We still kiss good morning. A quick peck, and that is about it. My husband is here, he is loving, and I still want to make out with him. I just do not enjoy kissing a mouth I can barely reach through his mustache.
We have been together for more than ten years. He is 40; I am 38. He has had a short beard and mustache for as long as I have known him, so facial hair itself is hardly a surprise in our marriage. I never needed him to be clean-shaven. I liked kissing the man with the shorter beard. That distinction seems small until it becomes the entire conversation.
Lately, he has been letting both grow much thicker. Not an enormous, flowing beard, just full and bushy enough that the mustache comes down over his lips. When I try to kiss him, what I notice is hair. The part I am interested in is somewhere behind it.
For him, the change has been a good thing. His hair is thinning, and he has become self-conscious about his jawline, especially after gaining some weight in his face. His facial hair grows well. He is proud of it, and wearing it fuller helps him feel better about how he looks. I can understand wanting to keep something that makes the mirror kinder. I do not want to make him feel worse about the features he already worries about.
But I have told him that I prefer the shorter beard and mustache, and explained why. This is not a hint I have been leaving for him to decode. I have said that kissing him this way is unpleasant for me. His answer was essentially that he is keeping it long and I am out of luck. There was no misunderstanding left to clear up.
So the longer kisses have stopped. That is the change I am living with, even though nothing dramatic has happened to the rest of our relationship. He is otherwise attentive and affectionate. I would struggle to describe him as an uncaring husband. Yet on this particular thing, which matters to me, he does not seem especially troubled by what we have lost.
I do not want him to give up feeling good about his looks. I want him to feel attractive, and I want to kiss him. Those wishes used to fit together without any discussion. Now his preferred length has become a choice with consequences for both of us, while the answer to my side of it appears to be that I can manage without.
My thoughts have even gone as far as the drastic possibility of asking to open our relationship. I have not presented that as an ultimatum; it is the extreme possibility I keep wondering about. I miss making out enough to find myself contemplating a change that enormous over something that, from the outside, probably looks like a disagreement about grooming.
For now, there is no new arrangement and no changed mind. There is my loving husband, pleased with his fuller beard, and there is the little good-morning kiss. I miss the kisses that did not end so quickly.
