An Oral Contract

Tonight's post is inspired by a couple of Cary's GuySpeak answers and LiLu's TMI Thursday (via Bev).

And brought to you by the letters B, J, and the number 69.

It was early in my relationship with TJ when she told me that she didn't like oral sex, either giving or receiving. This bummed me out a bit, because I enjoy oral sex, both receiving and giving, but I wasn't going to let it be a deal breaker.

More annoying, however, was TJ's haranguing about my low level of assertiveness. Yeah, yeah, I'm not the most assertive person in the world, but I don't need to be constantly reminded of it, and it was something I was working on.

So, one night, we're fooling around, and she says, "You're not very assertive."

"What do you mean?" I asked.

"Well, if you were more assertive, you'd ask me for a blowjob."

"I'm not going to ask you to do something you don't like to do."

"Well, sometimes we do things we don't like for people that we care about."

"If you care enough about someone to do something for them which you don't like, you'll go ahead and do it, without making them ask you for it," I retorted. Well, ok, I didn't retort that, but I would have, if I was more, um, assertive. Instead, I just let it drop.

Some time later, TJ told me that if she were to get into a long-term relationship with someone, she would want to go to couples' counseling with them. I'm pretty easy-going (though some would say non-assertive), so I agreed. She wanted us to go to the counselor that she had been going to, since she met him in a movie theater.

Yes, that's right, a movie theater.

Some time before we had met, she was at a movie, and was crying at the end, as the lights were coming up. A guy who was sitting behind her put his hand on her shoulder, gave her his card, and told her that she could call him if she needed someone to talk to. I think he was just trying to pick her up, but what do I know. She started having counseling sessions with him.

This guy wasn't really a counselor, as he had no degree to say so, but at least he was up front about it, telling me that he's a "life coach." What bugged me more than anything was that most of "advice" came from people that he had seen on Oprah.

One of the things that the counselorlife coach liked to do was to have us make "oral contracts." During one session, TJ mentioned that she didn't like riding in my car, because the A/C didn't work. The counselorlife coach asked me to make an oral contract that I would get the A/C in the car fixed. I refused to do so, because TJ preferred riding in the truck (which had a perfectly good-working A/C), and I didn't see the need to put $600 or so into the car when she wouldn't be riding in it, and I was ok with no A/C.

How's that assertiveness thing working out for ya, there, hun?

In our final session with the counselorlife coach, TJ brought up the fact that I never asked for oral sex, and she thought that I needed to work on my assertiveness. We pretty much ended up having the same discussion that we had had months before, and the counselorlife coach asked me to make an oral contract to request blowjobs.

Well, if that's the kind of thing I have to do to make the relationship work, I guess a man's gotta do what a man's gotta do. This was an oral contract that I could agree to, so I did.

As we left that session, I had only one question left unanswered.

How much should I have tipped the counselorlife coach?