I'm Porn Star Asa Akira And These 6 Epiphanies SAVED My Marriage

I'm no relationship expert. First of all, I'm too young; thirty is hardly old enough to be an expert on anything as complicated as love, really. Second, I've been married twice, engaged thrice, and my longest relationship so far is with my dog. My second longest was with my high school boyfriend, who later dated my best friend, and (on an unrelated note) is now dead.

Most of my adulthood has been spent in a series of one-year relationships, generally expiring because I got bored, or they left me because I'm a terrible person to be with. Additionally, another reason I am no expert is that I'm currently in the most successful relationship I've ever had, and it's still only been less than four years.

But this is about 400 percent the length of my usual relationships, so even if we got divorced tomorrow, I'd still consider it a great victory. Therefore, I'll offer some advice.

1. Always sleep in separate bedrooms. 

Toni and I don't share a bedroom, or a bathroom, or an office, or phone chargers, or a pizza. The first one is key. Like many constructive steps in a relationship, this started with me throwing a stone Buddha statue at Toni's head.

It was in the first year of our cohabitation, before we had gotten married, and we had gotten into an argument about the dishes. Yes, the dishes. It's important to fight about these little things in the beginning to set the rules for the future.

Growing up in New York City, I never had a dishwasher. While many apartments come with these futuristic machines installed now, when I was a kid living with my parents, they did not. And later, when I became an adult, being able to afford a New York City apartment on my own with one was just laughable.

(You may have asked yourself: Is Asa Akira married? Yes! Here she is with her husband Toni)

So for these reasons, when I moved to LA and rented an apartment with a dishwasher, I just washed the dishes like I was used to and used the machine as a drying rack. This system worked great, especially for a single woman who ate only salads and lived alone.

Toni moved in, and like a normal human being, was not accustomed to this genius alternative use for the dishwasher. Although I told him at the very early stages of our relationship about my method, he constantly forgot and placed his dirty dishes in the machine with my clean dishes.

Thinking of the molecules from his dirty dishes migrating over to my clean dishes wasn't something I could let go of easily. I would remind him, he would feel that I was nagging, and we would fight. He would agree to be more mindful, I would agree to be more understanding, and we would make up.

This one particular time, though, we couldn't seem to make up. Like many fights, it turned into a fight about the fight. I cried to Toni that "forgetting" my method just meant he didn't respect me enough to remember. He in turn suggested I was menstruating (his word, not mine — remember, I'm married to a foreigner), which understandably made me morph into a psychotic monster.

I jumped on him and started to punch him, he threw me off, and like the gentleman that he is, he stormed into the guest bedroom to avoid hitting me. I banged on the wooden door until it cracked, at which point he called me a crazy bitch, came out of the room, and yelled at me for destroying my own living quarters.

If there's one thing that will make me crazy, it's calling me crazy. So I took the stone Buddha statue next to me, which was heavy enough that I had trouble holding it, and threw it at his head. He ducked, pointed his finger at me, and yelled that I was f*cking lucky he ducked. (I'll give it to him, he was right. That time.)

He grabbed me by my hair, so I tried to get away and ended up on the floor punching his legs. He dragged me by my hair into our bedroom, picked me up by my neck, and threw me onto the bed.

"You f*cking stay there you stupid bitch," he pointed at me again, and went to the guest room and locked the door. I was honestly a bit tired from the whole fiasco, so instead of pursuing the matter further, I stayed in bed crying all night and feeling sorry for myself.

The next morning, I awoke with a fresh mind. As much as I hated to admit it, I felt ashamed of my behavior the night before, which was only accentuated when I walked out into the living room and saw the shattered Buddha on the floor. Toni was nowhere to be seen. I cleaned up the mess I had made, and the entire apartment, and was embarrassed to see the dent in the hardwood floor that would now be there forever, a permanent reminder that I had sort of tried to kill my boyfriend.

Toni came home later that day, and I apologized. He apologized too, and after a couple days of being silent toward each other, and a couple nights of sleeping apart, the fight ended the usual way: with him agreeing to be more mindful of my dishwashing method, and me agreeing to be more understanding of his forgetfulness. We had make-up sex, and as with most fights, came out stronger than ever, more in love than ever.

That night, though, after we had spent the day being sweeter to each other than ever, after having sex like nine hundred times, I couldn't help but notice how much nicer it had been to sleep alone. As we lay in bed together, side by side, I noticed that even in our king-sized bed, we kept kicking each other by accident, waking each other with every movement, every groan. I let it go, thinking this was the cost of being in a loving relationship.

The next night, as we each read our own books on opposite sides of the bed, I wondered why couples even had to sleep together. If I were alone right then, I could sprawl out diagonally and not be awakened every time he got up to pee. I turned to Toni.

"I feel like it was kind of nice, sleeping in separate rooms."

"Thank god you said something!" Toni exclaimed. (Again, married to a foreigner.) "I felt so good sleeping alone."

"Should we just... sleep apart? Is that weird?"

And so it was decided, and we never looked back. When we purchased a house two years later, we didn't for one moment consider that we might share a bedroom again.

(Asa Akira photo with husband Toni)

As we looked at open house after open house, we each declared which room would be "my room" and argued who deserved which room more, before ultimately deciding on a four bedroom, three bath, where we could each have not only our own bedrooms and bathrooms, but offices too. When we moved in, we each decorated our rooms very differently, taking pride and challenging guests to say whose room looked better. (Mine, obviously.)

People are confused when we tell them about our sleeping arrangement. "Are you guys in love? Do you still have sex? Is this a green-card marriage?" they'll ask, and I don't blame them. It's unconventional. We are in love, we do have sex, and this isn't a green-card marriage.

We spend every evening together like any normal couple, but when it's time to go to sleep, we each get ready for bed in our own bathrooms, and then he comes to my room to tuck me in, we spend about ten minutes winding down, and then he goes to his room, and then we see each other in the morning.

I love this. I love that we are OK with this. I love having my own space, that I decorated my room exactly how I wanted, and that if I choose to stay up all night reading or masturbating or writing, I could do so without bothering him. I love that I can sleep in my ideal temperature (hot as balls) and he can sleep in his (cold as f*ck).

I love that all of my belongings are in my own area of the house, and I love that I have a place that is only mine. Maybe it's the only child in me. But Toni isn't an only child, and I know he loves it, too. When we go on vacation, we sleep together, but we both laugh at how nice it is when we come home to our separate bedrooms. When we awake in the morning, we are excited to see each other, and I give him a big hug, genuinely asking how he slept.

2. Fight a lot in the first year. 

Like what we now refer to as the Buddha incident, try to fight a lot in the first year. Go ahead and be petty. If you're going to spend a significant portion of your life with someone, they may as well know how you like things done. This applies not only to household chores like how to properly use a dishwasher, but sex, pet peeves, the definition of "cheating"... everything, really.

In that first year of living together, Toni and I constantly fought about everything, many (if not most) of the fights being repeats. Eventually, we learned to conclude an issue forever by this very simple algorithm: Whoever cares more about the matter gets their way.

One particular issue that came up more than most for us was where the lines were drawn when it came to work. Being that our jobs are to f*ck people besides each other, the rules of dating were not as clear-cut as, say, in a traditional monogamous relationship. Can we f*ck people outside of porn? Can we f*ck someone that we are working with that day when the camera isn't rolling? Can we work with our exes? Can we still perform any sex act we want on camera, or are there certain acts that are now exclusive to home sex?

(Photo of porn star Asa Akira in bra and underwear)

I've seen it done all different ways, the porno relationship. Some girls don't kiss on the mouth. Some dudes refrain from working with the same girl more than once a week. Some couples only have anal sex with each other.

I've learned not to judge any of these decisions — everyone draws the line somewhere different. And however ridiculous it may seem to me personally, I can't knock how someone feels. I can't argue about what's important to somebody.

For me, I don't care what Toni does on the set. I know what kind of male performer he is: He's the guy who tries to f*ck the girl while she's still in the makeup chair before they even start shooting. He's the guy who will keep f*cking the girl even when the camera stops rolling. If there's a girl who wants to f*ck him on a day when he's just directing, I'd be a fool to think he wouldn't jump at the opportunity.

Toni loves his job, and I want him to have a great time when he's at work. I would imagine this is how any woman feels about her husband.

However, anything away from the set kills me. If Toni takes a girl to eat after their scene, I die of jealousy. This is something we fought about constantly in the beginning, and in the end, he realized that going to lunch with a girl meant more to me than it did to him. The level of hurt it caused me outweighed his desire. So on that one, I got my way.

Before you assume I always get my way, let me give an example of a time when Toni got his way.

I love licking men's assh*les. It's not the taste, texture, or anything weird or gross like that — I just love watching a man's face when I go there. It always catches him by surprise, and for a millisecond, you see him enter another realm of pleasure. It's not the same with girls, because we are used to having our assh*les eaten pretty much every time we have sex. It's much less special.

Toni knew this little tidbit about me, because he'd worked with me before we dated, and he'd watched me work with other guys, too. So when we started to get serious, he told me he would rather I abstain from eating men's assh*les at work. Women, he said, were fine — his reasoning was that boys had dirty buttholes, while girls had clean ones.

While he had no problem kissing me after my tongue had been on a woman's butthole, he did not feel the same if it had been on a man's. Of course, this sounded silly to me. I lightheartedly agreed, with little intention of following through. I figured I'd just do it a little less.

A few months later, I came home from work and was about to get in the shower when Toni angrily brought me his laptop.

"What is this?" he demanded.

I only had to look at the screen for one moment before I knew what he was talking about. In my defense, I was putting a dildo in a guy's ass — I wasn't gonna put it in dry; I wasn't heartless! Of course I was going to lick his butt!

(Photo of Asa Akira in sexy lingerie)

I argued this point to Toni, but he wasn't hearing it. We argued for a while before I realized I was arguing for a matter of principle. While he was genuinely upset, the level of his distaste (ha!) for the act trumped my level of desire to perform it. So he won, and I never ate a guy's assh*le again.

3. After that first year of fighting a lot, pick your battles.

This tip is really just an extension of the last tip. Maybe it shouldn't even be its own thing, but f*ck it, I will just make it short.

Once we spent that first year fighting over every petty thing, we learned which issues were truly important and which were not worth fighting over. I no longer use the dishwasher as a drying rack. He no longer goes to lunch with girls. I refrain from licking men's assh*les, and he refrains from smoking in the house.

We honestly hardly fight anymore, and I really do credit it to the fact that we got all our fighting out of the way in the first year. We know what matters to each other, and we respect it. When something bothers me, I try to think of it like this: Is this worth starting an argument over? In the grand scheme of things, does this really matter?

For example, when Toni leaves his socks turned inside out when he throws them in the hamper, it annoys me, because then when they come out of the dryer and I'm folding his laundry, it's one extra step to turn them out the right way.

But I don't bring this up. This is not worth a fight — it's only one small extra step for me. Him feeling nagged isn't worth it. I'd rather save it for an issue that really matters to me — one that actually affects my feelings.

4. Have your own life.

Whenever people are like "I married my best friend!" I barf in my mouth a little. Just kidding, because I have no gag reflex. But really though, I don't think this is a good idea.

I've been in relationships before where our social lives were completely intertwined, my friends were his friends, his favorite activities were my favorite activities, and we did everything together. This is all great in the very beginning of the relationship when you just want to spend every second together, but try to avoid it, because once you're past that stage, you're going to want your own social life.

Nothing will make you feel more trapped than when you share everything. It's important to have places to go when you don't want to be with that person. Go to separate gyms. Have separate friends. Have hobbies that are your own.

Plus, people respect independence; it's important that your partner know that you can live a life without them, that if they treat you like sh*t you're able to easily leave and move on with your life. (Unless you have kids, because then you're just f*cked.) If your whole life revolves around them, you'd better believe they'll eventually take it for granted.

(Asa Akira photo with husband Toni) 

5. Put your beef with old-fashioned, preconceived gender roles aside once in a while and be a 1950s housewife.

Trust me on this one. The benefits outweigh the pain in your soul. 

When we first started dating, like any new couple Toni and I went out to eat most nights. Consequently, I gained eight pounds, he gained twelve, and being in a business where our paychecks depended on our looks, we mutually decided something should probably be done about this.

For the most part, a man who watches what he eats is a big turn-off for me, but if his money depends on it, I can live with it. In my mind, we had come to the conclusion that I would go back to eating fruits and salads, and he would go back to his chicken and brown rice, or whatever he made for himself during the five years he was single.

This lasted for about a month before he casually mentioned one day, "So, when are you gonna make that dinner for me?" Naturally, as I always did when asked something I wasn't confident about, I immediately got defensive. "What dinner? What are you talking about?"

"You said you were gonna make me dinner," Toni smiled. "Remember? When we decided to start eating healthy?"

There was no way in hell I had promised him that, because I would never have made such an idiotic promise, since I didn't know how to cook. It was a skill I was confident I could learn if needed, but it was something I had never been interested in.

If anything, I was sort of against cooking for a main principle: why should I be the one cooking? Why not him? But this was the beginning of the relationship before I had let my crazy out, when I was still shaving above the knees on a regular basis. I was still trying to sell the idea of the perfect girlfriend.

"OK, how about tomorrow?" I answered in my best nonchalant voice. And so it was decided.

The next day, I went to the grocery store straight after my shoot. I had shot a gonzo scene, where the plot was basically me and my cocksman of the day sitting in a room naked, the script consisting of one line: "I've been waiting for you." It was a quick day.

With cum in my hair and my eyeliner smeared, I looked through recipes on my phone and walked into the store. As people walking by complained I was in their way, I wondered if I should just Mrs. Doubtfire it, and order some delivery and serve it as home cooking. I quickly decided this was a bad idea, as my ex-boyfriend Luke had done that very thing to me a few years back, resulting in a huge fight.

(Asa Akira sexy selfie)

"Why would you leave the containers in the house?" I had yelled. "If you're gonna do something this stupid, at least make sure I don't find out!" Looking back, the act alone probably didn't deserve such a reaction, but Luke was a pathological liar and this was just one in a string of many lies I had caught him in.

I decided on making salmon with a side of mashed sweet potatoes, along with a kale salad. I wasn't sure if fish and sweet potatoes went well together, and I was pretty certain Toni had specifically told me once he didn't like salad, but these were the only three items I had ever prepared in my life, so I figured it was the safest bet. Besides, the meal would a good balance of carbs, protein and fat, and maybe that would make him realize that one day, after I was done sucking dicks on camera, I'd make an excellent mother.

When I got home with the ingredients, I got into the shower and repeated the phrase "domestic goddess" over and over in my mind as I washed the dried cum out of my hair. The stove hadn't even been turned on yet, but I felt like the best girlfriend in the world.

Work all day, come home, cook a nice meal for my man — was this... was this the new me? I briefly considered going back out to buy a cute apron, but it was getting late and Toni would be coming over soon.

This story would be much funnier if the dinner had been a disaster, but the truth was that it went very smoothly, and Toni even asked for a second serving (which was actually in itself a disaster, because now this was something he might expect). I had forgotten an important rule I had been applying to life ever since I read it in a cartoon as a child: If you don't want to do something, do it poorly the first time, and no one will ever ask you to do it again.

What followed dinner was the best sex I'd ever had. And for the next week, he showed up with random surprises. He even got me one of those surprise-pearl things I had always wanted (no, not a pearl necklace. Although actually, he probably gave me one of those, too), where you get to crack open the oyster and see what kind of pearl was inside.

Thinking I had fulfilled my proof-of-cooking-skill duties, I didn't cook again, not a single time, for years to follow. Instead, it became a running gag that in all the time we had been together, I had only cooked for Toni once. And this is where this anecdote takes a turn for the worse.

Every time Toni would jokingly tell this story and end it with the punchline of me never cooking again, the feminist in me would come out and I'd become enraged.

"I'll cook for you when you pay all the bills and I can stay home on drugs in my pajamas all day," I'd yell. Of course, this wasn't what either of us wanted. While I don't judge it, I'd been a stay-at-home wife before, and that life just wasn't for me.

"Why don't YOU cook for ME?" I'd scream. "You think my role is to cook for you just because I'm a WOMAN?" Toni would calmly explain over and over that, no, that wasn't the case.

He wanted me to cook because it made him feel loved and cared for. It took years for me to finally hear this.

Nowadays, I cook once a week, and not because I'm the woman. I do it because I want to make him happy. The days I cook are the days that Toni is the sweetest to me. And when he's a dick, I can throw it in his face and say things like, "And to think I spent all f*cking day COOKING FOR YOU!" It's a win-win.

(Asa Akira Instagram photo with husband Toni)

6. Take that five languages of love test.

I only recently found this test. It was brought to my attention by Bill Poon, my friend/driver, and not the other way around. It sounds silly, but I truly believe this test has brought me a greater sense of what Toni needs to be happy, and vice versa.

The premise is that there are five languages or expressions of love, and different ones resonate strongly with each of us. They are quality time, (tangible) gifts, words of affirmation, acts of service, and physical touch.

Toni scored the highest in words of affirmation and quality time. It made me realize how, while we spend lots of quality time together, it was equally important for Toni to hear me say encouraging things, how that's something he equated with being loved, which is something I never would have realized since I scored extremely low in that category.

I'm big on giving gifts (it is, shamefully, my highest-scoring language), and I came to realize that instead of focusing so much on giving him lavish gifts (which I do often), it would mean more to him that I tell him verbally how much I appreciate him, how proud I am of him as my husband, how much I love him.

Additionally, it made his words of affirmation to me seem so much more important. Because this was his main language of love, I realized how much it meant when he said these things to me.

Ironically, physical touch was the lowest-scoring category for both of us. Which, thinking about it, makes sense. As porn stars, we f*ck different people every day. While it's still a highly emotional experience for me and I do feel a strong sense of lust and love while doing a sex scene, it's not something I hold exclusively for my significant other.

It's definitely not the most important thing that defines love for me. I'd much rather give/receive gifts and acts of service. For me, doing a favor for someone is much more intimate than f*cking them, and realizing this has made Toni appreciate it more when I go out of my way to do something for him.

It's made him more conscious of doing the same for me. Just knowing each other's way of loving has made our relationship stronger.

.......

This piece has been excerpted from Asa Akira's new memoir, Dirty Thirty, dropping August 9, 2016

All photos: Instagram / Instagram