In Which I Realize I Am Really Lucky to Have Had My Adventure Years, Part Three

That week, while my creative coaching client was collaging through her blocks, I made this. Both a staircase and a trapped butterfly, seems about right.

It should be said, friends, that my almost-year-and-a-half dry spell was a literal dry spell as well—I’ve always been the squishiest, but there was a while when I was so dry that I thought I might be starting menopause. I could just have stocked up on lube, but the idea of always having to was something I wasn’t ready to face, so I got by on spit and determination. From the moment I met J, the dry spell was over. I came home with soaked underpants every time, wetter than in all my adventures. It felt like a reunion, like a second chance at being alive, to be coursing with so much life, to be opening up like a flower. That’s why, no matter how it ended up, I’m glad I let my hoo-ha make the decisions for a while—that part of me (literally and figuratively) has been neglected for so long, I’m glad I didn’t begrudge myself a perilous treat.

When I met him, I was in a delicate but thriving state. It was the first time in my adult life that I could say I was truly happy to be single. I was teaching poetry in my pretty apartment, spending lots of time with my friends and at church, and starting to have faith about where I was going. However, back in February I had to resign from the school district due to acute stress disorder, and I’m still pretty jumpy and prone to panics about once a month. The fact that J. was triggering space issues seemed like it was partly due to my own recent and distant past, but typing the story to you makes it seem less likely that that was so. I am still brokeny, but I think I was scared of him because he was (unintentionally, I’m almost sure) scary—sometimes it’s not that deep.

Anyway, the day after our beautiful but ill-ended flower date, he sent a text apologizing and citing grief. I conceded that not everyone can be besties with their exes the way I (somewhat unhealthily) am with Sweetie. (Currently she and I work at the same three-employee store, she’s my boss, and we spend about an hour each morning processing my feelings about various things. All this with a person I once jumped out of a car to get away from. I know.) I told him to give me some time,  that I’d have to do some soul-searching, so we went to radio silence and a love poem proceeded to pour out of me in a way that hadn’t happened in a long time. I felt jangled but fired up. I made art all day that day.

(When I second-drafted the poem with my friends in poetry class, I noticed that it accidentally implied that I wanted to have babies, including feeling the vibration of his Apple watch as “Another little heartbeat.” and, seeing the children in the flower garden wearing glow bracelets, responding with “I want one” meaning but not really meaning the glow bracelets. I hid it pretty well before I posted it, but still, I was like, nicely done, subconscious! Got it.)

Anyway, maybe latent baby-wishes were what inspired me to give him a chance, or his prowess at planning dates, or the cuteness of his texting style. (It was the first time I’ve dated with emoji involved, and I can’t overstate the adorableness of a good morning sunflower rainbow kissy face…) Maybe (probably) it was just plain lust and curiosity. That Sunday, I took a beach trip by myself, to clear my head and make the right decision, and I knew (I always know things best in the ocean, even if it is with a bathing suit on these days.) that if I let him go, I would always wonder if there could have been something real between us. Also I have to admit there was the stupid “What if this is my last chance?” feeling that comes from being socialized to think of myself as ancient at almost-forty-one.

When he asked me a couple days before the date what I was in the mood for, I very brazenly and honestly said red meat. He sent me a couple of menus for fancy places I could dress up for, with very grown-up prices, and I thought, “Is this what regular dating women get all the time? I should start expecting more from life.” That was the central lesson of him, and I hope I can see it through.

The day before our third date, I had an enormous panic attack. The first week of classes is pretty much the only busy time our college bookstore job is stressful, just because of all the extroversion and sometimes-getting-trapped-behind-the-register it requires. The one rude kid on our super-adorable campus found me and I found myself with a pounding headache, unable to work or get myself home. A kind coworker brought me to the campus infirmary, where the nice nurse asked me why I had neither a therapist nor meds. Reasonable question. I got some good rest before the date, but I carried a residue of fear under my pretty black polka-dot dress. (Hello again, red satin heels!)

As I followed my GPS to the suburbs, everything started to look familiar, especially when I turned onto J’s block. Remember way back whenSteampunk Guy pulled over on a quiet suburban street for car sex? THIS RANDOM OKC GUY’S HOUSE WAS THE HOUSE WE PULLED OVER IN FRONT OF. J was one of the nice people I was trying not to wake with my sex yowls three summers ago. I didn’t know if that was a good sign or a bad one, but I’ve never been more sure that my love life is a labyrinth. So where had I returned to?

I can’t overstate my delight at being properly dated, to be out in the world being shown off in a fancy outfit, being treated like someone who’s someone instead of a dance card afterthought. I ate rare filet mignon and felt like an animal, like a sexy lion, like a woman who’s thoroughly alive. He ordered a good pinot with the inauspicious name “Writer’s Block” but I seem to be overflowing with paragraphs nonetheless.

The conversation turned again to his writing, which was a tricky subject. He’d told me before that he wrote erotic novels, and I (somewhat hypocritically) was scared to read them—I had a feeling we wouldn’t be able to go on if I read his stories, and probably I was right. He confirmed that “Well, let’s just say it’s not all consensual.” I didn’t ask him who in the stories was not consenting to what, only told him I was now A. Scared and B. Too tipsy to flee.

“But sometimes someone just needs a little…push…”

Okay, so this blog wouldn’t exist if that weren’t a little bit true, but I didn’t like hearing it from him. “That’s not up to you. It’s not up to you to decide what someone else needs.”

He rightly pointed out that he’d written it, not done it, but still, I felt so let down and sad. “I just want there to be one guy, one guy, who wants a real person next to him in bed.” Yes, there have been plenty, but I was having tunnel vision, heavy with the burden of trying to keep myself not-raped. In the do-over version, this is where I have the waitress split the check, wait around a bit to sober up, and grouse about it to my friends at brunch the next day. But as he paid the bill, the conversation simmered back to happy somehow and I admitted that what I wanted most in the world was just to tear. Him. Apart. I was getting in that pool, and no stupid thing he said was going to stop me.

Next time: Big moon, hot sex, more stupid things.

Roadblock #8: Scared I’m Too Old

I’ve always had a poet’s preoccupation with the finiteness of life, and it used to be much worse. Lilacs are my favorite flower and every May I used to worry my head off about whether I’d smelled them enough that year. Of course, once I made room for a bigger life and other flowers, the lilac-urgency relaxed, but I still do feel very upset about the passage of time, especially with my 39^th birthday coming up next week.

I came to both my career and my body at a later-than-usual point in life. At work, I’m surrounded by experienced twenty-something teachers while I’m just starting out. In the dungeon, it’s hard not to feel inferior to the women who knew what they wanted right away and claimed it. I am so ashamed and embarrassed for being so far behind, for all the time I managed to put off growing up and making the most of things.

Although I’m pretty sure I don’t want a person to come out of me (I have space issues, people!) my biological clock is pissed off at me and twisting the knife in my gut lately. How did everybody else find the right people to make families with? How did they trust themselves and their partners and the world enough to take such big risks? Why did I automatically count myself out for so long? I try to tell myself that the family I was with Sweetie was what I needed for a while, but now I am just absolutely terrified that I missed my chance to find the family I really want. Although I know millions of ladies are in the same boat, 39 seems like an INSANE time for me to realize I want a male primary partner—that statistic about being more likely to get struck by lightning gets stuck in my head sometimes and it’s paralyzing.

I remember the panic I felt when I first realized how valued younger women are, and that I was now sharing the dating pool with them. I was fussing about how some crush of mine had taken up with his 24-year-old student and another guy friend of mine said “Um, because he can!” as if she were some special privilege he was entitled to claim. It pissed me off so much that she was assumed to be better than me simply because of her youth.

Given the societal dictate that younger is better (How often have I been in a rope class where the teacher who needs a demo bottom automatically chooses the youngest and smallest girl in the room?) just how in the world am I supposed to compete? I’m so excited to find authentic ways to connect and express mindful adult sexuality and it doesn’t always feel like there is a market for that.

I’ve known for a while that I’m having a pretty classic midlife crisis—grief for what I have missed and a worry that I won’t be able to make everything out of my life that I want to. I’ve wasted a lot of years thinking that I’m too big, too ugly, too old for men, and I’m still trying to take apart those assumptions.

There’s no way in this world that I would ever want to go back to my own twenties, though. I was selfish, mean, and afraid of every kind of intimacy. My body may have been better by some narrow, sexualizing made-up standard, but I didn’t have a single clue of what to do with it.

The current version of myself is decidedly the best one I’ve had to offer, but I feel so very, very scared that no one will ever want it, that there will always be some younger, better girl standing in the way.

Back in the spring I had to break off a friendship with one of my guy friends for a while because he (42 years old, I think) kept talking about the “vitality” of his 24-year-old crush. I have vitality—all you need is life and excitement. I know the biological clock pressure is false because I don’t need to reproduce to have the kind of family that I want. I can’t go back and start over so that I’d have more experience by now. I know that any guy who’s that into youth is a creep and not the guy for me.

The birthday-panic is so strong this year both because of the divorce and because of the times I’ve felt so close to having what I wanted. I’m going to try and filter out the influences that make me feel old and dried up (Bye for now, porn and pre-Criss 30 Rock episodes…) and get out in the world among the real play and real bodies. Though I do occasionally like to play as 17, I can’t and don’t want to be younger, smaller, or magically at some further-along point in my life. I can only do my best exactly where I am and hope that the right folks’ll meet me here. 

37 Is A Fine Age at Which to Blossom (Against TNG Ageism)

“TNG is about having a comfortable place for younger folk in the lifestyle. There are a bunch of regional groups, but nothing for people from different places to get together to talk to each other and trade advice.

Please be aged 35 or younger. I won't stop you if you are not, but I will be peeved if anyone uses this as a place to troll for younger folk.”--From the TNG Global group on Fet Life

This week, I’ve been having somewhat of an age panic. Earlier this week, I was feeling like putting some mingling on the calendar, and the only thing I could make it to this weekend was the local TNG (the next generation) munch. Just like the global group above and most cities’ TNG groups, our local group has an age ceiling of 35. If you’re over 35, you have to get a younger friend to “chaperone” you to their munches.

I got interested in TNG events because I’d like a dom who doesn’t have, like, two decades of experience on me, but one the other hand, this “chaperone” business seems humiliating, and not in a good way. I also resent the implication that 35 is the age at which one automatically starts “trolling” for younger people to play with—predators and victims come in all ages and experience levels, and putting an arbitrary age limit on interaction just creates more possibility for alienation and miscommunication.

The age-35 cutoff for TNG groups stigmatizes age (even, I think, adulthood)  in a way that mirrors mainstream consumer culture. For a community of people who are so creative in their physical expression, I hate when kinky folks sure seem to exemplify and even exaggerate the limits which mainstream society places on us.

Its true that some cities’ communities may skew a bit old, so I can see the appeal of being able to get together with pals one’s own age. After all, I go bonkers over guys who are 37, they’re the dreamiest and hard to find in an available state. As I learned with Firguy, playing with someone who has so much more experience can create a scary power imbalance.

However, I would not want to restrict myself to only 37-year-old partners—I’d miss out on so much! A large part of what I’m learning here are the best practices for a sexed-up adulthood, so it’s very helpful for me to spend time with couples of all ages and categories.

Society so often sends us the message that sexuality is only to be explored by the young. I’m told in a million ways a day by pop culture that my age makes me less worthy of affection and love. (Think Barney’s constant ageist cracks of How I Met Your Mother.) Even though I’m a good sport with a lot to offer, I often worry that I took too long to blossom and now I’m just an undervalued resource. Everyone has stuff that might limit their dating capacity: size, disability, even just having really specific tastes. It seems really creepy to add arbitrary age limits on top of that!

Dear TNG, it isn’t my fault that this particular phase of my sexual awakening came at 37 instead of 20. I was doing worthy things with those years, making art, travelling, writing poetry, making friends. I’m so proud of everything those years meant to me, even if it meant that my kinky side didn’t emerge until later.

My perspective isn’t any les valuable because I’m 37, nor is my ass any less hot. I’m trying to keep reminding myself that age-fears are just that, fears, and I shouldn’t let them hold me back from my adventures. I don’t feel right about needing a chaperone to attend a public event, so for now, I won’t do it. I’ve learned by now not to dabble in things that offend my childlike sense of justice. If something’s not fair, it’s just not fair.