Once upon a time, I lived in a very small apartment with my significant other. The price was right, the location ideal to school and the complex, if not especially fancy, was at least fairly clean and had a tennis court.

For all that we liked about it, this apartment had one major drawback, which we discovered with some surprise the first night we moved in: The walls were paper thin.

After carting what seemed like thousands of boxes, a big screen TV and a king sized bed up a few flights of stairs in the heat of the Florida summer, the last thing on our minds was making love.

Not so for our neighbors, who started having sex so loudly that I could hear it in the shower at about six o’clock in the afternoon.

At about nine, my boyfriend and I had given up all pretense of affording our new neighbors their modesty and had our ears fully to the wall, listening intently as they changed position, talked dirty, even spanked each other.

Usually, I would get some perverse amusement from a scene such as this, but it only made me feel, well, sad. I didn’t know if the couple next door had been moving all day like we had, but they obviously had the energy for a marathon lovemaking session. I thought with some embarrassment that the time we had spent listening to the rabbits on the other side of our wall, not unpacking or resting, could have just as easily been spent having sex. Not crazy end of the world sex in which our neighbors were engaging, but sex nonetheless. Read More »