Dear Amritsar,
I've been involved with this amazing guy - Greginald - for the last two and a half years (which is 12 1/2 years in dog years, 17 3/4 years in ferret years and 37 seconds in fruit fly years...so, umm, I guess it all evens out in the end...). He's smart. He's funny. And, boy, can he ferk. I mean, when we first started dating, we ferked like rabbits (which is 37 times a day in human ferking...).
We ferked in the bedroom. We ferked in the kitchen. We ferked in the bidet. We were young and limber and ready to experiment! (Although, in retrospect, I wouldn't recommend ferking in a bidet to people with back problems, Mormons or Lake Ontario pearl divers...)
Then, eight months ago Galactic Whosie-Whatsits - where Greginald works as a Thingummie Technician - transferred my lover to Mars.
We knew that this was a possibility, so we were prepared: we bought his and hers Neuro-Tactile Bodysuits with Enhanced Cranial Interface from Satyr's Day, a wholly owned subsidiary of MultiNatCorp ("We do naughty stuff"). Imagine a wet suit that allowed your partner to stimulate your erogenous zones from far away - it would certainly make looking at schools of trout more interesting!
The first time we tried ferking after Greginald's transfer was a real eye-opener (and, not in an orgasmic way); because of the 16 minute time lag in communications between Earth and Mars, it took us 14 hours to get off (and, I will admit, I faked it towards the end just to catch the latest episode of Prime Suspect 17: The Primest Suspect). We worked on it for the next three months - oh, how eagerly we worked on it! - and got it down to eight hours of only mildly frustrating sexual activity.
Then, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency perfected subspace communications, making Earth to Mars messaging instantaneous. This meant that when Greginald groped the air with his latex gloved hand, my ass instantaneously felt it! Whoo hoo! I never thought I would say this, but DARPA saved my sex life!
The next couple of months were bliss. If I closed my eyes, I could imagine Greginald pinching my nipples instead of the servos in the body suit and stimulating my clit rather than the neural interface stimulating the part of my brain that made me feel that somebody was stimulating my clit. Good times.
Except.
The last couple of months, I have felt Greginald's love-making grow distant. Foreplay, which used to last for hours, now often involves a slap here, a tickle there and hardly a bite on the lips. Really, it's more like twoplay (or, when, I'm feeling really distant from Greginald, oneplay). Sex that used to take hours (with no time delay) is now over in a matter of minutes.
Could...could Greginald be losing that loving feeling?
Betty-Lou Beelzebub
Hey, Babe,
First off, "first started" is redundant. "When we started dating" means the same thing. I don't mean to be pedantic, but...yeah. I'm pedantic. I can live with that.
The problem with long distance romance is that you can never be 100 per cent certain who is on the other end of the relationship. You think you're enjoying the amourous attentions of your boyfriend when you could actually be making love to your partner's evil twin (known as "Mirror, Mirror Syndrome"), a computer programme your partner has written so that he can spend less time with you and more time on his fantasy table hockey league (aka: "Demon Seed Syndrome"), or a gerbil who happened to be lying around the lab looking forlorn and lonely (sometimes referred to as: "That's So Sick There Isn't A Cultural Reference We Can Make To Anything Remotely Similar Syndrome!").
Or, it could just be that your lover is getting self-satisfied and lazy. It happens periodically in relationships. Sometimes, men have the sexual imagination of a fruit fly (which is 27 seconds in human terms)!
If you want to know if the person on the other end of your love connection is not your lover's evil twin, ask him how he feel's about Mother Teresa. If you want to know if it's not a computer programme, ask it to explain Zeno's Paradox. If you want to know if it's not a gerbil, ask it how often it works out on the hamster wheel. Simple, really.
You'd be surprised how many women would rather not know.
Send your relationship problems to the Alternate Reality News Service's sex, love and technology columnist at questions@lespagesauxfolles.ca. Amritsar Al-Falloudjianapour is not a trained therapist, but she does know a lot of stuff. AMRITSAR SAYS: my lawyer made me say: "My lawyer made me say this."