December 20 (Bonerversary)

December 20 (Bonerversary) is the anniversary BB Easton assigns to a night when Ken Easton seemed, for once, to meet her in intimacy rather than merely endure it. Set against years of sparse physical affection and a decade she describes as Ken’s emotional coma, the date becomes both a private joke and a marker of a possible change in their marriage.

The Date and Its Origin

The date is named in a journal entry written on December 21, after BB Easton concludes that Ken Easton might have made love to her the night before. She wants to mark the calendar so she will not forget the occasion, and identifies December 20 as their Bonerversary. The naming gives a specific date to an experience she presents as exceptional: a departure from the familiar pattern in which Ken Easton remains passive during sex and withdraws from cuddling soon afterward.

The encounter follows an evening when BB Easton crosses the mattress’s person-sized hump, which she calls Chastity Mountain. The hump has formed in the middle of the bed through the couple’s lack of spooning, cuddling, and other shared middle-of-the-bed activities. Ken Easton is watching football in bed; he lifts an arm to let her in but makes no other concession. BB Easton is determined to cuddle him anyway, even while recognizing that he is humoring her. The modest gesture of making room contrasts with the distance she has come to expect, and the date she later assigns to the night makes that contrast memorable.

A Rare Change in Their Pattern

The significance of December 20 depends on the history it interrupts. BB Easton describes Ken Easton as emotionally and physically unresponsive during their usual intimacy: he allows her to take the lead, offers little participation, and signals when she should move away. Her comic comparison of him to a cold, limp fish frames the gap between her desire for active affection and his apparent restraint. She also recalls trying to create a more playful sexual encounter, including a scene inspired by Fifty Shades Darker, but finding that even elaborate efforts did not reliably draw him into the exchange.

Their different histories sharpen that mismatch. Before meeting Ken Easton, BB Easton had pursued an adventurous sexual life, including wearing piercings and seeking out tattooed boys; she regarded his straight-laced manner as something he could not compete with. Yet the security he offered appealed to her after what she describes as years of emotionally exhausting attraction to dangerous, heavily tattooed men. December 20 therefore does not simply celebrate sexual novelty: it registers a rare moment of connection inside a marriage she had chosen partly for its stability, while still longing for warmth and reciprocal desire.

Ritual, Hope, and Meaning

BB Easton imagines making the date an annual observance. Her plan is deliberately comic and domestic: each December 20 she will send the children to her parents’ house, pick up a meal, and sit with Ken Easton in quiet remembrance of the one time he did not behave like a cold, limp fish during sex. The ceremony is less a report of an established tradition than a promise she makes to herself. She says the Bonerversary will sustain her, turning a single evening into something she can anticipate and preserve.

That hope is set beside an immediate reminder of how fragile the change may be. BB Easton compares herself to someone keeping vigil beside a comatose partner, though in her account it is Ken Easton himself who has repeatedly made the situation feel hopeless by rolling away from her, responding to her love poems with casual thanks, or tapping her to signal that sex is over. She believes something she said the previous night may have awakened him after ten years of emotional sleep, but admits he might withdraw again. Her closing resolve is to remember December 20 even if his emorection is gone. The date thus holds two meanings at once: a playful anniversary for an exceptional sexual encounter, and a fragile record of BB Easton’s renewed hope that intimacy between them can change.