Why Do Men Fall Asleep After Sex? More Questions You'd Only Ask a Doctor After Your Third Whiskey Sour

CHAPTER 1 BATTLE OF THE SEXES It's 9 A.M. Leyner and I are sitting in our office, awaiting our first patients. After finishing Why Do Men Have Nipples?, we decided to go into practice together. Leyner's BA in English and Masters in creative writing hardly qualified him to treat patients, and his adamant refusal to seek higher medical education didn't help matters. (Leyner was violently opposed to the idea of attending school again. During a rather heated discussion of the issue, he smashed a printer we'd just purchased for our new office, and scrawled an adolescent vulgarity on a print of Van Gogh's Sunflowers hanging in the hallway.) When Leyner regained his composure, we realized that the thing that made our partnership work was our fanatical mutual admiration, our boundless love of arcane medical matters and our capacity to talk endlessly about our own insecurities and desires, and the personal crises and dilemmas in which life occasionally ensnares us. For some bizarre reason, people other than the two of us seem to be interested in what we have to say. . . . We finally agreed that if Dr. Phil could do it on TV, why couldn't we offer our learned and empathic counseling services. This would preclude the need for advanced degrees, and, I also figured it was a way to safely keep medical instruments and sharp surgical devices out of Leyner's emotionally unstable grasp. Our office assistant, Wendy Thurston, who was recently fired from her position as senior editor at Half a Dozen Ponds Press after she was arrested for shoplifting lipstick from a Rite Aid, escorted our first patients of the day into our office. They were a young couple. The woman was attractive, conservatively dressed, and--at first glance--seemed somewhat despondent. Her husband, dragging behind, seemed more interested in the defaced painting in the hallway than in being here to address "issues" with his inexplicably unfulfilled wife. "Who wrote 'sniff my crotch' on the Van Gogh out there?" he asked as he took a seat next to his wife. "I love it!!!" he guffawed, slapping his thighs. His wife grimaced with chagrin. "You see," she said, "I married a philistine and a troglodyte." "Insult me in English, you pretentious bitch!," the husband replied. Leyner assumed a fighting stance--the Drunken Crane pose of the Shaolin School. I remembered the last time that Leyner assaulted a patient and hoping to avoid more litigation, I interceded and suggested that Leyner's pose is the typical noncommunicative and defensive position that spouses take and that this impedes further discussion. A dissapointed Leyner shrugged in agreement and slouched into his leather armchair. As I turned to the fuming couple, I asked them to role-play with us. I offered to play the husband to our female patient and Leyner enthusiastically embraced the opportunity to play wife to the man. I began, "Sometimes patients feel more open and honest with a surrogate spouse, so I want you to tell me exactly what you need from me in this marriage." Sheepishly the woman responded, "I need a partner, a soul mate, someone to talk to. Sometimes I just want to be heard. I don't need someone to solve all my problems, I just need someone to hold me and listen." The husband jumped at the chance to answer his wife, but I stopped him. "I want you to respond to Leyner as if he were your wife. This will keep the two of you from becoming defensive and allow you to see each other's point of view." Confused, the husband looked at the beaming Leyner and said, "I listen, I hold you, but it's always the things that I don't do. I feel like you don't appreciate the things that I do. I barbecuLeyner, Mark is the author of 'Why Do Men Fall Asleep After Sex? More Questions You'd Only Ask a Doctor After Your Third Whiskey Sour', published 2006 under ISBN 9780307345974 and ISBN 0307345971.