Not long ago, my friend Carol was lamenting the fact that she had become a “golf widow,” by which I assume she means that her husband spends so much time out on the links that he might as well be dead, so far as she’s concerned.

“Nothing will make that man miss his Sunday morning round,” Carol told me, her eyes filled with a combustible mix of sexual frustration and metastasizing wifely consternation. “Nothing. Not even the promise of a blowjob.”

I didn’t say it out loud, but my first thought was that Carol must give lousy blowjobs, because in my experience, a man will take a blowjob over anything. My husband could be in the middle of disarming a ticking time bomb, and he’d somehow rationalize the need to pause for a quick hummer – the immediate future of all nearby humanity be damned!

That’s what I thought, at least…. until the U.S. played Ghana in the World Cup this week.

I knew how much my husband had been looking forward to the game, for the simple reason that for the last six days prior to the match, he wouldn’t shut up about it. No matter how clearly disinterested I was, he would drone on about how the U.S. coach – Jurgens Lotionmacher I think his name is – has made subtle changes to the lineup and “brought in new blood” (which briefly got me interested, because I took it literally; maybe the new coach was some kind of Bavarian vampire?) for this year’s Cup.

I try to be as supportive as possible of my man’s hobbies and obsessions with life’s various little trivialities, so for several days I feigned as much interest in the upcoming U.S. v. Ghana game as I could – which, truth be told, wasn’t much. It’s not that I don’t like soccer, just that after three days of talking about any subject, it’s time to talk about something else…. Anything else.

Anyway, when the day of the Big Match finally arrived, I decided to put my blowjob theory into action. I waited until ESPN was deep into the pre-game show before springing my proposition. “Hey… what do you say we turn off the TV and I give you some head?”

Normally, the remote would be in his hand and his finger on the power button before I’d even gotten to the word “head,” but this time around, he just looked back at me, clearly aghast. “Seriously, right now?” he said, his brow thoroughly furrowed. “But…” He trailed off, leaving “the game” implied.

Even though I was the one being shitty by pulling this little stunt in the first place, I was offended that he didn’t immediately ‘turn off, tune out and unzip,’ so to speak.

“What the fuck?” I said. “You’d rather watch soccer than get sucked off?”

I don’t know if I’ve mentioned this before, but my husband is not a complete idiot. Instead of groveling and begging for forgiveness, he took the opportunity to prove just how well he knows my Evil Woman Brain.

“You’re fucking with me, aren’t you?” he said. “You’re intentionally setting me up to piss you off.”

My offense turned to embarrassment. The little ‘ding’ sound in my head wasn’t me having a brilliant idea; it was my husband hitting the proverbial nail on the head.

Before I could respond, though, he turned the tables on me.

“I’ll tell you what,” he said, shifting in his seat and reaching for the remote. “I’ll turn off the game, and not turn it back on – IF we can make this an anal day.”

I couldn’t believe it; that sneaky motherfucker just played the anal card. It was his way of saying “I’m on to you.”

You see, we have this deal; every once in a while, in exchange for doing something really nice for me, he gets a one-evening Ass Pass. Truth be told, I’m not wild about anal, but it’s an arrangement that has been the source of many mutually beneficial compromises over the years, so I’ve stuck with it – or allowed it to be stuck in me, more accurately.

In addition to not being a complete idiot, my husband also isn’t a complete asshole. I must have made my patented Sad Girl Face after he played the anal card, because instead of smug look and an upward adjustment of the volume on the TV, he muted it and gave me a look like he’d just gotten caught kicking a puppy.

“Look,” he said. “I’m sorry. If you want to do something else, or watch something else, let’s just do something else, no problem. You don’t have to blow me just to get me to change the channel, you know.”

Before I could respond, I must have lost my Sad Girl Face, because then he hit me with a brutal caveat: “But if this is just one of your little tests, an experiment to see if you could get me to turn off the game…”

As he trailed off, he looked at me with eyebrows raised. He wasn’t really wondering if this was one of my tests; he knew it was. As such, I had to admit defeat. Today, he was the Garry Kasparov of Sexual Manipulation Chess and I was the vanquished, unfulfilled Anatoly Karpov.

Grabbing the remote, I put the volume back on, winked at my husband and let out a hardy: “U-S-A! U-S-A!”

Coleen Singer is a writer, photographer, film editor and all-around geeky gal at Sssh.com, where she often waxes eloquent about sex, porn, sex toys, censorship, the literary and pandering evils of Fifty Shades of Grey and other topics not likely to be found on the Pulitzer Prize shortlist. She is also the editor and curator of EroticScribes.com. When she is not doing all of the above, Singer is an amateur stock-car racer and enjoys modifying vintage 1970s cars for the racetrack. Oh, she also likes porn.