Come Back to Bed, Honey

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.

When one partner has to go somewhere and the other wants more sex. Often used to show just how devoted a character is to the task at hand—they're refusing sex in order to get on with it—while their Shallow Love Interest only has one thing on the brain. Alternately, it can lead to Coitus Uninterruptus.

A common, more chaste use is when one character gets up in the middle of the night to contemplate something (Common in mystery and Urban Fantasy stories) and their other wakes up and asks their beloved to come back to bed, so they can sleep.

No real life examples, please; this is All The Tropes, not Tropes After Dark.

Examples of Come Back to Bed, Honey include:


Anime and Manga

  • In Macross Plus, after Isamu and his co-worker/friend-with-benefits Lucy have had sex, Isamu is woken up by a call. He answers it but Lucy tells him to go back to be with her so he hangs up. The call was from his ex-girlfriend Myung, who has caught quite a Distress Ball and needs urgent help. Guld ends up saving her instead.
    • Actually, it's more complicated. The call was from Sharon, impersonating Myung, who back then was trapped in a fire. She was attempting to either bring Myung and Isamu together, instigate a fight between Isamu and Guld when the both showed up to save her, or kill Myung outright; Sharon was the one who overloaded a circuit and started the fire that put Myung in danger, then attempted to kill both Myung and Guld when Isamu didn't show up.

Film

M: Moneypenny, where's 007?
Moneypenny: He's on a mission, sir. In Austria.
M: Tell him to pull out. Immediately.
[James Bond receives message]
Girl: What happened? Where are you going?
Bond: Sorry. Something came up.
Girl: But, James, I need you.
Bond: So does England!

  • Implied in Rear Window, where a newlywed couple move into an apartment close to the protagonists. They close their blinds, and are not seen for a while. After a few days, the man is seen leaning out of the window, and his wife calls him back.
  • Harrison Ford's character pretends to do this in Frantic to stop a pair of Mossad agents roughing up the French girl who's helping him (actually Ford had just sneaked in the window).
  • The Crazies (1973). Happens as a Mood Whiplash after the opening scene where a man burns his family to death. The two protagonists, a volunteer firefighter and a nurse, tease each other about ignoring the ringing phone and blaring fire siren.

Literature

  • A combination of the two uses occurs in The Bacta War, with Corran being called back to bed by Mirax while he's up late at night, worrying over what he's gotten them all into (at the end of the last novel, he resigned his commission because the politicos wouldn't let him go after the Big Bad, and the rest of the squadron followed).

Live-Action TV

Justine: Did you sleep all right?
Archie: Eventually, thanks.
Justine: Missed you. Come back to bed.

  • The chaste version occurs in one of the Flash Back sequences in the Stargate SG-1 episode "Threshold". The participants are Teal'c and his then-pregnant wife Drey'auc.
  • Occurs in Mad Men with Don and Betty.
  • Farscape - in a flashback, we see Aeryn's last sexual partner Velorek try and persuade her to come back to bed rather than going straight to her post.

Video Games

Duke: My name's Duke Nukem! After a few days of R&R, I'll be ready for more action!
Woman: Aww, come back to bed, Duke! I'm ready for some action, nowww!

Web Comics

Western Animation

  • Futurama: Fry hears this from his grandmother-to-be in "Roswell That Ends Well", and suddenly sees her as the old woman he knows from the future;

"Come back to bed, deary"

  • The Simpsons: Homer did this once and annoyed Marge greatly.
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