"Just whatever you do, don't let him do you in the butt."

"Umm... WHAT??"

Has it really come to that? I tell my best friend that I'm in love and she tells me to just watch out for a little slip of the bum? I'm put off by her reaction. This cannot be how we're defining love now. 

Suddenly it all flashes back to me... she's a little sensitive about this. The last time she was in love, this is exactly how some boy tricked her. She wanted to have regular sex with him, the usual-hole kind, but he was a "virgin" and suggested the other hole as a means of pleasing God. She agreed, with her "try anything once" attitude, but the experience was unpleasantly indelible, and now the association between love and anal is strong. 

But, she's long since moved on. Far and away totally in love with someone else. Someone who thinks that God can take a back seat to good ol' fashioned sex. Yet, she is still putting the warning out there: dissuading other individuals claiming to be in love, to just love without their asses. 

It makes sense to me, but then again, I never considered the alternative. Although, that's just a personal preference and clearly, when it comes to love, all bets are off. 

And then I am reminded of a conversation I had about a year ago with my friend Alex. I remember sitting in the kitchen of my old college house with him, drunk and drinking water, laughing while discussing the pros and cons of anal insertion (between a guy and girl, anyway). What I'll never remember is how we stumbled upon that particular topic, but needless to say, it was the subject on the table. It quickly escalated into a heated battle--me on the "anti" side, him on the "devil's advocate" side--and it woke up one of my roommates, who, before telling Alex and I to be quiet, was quickly sucked into the conversation by the sheer fact that we needed an objective third party to rule on the question at hand...

What if it came down to it? What if, at the end of the day, the person you loved wholeheartedly, the person who dominated your affections in and out of the bedroom, the person you envisioned a wedding with and who had helped you decorate your last Christmas tree, just wanted to stick his toe in your butt? You might be alarmed at first, but what if he told you it was the absolute, honest-to-goodness only way he could possibly get off? What if you had tried everything else suggested in the Kama Sutra pamphlet but it all failed, leaving you with only this last little experiment to hinge together your entire sex life? Would you do it? Would you step over all perviously-determined boundaries for the sake of satisfying someone you loved?

It's a tough one. I know that when the hypothetical question was raised, my disgruntled roommate, whose original intention was to silence us, left the kitchen slightly convinced: "Yeah, what the hell? I'd let him do it... if I really loved him. Now please shut the fuck up and go to bed."

But I'm not won over all that easily. I have to say, I'm the number one champion of love, but if love means that you have to silence the voice in your head that says, "Think twice about this one, it could get messy..." then maybe I have it all wrong. Maybe I've been telling people that I'm currently dealing with an emotion that really, I have no clue about. These folks, these "love" folks, seem to be willing to bend over backwards for their mates--pun intended--and that seems a little extreme to me. Here I was thinking that the actual act of "being in love" was as extreme as you could go, but apparently it is the acts you do while in love that are the extremities. 

When you start to analyze it, rip it apart to its verbal core, it starts to become a compelling argument. Since you love me, meet my family. Since you love me, babysit my aggressive doberman. Since you love me, empty the dishwasher. Since you love me, let's experiment...

And although I've never been confronted with this kind of dilemma before (thankfully) I would wager a ferret that more than a few girls would admit to having heard this kind of slippery slope love-rationale before. Yes, I have a feeling that this is exactly the kind of logic and reasoning that landed my exhibitionist best friend with a broken heart, a permanent love-disclaimer, and a pile of dirty laundry that contained one, sadly poopy thong.