After a month or so of driving, one of the "regulars," who called herself Sin Dee, recruited Joe to work exclusively for her. She ran a business that specialized in bachelor parties and she needed a reliable driver/emcee for her stable of rotating twentysomething girls. He was, she said, the perfect candidate: He didn’t smell, he drove a dependable vehicle, he didn’t do drugs, and — most importantly — he didn’t try to hit on the girls. He said sure, and came home crowing about his big promotion.

And what a promotion it was. Instead of waiting in driveways doing crossword puzzles and enduring every variation of speech impediment courtesy of NPR, Joe was now working a Mister Microphone, selling and buying back sweaty dollar bills to hoards of drunk and horny businessmen, agents, and overgrown frat boys. Every Friday and Saturday night, my husband saw a trio — sometimes a quartet — of confidently naked women do A) an intro striptease, B) a sexy girl-on-girl-on-girl dance that ended with a female ejaculation, and C) a round of "fun and games," when they did things like stick licorice rope up their vaginas and, for a price, let the guys eat it out.

I’m the least insecure person I know. As mentioned, I encouraged my husband to take this job and begged him to keep doing it forever. I had never doubted my attractiveness to him, or my attractiveness in general, not in the 10 years we’d been together by that point. But little by little, after tales of tequila body shots, whipped cream "around the worlds," and nipple/ass/clit tattoos — the doubts began to creep in. Should I get a tattoo? Would that suddenly make me go from "medium sexy" to "highly sexy"? I asked Joe what he thought. He didn’t think so — what tattoo would I even get? — and I’d for sure regret it and then have to laser it off, which always leaves a scar, he’d heard.

I dropped the tattoo idea. But still, there was the nagging thought that maybe I should be trying harder to be sexier. Maybe spice things up a little. So I went to the crazy expensive, 100-square-foot lingerie store in our hipster neighborhood and — for the first time in my life — bought a matching lacy bra and underwear set. The next Tuesday (we’d fallen into our definitely-once-a-week sex time happening on Tuesdays, which we referred to as Super Tuesdays), I put on the lingerie in the morning to get used to it. By 10 a.m., I was itching from the lace and the tags I couldn’t rip out because it would tear the lace and blow the $200 I’d spent on the damn getup — not to mention the massive sandpaper wedgie riding up my ass. But it was cool. I carried on for the sake of sexiness. When showtime came, I tried hard to strut around and be confident. In my mind I was a Victoria’s Secret Angel. But I felt like a total idiot. Maybe not an idiot, but very much unlike myself. Within two minutes, the lace was on the floor, never to be worn again.