Staycation Sext Fling Part Three: I Recognize That Tree

I was looking for the original Blair Witch quote, but Lorelai makes it even more apt.

The last time The Coach and I text-played, he called me Ma’am and for a second I got so swoony that I had to make him tell me what should happen next. Once I regained my senses and my upper hand, we wrote through a quick but very sweet scene of me tying him to the bedframe with my pretty pink ropes. There wasn’t much chance of not having warm feelings after that! Getting Ma’am-ed woke up so much nurturing, protectiveness, and not-that-gentle gentleness in me. I guess I knew that was out of place in such a casual arrangement.

The next night was one where he didn’t text, and I ached to hear from him, literally felt a literal ache in my abdomen waiting/hoping for that little red text-notification number. I could have texted him I guess, but I didn’t want to be stepping on any other lady’s time and sure didn’t want the comparison if he was busy with someone younger, prettier, and (somehow!) more game.

My brain does this thing when I’m not hearing from someone I like, creates a whole cast of characters for them, each partner more beautiful and experienced and slutty-in-the-right-way than the next. This is almost never a slut-shaming feeling, I’m always happy for them and the adventures I’m imagining for them. I just don’t ever understand how I could keep up or fit in.

So I knew it was time to get oriented, to find out who the other partners were, to check in about the Ma’am stuff, to generally hang out and be humans together. I also knew that kind of an interaction might already be off the table.

So I asked if he wanted to go for a walk or a drink sometime so I could get to know him better. He took it as me asking him on a date (I guess it like 40% was.) and balked. I’d been pretty sure he only wanted me for strictly sexy times, and now I knew I was right.

It ended very kindly this time, to the point where I could feel a little of the Trump-era defensiveness we started this acquaintance with leave my body a little. He texted some very sweet “it’s not you, it’s me” type stuff that made me like him (and want to be Ma’am-ed by him) even more. While we texted it through on my morning walk and maybe in the middle of his workday, I cried a little. It’s hard to let him go.

I’m glad I’m able to get so much feeling from such attemptedly-simple interactions. It’s a hard-won skill and what gives these adventures so much meaning. But it feels a little lonely too. Are there really ladies out there being the just-sex thing he wants, the just-sex thing THEY want to be? I mean, there must be, he is superhot. I’ll always admire those casual girls, even as I try to let go of ever being them. But hey! I was casual for like eight whole days! And it was a very good eight days.

Dear Coach, Dear Goodgood Filthy Prince, Dear Kind-Of-But-Not-Really-A-Fuckboy,

Thank you. I’m so proud of how far we’ve both come. (Pun absolutely intended.) Go do all the things, go be exactly you. But part of you (not that part) (okay also a little bit that part) will always be mine now. I’m keeping your swagger, your bluntness, your sunny, sexy optimism. You’re inside me now always and I’m so, SO glad.

Spanks and vaccinated kisses,

A Princess

When (Awesome) Sluttiness Feels Like Armor

Possibly wine is stronger that it used to be pre-pando? My first going-for-a-drink since before quarantine was a really fun fiasco that kinda helped me get around to at least sort of knowing what my deal is.

When Poly Friends’ Partner asked if I wanted to hang out a few weeks ago there was no indication that it was other than friendly, but an OH MY GOD CAN I PLEASE JUMP ON HIM bolt of excitement came out of basically nowhere and made everything distracting and prolific and fun for a little while. I guess I could have asked him the above all-caps question in advance but I really did want to be there as a friend—we hadn’t talked in at least ten years, and it seemed like a friend-match that made a lot of sense.

So while he was telling me all about his various connections and I was feeling both covetous and compersiony, I did SUCH a good job of being Ms. Cheerleader of Other People’s Snuggling while he used the word “friend” like a BILLION times but was also pretty flirty so it was pleasantly confusing, but not too much so. He talked about music and domming and writing enough for me to wish we could be a thing, and the amount I was hitting on him was, in the words of Jack Donaghy, a lot to very.

Poly Friends’ Partner’s life is so glowy and connected, so warm and open, that I felt bowled over with longing to be a part of it, or rather, to be the kind of person who’d be a part of it. It wasn’t disingenuous when I brazened my way through stories about my slutty bunch of years or nudged him for more details of his own adventures, but I was trying to be brave, to be tough, to hide the all-caps sexy feelings behind gameness so I wouldn’t have to face rejection or seem like a threat to his lovely bubble of a world.

I found myself in a pinkly drunken haze sitting on a stranger’s stoop waiting for a Lyft that didn’t come and then finding coffee and my favorite busline. I ended the night yammering loopily on the phone to Sweetie about how I was 40% SO EMBARRASSED and 60% ELATED and how I LOVE wine and I LOVE my busline and how everything was very confusing but not really.

I knew all I had to do about PFP was..NOT.

This morning, when I got a text that read like “Hear ye, hear ye, this is your official notice that I don’t want to snuggle” followed by a winky face (How am I almost forty-seven years old and vexed by a winky face?!) (I know it was meant as a kindness but honestly poly people it’s too much with the communication sometimes. I can figure out you don’t wanna without the Magna Carta).I was hurt and sad and disappointed, but I also understood that I was trying to get back to a place where I definitely don’t belong.

All the adorable poly stuff feels like a (SO CUTE) should statement, as a therapist might say. It sometimes feels like a world I have to get back to in order to be seen at all, like in order to be good enough for men, that I have to find a place in the puzzle of poly. Like I have to figure out how to want both less and more than I do.

I want someone who just wants me. I want to be someone’s favorite. I can’t make myself be any less than the full Call Me Maybe, as frustrating as it is sometimes and as terrifying as men seem to find it. In a few days or weeks this crush will simmer down and I’ll find things to do with all this pent up energy. I’ll try to keep admitting that I want the rom-com even if it seems SO DUMB of a thing to hope for.

 

Fuck This Sexist Piece of Kindhearted Advice

            Not the first part, that’s like my whole thing. The “let love find you” part.

Last week, I left the library where I worked with Mr. Makeout Music. There were a lot of good reasons for doing so (Work crushes can sometimes be a sign that I need to be doing something more absorbing.) but the main reason was that it was exhausting to keep pretending to be okay around him. I wasn’t. Now that I’ve got the time and space and naps to heal, the pain of him is almost gone.

            Because I couldn’t bring myself to walk past MM one more time, Sweetie went to clean out my desk for me, with Awesome Genderqueer Librarian’s help. In the bag with my collection of kid art and my desk socks was a lovely stack of “We miss you!” cards from kids and coworkers. It was very gratifying to still be valued there, after three sometimes-crying months of love-shame and election grief. The woman who wrote the above advice is one of my favorite humans in the universe, but it unleashed a stream of gleeful annoyance that I’m kind of excited to paragraph.

            It’s partly that she knew (Ugh, everybody knew.) that my leaving was even about heartbreak at all, but mostly it’s this—I’m mad at myself for spending three months crying about a guy who got scared of me because I made the first move. He has tried to frame it in other ways, but from where I’m sitting, he adored me until I took his hand.

            Of course he had the right to decline my advances for any reason, but I hated the way I felt around him after that—too big, too excited, too complicated, too much. About our weird somewhere-between-friendship-and-the other-thing situation, he kept saying “just let things develop organically” every time I had a question or needed a clarification, but I think what he meant was, let things develop on his terms.

            Even the way our flirtation started, with him visiting my department or my office when he could (He had keys to my office, but I certainly didn’t have keys to his.), with me waiting around with an open heart and what I hoped was a pretty face for him to come and be praised, it sometimes made me feel helpless and trapped, even when things were nice. In one of our fights, I said I wasn’t a web cam girl, just waiting around to approve of him. (He probably wished he hadn’t told me his porn preferences…) The way the building is designed, he could see me from almost any of his posts, and it felt really claustrophobic sometimes.

            The “let love come to you” (if you’re a woman) paradigm is part of what makes the traditional structures of dating unworkable to me. When I like someone, I really like him/her/them. When I want ANYTHING, I try very hard to be awesome at getting it. If I’m attracted to somebody, I tell them. I ask for what I want and see if it works for them. I’m not Sleeping fucking Beauty, I’m an adventuress on a quest. On a good day,  I’m a goddess, and men have been known to kneel down for me without my even having to command it. I have a dominant, honest, brave, ridiculous heart that knows what it wants and will always go after it.

            The passiveness of the “wait for love to find you” paradigm takes me to a dark place. It reminds me of necrophila. It reminds me of rohypnol. (When I just Googled that for spelling, the horrifying third choice was “rohypnols buy.”) It reminds me of back when there was MySpace and all of my guy friends liked girls whose profile pictures managed these slack, vacant expressions. I could never have made my face look uninhabited enough to resemble the ghost/zombie girls who were the style of the Mid-Zeroes. It reminds me of the time I was told that I smile a lot for a submissive.

           

            The boxed-in passiveness of the advice reminds me of Moana being told that everything she needed was on this one little island and that all she had to do to be happy was reject the song of her own soul. (Did anyone else see her and her many new islands as a polyamory tale? Maybe it was just me.) Like Moana, I am an explorer, a leader, a navigator. I won’t sit in a box and wait to be clicked on, and I hope to never tunnel-vision myself into any more narrow little islands of gendered constraint.

Like many of my rants, this is really a culmination of an argument with myself. Since my brokeny teenage years, I’ve always “known” in my heart that I’m not passive enough to be loved by a man, that I could never be compliant or compromising enough for a straight cis male. That idea is offensive to one and all, but it didn’t come from nowhere. I would love for it to go away.

When I look at it objectively, I see that Mr. Makeout Music was a rare exception. I am surrounded, past and present, by men who have enjoyed being sought out, pursued, and pounced upon. Far from being a turnoff, my literal and figurative bigness and enthusiasm have drawn the best, most adventurous, most oomph-filled men to me. Some of them have even stuck around.

Though I’ll always appreciate the way that he woke up my body and heart, I think Mr. Makeout Music mostly served to show me what I don’t want—I never want to try and make myself smaller or less in hopes that someone with a narrower scope might see me. I never want to be stuck on an island again.

            I know that romantic love isn’t something that can be to-do-listed into existence, but I WILL have agency. I will not sit in a box and wait. I will not listen to the fears and the family/social pressures that kept me away from the water. I aim to untie myself from the hetero/mononormative shore and learn to sail. My heart knows the way.