Chapter 1: The Spark

A spark is starting to sprout.

“When the Gods wish to punish us, they answer our prayers.”

― Oscar Wilde, An Ideal Husband

Sometimes our lives change without us realising it; we suddenly find ourselves living a life we didn’t intend, totally different from our life just a few years before.

It happened to me too, but I do know at what point my life began to change, the turning point from which the changes in my marriage progressively accelerated to the situation I am in now.

Was it for the better or for the worse? It depends on one’s opinion and perspective. Let me tell you about it.

It all started one day in early autumn. Although the holidays were over, one weekend my wife and I decided to take advantage of the last days of good weather and go to the beach. We were at La Musclera nudist beach, a beach to the north and close to the city where we live, Barcelona, Spain. We had laid down at one end at the foot of a rocky cliff, next to the railway line. I was totally naked, as I like to sunbathe and feel the air on my skin without anything in the way, and from time to time I like to go to one of the beaches that don’t require a swimming costume. My pubic hair is shaved, so I feel the air, the sun and the seawater more intensely on ALL the surface of my skin. My wife is more shy and not a nudist; she was wearing a red bikini.

But before I go on, I think I should talk about myself and my family. My name is Oriol. I’m 51 years old. I have short brown hair with slightly receding hairline and brown eyes. I’m 1.77 m tall, and I weigh 116 kg. Yes, maybe I’m not very fit, and for that height, my weight should be less, but I find beers and butifarra (a kind of traditional Catalan sausage) irresistible, and on top of that, I don’t exercise. My work as a lawyer specialising in companies in a law firm keeps me sitting a lot.

My wife’s name is Iris; she is also 51 years old, has brown eyes, has reddish-brown, wavy, shoulder-length hair, is 1.60 m tall and weighs 69 kg. Yes, she’s in great shape, and what a shape! She has a beautiful body, thanks to the fact that she takes better care of herself: she drinks less beer and sausage than I do and more fruit and vegetables. She also does aerobics at the gym every week, well, not really every week (she’s not perfect, but almost).

What she does achieve perfection in is her body; she has an athletic body, slender but not skeletal, with the curves of a real woman, not an anorexic and unrealistic model, sensual and marked hips, beautiful breasts, large and slightly sagging, but that no one would attribute to a woman who has breastfed two daughters but to a young girl of 25 years, with large areolas and dark, pointed nipples, long, slender legs, pert buttocks that draw the eye to her ass, rounded, soft shoulders and, best of all, a smile that lights up her face, and that is what captivated me about her. That smile is the best thing about my wife, and when I see her smile, I feel happy, and I know she is happy. Iris works as head of human resources in a company.

In short, I am very lucky; I have a perfect woman: a good professional, intelligent, cheerful woman who is a great mother with a body that would make many young girls envious.

Although we were classmates from the ages of 13 to 17, we didn’t have a very close relationship at that time and lost touch, but eventually we got back in touch, and that second time it sparked; we fell in love and got married at 25. I had had several girlfriends and sexual relations with some of them, but for my wife, I was the man with whom she lost her virginity.

After a honeymoon in Tunisia, we settled on the top floor of a house in Barcelona’s Ensanche (or Eixample), a district that was built in the 19th century to extend the narrow confines of the city’s old town, with a rationalist, modern design of perpendicular streets and characteristic chamfered corners.

One of the advantages of the flat, which was quite large, was that being the top floor, it had a huge terrace which we had insulated with plants around it, allowing me to sunbathe naked whenever I felt like it.

We have been married for 26 years now, and in that time our two daughters were born: Nuria, the eldest, and Montserrat, the youngest.

And with my daughters I am getting closer to one of the factors, not the only one, of the situation we were going through.

Nuria had finished her studies as a teacher, and, after a competitive examination, she had been lucky enough to get a teaching post in a school in another city. She had rented a flat and moved to start the new school year.

Montserrat had finished her degree in mathematics and had decided to do a master’s degree in artificial intelligence, which was only taught in Madrid, the capital of Spain. Fortunately, some of my wife’s uncles who lived there welcomed her to live in their house, delighted to have someone young to accompany them. This had been very good for us financially, given the very high costs of renting in the cities.

As a result, this September, my wife and I were suddenly alone in our big flat. So we were suffering from the “empty nest syndrome”.

My wife was feeling very bad about it. For my part, although I love my daughters dearly, and I knew that I would miss seeing them every day, their conversations, their laughter, and even the usual fights between sisters, on the other hand, I had hoped that by being alone and having more intimacy, our sex life, which had been declining more and more, could recover.

But nothing could be further from the truth. Sex between my wife and I was not getting any better. We had never been porn stars, limiting ourselves to the missionary position and little else, but lately, sexual relations were scarce.

To make matters worse, my wife was entering menopause, or more precisely, climacteric. Her periods were becoming irregular and spaced out, and her vagina wasn’t always well lubricated, so it didn’t make it easy to have sex.

And I, for my part, was also beginning to enter andropause, or “manopause”, as some jokingly put it, so my erections and stamina, which had never been extraordinary, had worsened.

And on top of all this, as a final factor in our situation, my wife’s concern about age was compounded. The result was that lately, my wife’s beautiful smile barely showed on her face, and when it did, it was gone in a few moments. It pained me greatly to see her begin to wilt, like a beautiful flower withering away.

All this was mixed up in the conversation we were having that morning on the beach as we lay in the sun on the sand.

Iris was saying to me, sorrowfully, “Autumn is beginning, and the autumn of our life is beginning. We’re already going downhill.”

“Please, honey, don’t say that. It’s not like you’re 80 years old,” I tried to cheer her up.

“Our daughters don’t need us anymore, and we’re getting old.”