After dating this woman for a couple of months, I began to suspect that she was a bed wetter. There was the occasional smell of urine in her bedroom, and she was reluctant to spoon with me. After changing my sheets the other day I noticed an unwelcome stain on my bed. She was obviously embarrassed by the situation, and being sensitive to that I said nothing. Is adult bed-wetting more common than one would imagine? Would it be morally shallow of me not to want to sleep with her again? –Perhaps I Shouldn’t Show Our Friend Favor
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MyBladder.com is “a unique on-line community dedicated to encouraging people with bladder control problems to seek help rather than suffer in silence.” I’ll say it’s unique. According to the site, 12 million American adults have bladder control problems. Does that make adult bed-wetting a more common problem than one would imagine? That depends, I guess, on how many bed wetters the average person imagines there are, assuming, of course, that the average person spends much if any time at all contemplating such things. (Going out on a limb, I would guess that the number of people out there wetting beds is significantly higher than the number of people out there contemplating the number of people wetting beds.)
Instead of dumping this woman, why don’t you try to help her? According to MyBladder.com (how I love typing that!), only one in five people with bladder control problems seeks medical help. But of those who do, “80% can be cured or can achieve substantial improvement.” To get her to seek medical attention, though, you’re going to have to broach the subject. She was no doubt embarrassed when she wet your bed, but saying nothing wasn’t necessarily the most sensitive thing you could do. A truly sensitive guy would spend some time on MyBladder.com (before it goes tits up), learn about bladder control problems and treatments, and then have a heart-to-heart with the leaky miss.
I shared your letter with a straight male friend. He read it, looked hurt, and then asked, “Why would a woman think a man’s scrotum was in the way during a poop?” We pondered this for a moment–like bed-wetting, this wasn’t a subject I’d previously given much thought–and then I slapped my forehead. Of course! The only time a woman sees a man’s scrotum up close is when she’s giving him a blow job. Since men typically receive blow jobs lying flat on their backs, she’s probably seen a scrotum or two draped over the owner’s anus. The shit-on-the-balls question is relevant, of course, because most men want women to kiss and lick their balls, which isn’t very appealing if they’re dirty.
Dan, the letter from the woman whose sister was alarmed by her father’s passion for porn was a heartbreaker. Many women seem to feel that the progression from passive voyeur to criminal molester is a slippery slope. But most men have fail-safe circuit breakers in their hearts and souls that draw huge distinctions between model vs. sister, actress vs. daughter, and private fantasy vs. flesh-and-blood niece.
