Adult Bed-Wetting and How Not to Meet Women Online

Among the reasons to not publicly announce an episode of adult bed-wetting, avoiding embarrassment is the most convincing. Bodily functions are to be contained, cordoned off, and apologized for–so too the erratic and sometimes dysfunctional bodies they spring from. When we admit these things we lose control over our personal narratives. People read into these things, the random scatterings of disorder behind our manicured front porches. Bed-wetting arrives on a plume of psychic decrepitude’s, and the person who suffers this affliction into adulthood is broken, a malformed Oedipal adolescent. And once someone thinks that of you, there’s nothing you can do to prove otherwise.

So it was with a special giddiness that I made an online dating profile this week and, in a section that asked for some embarrassing private fact, I admitted to having pissed the bed twice as an adult. There was also a third incident that involved me passing out in a hotel hallway in Kanding in western China, after too much yak butter tea, which didn’t sit well with the highest setting of the electric blanket on my hotel bed. I must have gotten up too fast, or the change from the heated hotel air to the frigid outer hallway created a short in my nervous system, a brief white flash that left me tumbling to the floor with all my holes momentarily dilated. But that wasn’t in a bed, so I’m not counting it.

Excepting a job interview, internet dating is likely the worst possible format for embarrassing bodily admissions. These form questions are almost never treated honestly, but instead used as platforms for conservative self-flattery. An alarmingly high percentage of people defer the question entirely, with some variant on having to wait to meet in person to find out–as if there will be something innately seductive in the eventual confession. Instead of addressing the question head on, they use the weakest form of seduction to create a blur of desirability around themselves.

Internet dating is a bad thing for me because it’s focused on salesmanship. Honesty is generally used only in so far as it expedites a person’s self-idealizing persona. And these disingenuous LEGO blocks of personality are too easy to piece together in ways that flatter the reader’s own sense of stereotype. It creates a logical framework for something that is ungovernable and illogical. I cannot deal with people in terms of a catalog presentation (why does everyone say they’re “easy-going” and yet decline to answer the “embarrassing” question?). I freely admit dismissing someone on the terms of a paragraph of self-description suggests a power over my emotions that I don’t really have.

So I thought it would be funny if I told everyone who would be looking for reasons to dismiss me that I peed myself as an adult. The scariest part of this is the suggestion that my penis, the thing which must be most aggrandized, is sometimes beyond my control. If a man can’t control his bladder, he must surely be a premature ejaculator, impotent, or stuck with the vestigial piping of a 6 year-old boy.  Could that possibly be me?

My first grown instance of bed-wetting came when I was 27. I was on an extended vacation with a few friends in a small beach village. On our first night together we’d walked around, ate some street food, and drank some beer in breezy evening air. We all went to bed a little before midnight. I wasn’t drunk but I was happily aloft on the booze glinting its way through my veins. I shared a large foam bed with one friend, a woman with whom I had no intimate interests. I’d guzzled some water just before turning out the lights as a small insurance against the morning effects of the beer and how it might be compounded in the tropical heat.

An hour later I woke to the dual feeling of pressure being relieved and a startling wetness forming somewhere around my hip. For a very brief moment I felt like riding along on the current of relieved muscle tension before the jolt of understanding brought me fully awake. I’d just watered the bed, the sheets, my shorts, and the resulting pool was creeping towards my friend, still peacefully asleep on the other side of the bed. Of the many awkward moments I’ve passed through in my life, this is among the most irreconcilable. There was no way out of this urinary snare I’d sprung on myself. I was suddenly in a humiliating moral trap with mortifying consequences to every choice I could have made.

I thought about the potential conversation of waking my friend up. Was there a way of phrasing things so that it would have seemed like no big deal?

“Hey, are you awake?”

“No, why?”

“Um, I think I peed everywhere. It’ll probably reach you in another minute or so.”

Imagining this conversation sent me down a slope of anguish and irritation. Things had been so great an hour before, a beautiful night of wandering the sandy rows of a tiny beachside village, followed by a night of gentle sleep in the iridescent ocean air. Now things were ruined. The night would be broken to pieces by the invasive shock of the overhead light and the nannying strains of changing sheets, sopping the mattress, taking a shower, and finding a fresh pair of shorts. Not only would it be my night ruined, but my two friends’ night as well.

I chose what, in hindsight, was the most ignoble of all possibilities. It seemed logical in the moment, alone in a wet and uncomfortably cold puddle of my own creation. I chose to lie directly on top of the puddle, forcing it to pool back over to my side of the bed and then deal with the chores of cleaning in the morning. I did not sleep very well the rest of the night, and I was the first to get up in the morning.

The second time was less traumatic, but triply stupid. I was on another trip with friends and drunk to the point of delirium after having consumed a giant plastic bag filled with whiskey and Red Bull. I went back to my friend’s hotel room and decided to pee in his bathroom sink since it had a drain and seemed to be made of porcelain. While aiming my stream downward and catching glimpses of myself in the mirror I decided it would also be funny if I went and peed a little on his mattress. Which I did.

Like many things in life, these embarrassing occurrences bubble up out of a long series of branching probability. The function of the bladder at night depends on two sets of muscles to keep things tight, and the increased production of another chemical that signals your body to slow the flow of urine to the bladder. So too the random accretion of experiences, thoughts, and inside jokes that can form a hospitable mental backdrop for the idea of spraying someone else’s turf in deluded animal mimicry.

It’s easy to build an unflattering profile based on all the threads that lead out of these urinal gutters. The truly embarrassing part isn’t in facing other people’s consternation but, instead, realizing you too can sometimes wind up in the trough. I’ve know several people who have experimented with peeing on their partner’s during sex, and, likewise, know three women who’ve peed the bed after one night stands. I can’t even count anymore the women I’ve know who’ve accidently peed themselves in a fit of laughter at some point. And, shifting pipeways, I once saw a friend of mine shit her pants while stricken with giardia. Before cleaning herself she went defiantly outside to smoke a cigarette, making a point to tell everyone who passed that she was carrying a small bundle of refuse in her jeans.

I’ve told these stories in person many times and I can’t remember them having ever elicited judgement. When you can connect a history to a real person the impulse to judge, deconstruct, and catalog diminishes to nothing. But when all of that human information is stripped away and we only have the record of the terrible things we do, there’s nothing to fall for or even be attracted to. Internet dating sites become random grab bags of lies, delusion, and embarrassment.  Something worth peeing on.

Image via Elsie esq.