I tend to monitor it in the bowl. Oh stop it; I'm sure you look at yours, too. Whether it's the bright yellow of a too-many-vitamins pee or the pungent odour of an asparagus pee, you can learn a lot from your urine. But I have to say that that's about the extent of my relationship with pee -- though there was that one time when the guy I was living with came into the bathroom and watched me pee. At one point he got brave and stuck his finger in the stream. It was just kinda funny. I don't know what we expected. Nothing more happened.

More did go on for 41-year-old Pierre. When he was 18, he stuck his hand in the stream of his girlfriend's pee during a mutual shower and liked it. “The feeling of her warm pee got me going,” explains Pierre. “I felt honoured to feel this and since then, I've been hooked.”

Pierre introduced his passion for pee to his current squeeze six years ago and she admits she was a little taken aback.

“I have a saying: ‘Try everything once,’” Irene herself tells me via email. “If you don't like it, don't do it again.” She tried it. She liked it. “Many people see this as disgusting but for me, it was a total turn-on.”

Pierre and Irene both agree that peeing on each other is one of the most intimate things two people can share. “I wouldn't just let anyone pee on me,” Irene laughs. “I find it more intimate than fucking.”

“We don't do it every day,” admits Pierre. “But it's become part of our repertoire. We pee all over each other: body, face, leg, etc. We usually do it in the bathtub, but we just got a plastic cover for the bed,” he says sounding excited about the possibilities. “It's the best feeling in the world. We do not do this to degrade the other person. It is just pure ecstasy.”

As for how it happens, Pierre says they don't have a typical session or routine. “We can be watching TV and one of us will say, ‘Gotta pee’ and from that phrase a whole night of sex begins,” he explains. “Other times, myself or Irene will hint that a ‘good pee night’ is in order. We don't usually prepare for it -- it just kind of happens. It may be different for others.”

While there are many technical terms for the practice of getting sexual pleasure from pee -- urophilia, undinism, ondinism, urolagnia, renifleurism -- most practitioners, including Pierre and Irene, refer to it as “GS” (golden showers). “Water sports” is another common term.

Textbook explanations abound for why pee turns some people on. Most attribute it to childhood experiences and claim it to be mostly a boy thing. Boys who are constantly being told not to play with their penis realize they get to hold it to pee and later associate peeing with pleasure, or boys who target-practiced when they peed realized they got turned on by the power of peeing. According to Brenda Love's The Encyclopedia of Unusual Sex Practices, Urophiles will pee on their partner's body, genitals, face and/or in their mouth for humiliation, punishment or reward depending on how the recipient feels about pee. It is a combination of rebellion, power and sensuality, Love writes.

Pierre and Irene don't buy all this intellectualizing about their favourite pastime. They just like it. “It has nothing to do with childhood experiences,” claims Pierre. “What do I attribute it to? I don't know.”

And as for what others think about it, Pierre's motto is, “Don't knock it until you try it.”

He says this sense of adventure and their openness to trying new things has kept their sex life strong and healthy. You can't argue with that. And while pee may just be waste to you, according to Brenda Love, pee was once thought to have magical powers. Pee has also been used as a cure for everything from anorexia (though I think that'd pretty much kill my appetite for good), toothaches, fever and insomnia. Gandhi drank his own urine to reabsorb nutrients back into his own body.

If all this has you curious but you're still a little squeamish, or you just don't have to go, I've heard through the GS grapevine that warm apple juice will do in a pinch.

One last word of caution: Urine can contain bacteria and viruses, so know your partner and pee safe.

I gotta go.