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" Marriage is amazing. It&amp;#039;s like living with your best friend \u2014 someone you sleep with, laugh with, cry with, and eventually turn into the Crypt Keeper right in front of like it&amp;#039;s not even a thing. But you know what&amp;#039;s hotter than having sex with your best friend for eternity? Everything.  For many women (the ones who aren&amp;#039;t liars), it&amp;#039;s work to stay sexually stimulated by a partner who&amp;#039;s returning our calls and not mindfucking us into believing that we&amp;#039;re ever so slightly inadequate. In a healthy relationship, there is stability and security. Sex is always an option. And like anything that is available freely and constantly, there&amp;#039;s just no real urgency about it. Especially when Mad Men is on. That was, until I and 65 million other women met Christian Grey. I was browsing through a bookstore when a salesgirl asked if I&amp;#039;d read the Fifty Shades of Grey trilogy. &amp;quot;Really?&amp;quot; I said, more than a little disturbed. &amp;quot;Do I look like someone who&amp;#039;s read any trilogy, ever?&amp;quot; &amp;quot;Trust me, this isn&amp;#039;t your typical trilogy.&amp;quot; She handed me the first book. &amp;quot;It will change your sex life in a week.&amp;quot; To be honest, I wasn&amp;#039;t necessarily convinced my sex life needed changing. I was perfectly OK with our dogs watching Jason try to get an erection and equally fine with them sitting on my face while he was going down on me. (To clarify: We don&amp;#039;t fuck dogs. I just get distracted during sex sometimes.) It&amp;#039;s not that I&amp;#039;m not a sexual person. It&amp;#039;s just that I&amp;#039;m never good at anything when I know I have to be serious. Sex with your best friend can feel like when you&amp;#039;re in detention and if one of you even looks at the other the wrong way, you&amp;#039;re gonna crack up. My husband doesn&amp;#039;t help when he says things like &amp;quot;Smell my hands. Do they smell like poop to you?&amp;quot; One day, he called me into the bathroom, beaming with pride, to show me that he had shit my initials in the toilet. He has pulled tampons out of my vagina and farted on my face while I&amp;#039;m half asleep for his own amusement. Not that all that isn&amp;#039;t super-hot. It&amp;#039;s just not the kind of behavior that sets you up for an orgasm. So for 16 bucks, I decided, What the hell? and bought the book. Maybe it was the graphic sex. Or the graphic sex or the graphic sex. But within two days, I was finished with the first book and more sexually charged than I&amp;#039;d been since ever. The reason this book works is it makes you wait for the payoff. And though nothing makes me more frustrated than waiting, the waiting is the best part. We often fail to recognize that by immediately acting on our carnal desires, we take a chip out of the mountain of lust that got us there in the first place. Like every TV show from The X-Files to Sex and the City, the minute the two leads get together, we stop giving a fuck. The &amp;quot;story&amp;quot; revolves around the dynamics of a BDSM (bondage and discipline/sadism and masochism) relationship, something I&amp;#039;d be hard-pressed to seek out in real life. Discipline tops my list of most-hated things, followed closely by portobello mushrooms. If a guy tried to tie me up, I&amp;#039;d probably freak out and bludgeon my seducer to death with his own butt plug. Luckily, the BDSM merely provided entr\u00E9e into a larger world of role-play and fantasy. Most men can pop in a porn and get hard the second they see a faceless pussy staring back at them. But women require more mental stimulation. We want a story. Whenever I watch porn with Jason, I insist we sit through the beginning narrative. If I&amp;#039;m gonna care about two dudes coming on a chick&amp;#039;s face, I at least need to understand how they all know each other. Oscar Wilde said, &amp;quot;Everything in the world is about sex, except for sex. Sex is about power.&amp;quot; E. L. James knows about the importance of the power/sex dynamic. She gets that the hottest thing about fucking someone&amp;#039;s brains out is the psychological chess game you had to play \u2014 and win \u2014 to get there. Long story short: E. L. James is a hero. She is a humanitarian ... and the Robin Hood of female libidos. After zipping through the second book, I was doing things I hadn&amp;#039;t done in years, like shaving all the hairs off the back of my thighs, closing the bathroom door when I peed, and seducing my husband with more than just, &amp;quot;I feel like we&amp;#039;re supposed to be having sex.&amp;quot; I was insatiable. And by that, I mean I wanted sex more than twice a week. Hot as things had become, something was still missing. Despite our best efforts, we still weren&amp;#039;t like the characters in the book. I was talking too much, and Jason&amp;#039;s hitting me over the head with a pillow felt more like he was trying to suffocate me so he could go back to his iPad. Christian and Ana also had things that we didn&amp;#039;t have. What is a sexual deviant without toys? I thought one day while taking photos of my labia to send to him at work. Admittedly, I go through phases where I get super-passionate about something, throw myself one hundred percent into whatever it is, and then ditch the whole thing a couple of weeks later. Knowing where my overzealous nature could lead, I tried to stay rational as I sped into the parking lot of my local sex store. With determination, I walked past the sexy schoolgirl outfits and Pocket Rockets and marched directly to the hardcore shit. I was browsing the bondage aisle, filling my arms with weapons of mass seduction, when I came upon something called a spreader bar. Looking at the price, I gasped. Three hundred bucks? I have a whole dungeon to decorate! &amp;quot;Excuse me,&amp;quot; a voice chimed in behind me. Guiltily, I turned around. It had to be so obvious from the looks of me (nonthreatening person with a wedding ring) and the contents of my arms (bondage fuckfest) that I was reading Fifty Shades. &amp;quot;Would you like a basket?&amp;quot; a salesgirl asked, like we were at Whole Foods. I hate how calm sex-shop workers are, as if sex were the easiest thing to talk about in the world. I&amp;#039;m sure during training they get coached in talking about clits the way some people talk about coffee pots, but the rest of society doesn&amp;#039;t operate that way. It&amp;#039;s stressful to have someone look at me with a straight face and ask, &amp;quot;Have you ever tried an ass egg?&amp;quot; By the end of my supermarket sweep, I&amp;#039;d settled on nipple clamps, some reasonably priced cock rings, two giant vibrators, a latex bodysuit, and a blindfold. On my way to the register, I noticed some small orbs sitting in a case near the glass dildos. They were Ben Wa balls. In Fifty Shades, Christian forces Ana to insert similar balls into her vagina and wear them to a black-tie event. Fun! I thought, tossing a pair into my basket of vices. At home, I did what I always do after shopping \u2014 I ripped the tags off everything and put it all on. I danced around the room in pain, trying to acclimate to my new nipple clamps, then busted out the strange balls and shoved them inside my vagina. They were cold and heavy and made me feel like I had two soaked tampons in at once. Feeling both pride and shame that my vagina was wide enough to fit both balls, I tiptoed around waiting to have some sort of Sting-Trudie Styler tantric explosion. Just then, I heard the garage door opening. My husband was home! And was he in for a treat! I threw a pair of boxers and a tee shirt over my bondage gear and ran downstairs to greet him. The front door swung open, and I was suddenly face-to-face with my husband and an uptight Aryan Youth\u2013looking business acquaintance named Judd. Perhaps it was the shock of seeing a stranger when I had XXX-rated plans in mind, perhaps it was my bouncing down the stairs, or perhaps my vagina was just that big, but at that moment, my body decided it was time to purge the balls. I stood there, speechless, watching my vagina turn into a gumball machine. Bap ... bap. The metal balls hit the hardwood and rolled into the kitchen, only to find my innocent housekeeper, Lita. Judd screamed like he&amp;#039;d just witnessed a home birth. My husband&amp;#039;s jaw hung open in horror as I charged after the orbs. &amp;quot;Feels like maybe this is a bad time,&amp;quot; I heard Judd whisper to Jason as I scampered after my Ben Wa babies. By the time I got to the kitchen, Lita already had one in hand. &amp;quot;Oh! You can just throw those in the sink,&amp;quot; I said, trying to play it cool. I shamefully slunk back upstairs and waited for Jason to come ask me what was going on. I didn&amp;#039;t see him until three hours later, when he walked in, holding the balls. &amp;quot;Lita was under the impression that these could go in the dishwasher,&amp;quot; he said, smiling at me the way people smile at dogs and old people. &amp;quot;Are you mad?&amp;quot; I asked. &amp;quot;No,&amp;quot; he said. Then he got in bed next to me and pulled me close. &amp;quot;You know what&amp;#039;s hotter than you doing vagina parlor tricks for my friends?&amp;quot; &amp;quot;What?&amp;quot; I asked coyly. &amp;quot;Everything,&amp;quot; he sighed, and then kissed me. It was another phase, come and gone. Our sex life returned to once a week. Sure, there&amp;#039;s the rare night that I turn over in bed and wish I were staring at anybody else. But I think that&amp;#039;s normal. And let&amp;#039;s be real \u2014 would anybody else be able to shit my initials? I think not. Excerpted from I Like You Just the Way I Am, available June 17. Order your copy here. This article was originally published as &amp;quot;Hot &amp;amp; Hilarious: My Fifty Shades Confession&amp;quot; in the June 2014 issue of Cosmopolitan. Click here to get the issue in the iTunes store. RELATED: How Fifty Shades of Grey&amp;#039;s Anastasia Steele Is Just Like The Little Mermaid 9 Things I Wish I&amp;#039;d Known About Sex in My 20s 4 Amazing Swimming Pool Sex Positions Photo credit: Studio D "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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