I want to be in bed next to you, and wakeup with you next to me. I want to call you and tell you that I’ve changed my mind, we should be together, we can make this work… But I don’t, because I haven’t and we can’t. Because if we get back together I won’t wake up next to you, you are still on the other side of the country, I’ll still be just as lonely. Our friendship is what I hold on to, what’s keeping me from breaking down, but its also what makes me want all of you. I love you, but being in love with you is too hard, I need to keep reminding myself of this. Its better to hurt now and be able to work my way towards getting over you, towards someday getting to a place where I can start falling for someone else, instead of waiting for you to be all the things I need and all the things you are not. This isn’t going to work, we can be friends, I need your friendship. I want to see you and to kiss and to pretend you want me the way I want you. Pretend like for the past months you haven’t been rejecting my touch, pretend like you want all of me. I want to touch you and not have you pull away, I want to touch you without holding back, afraid to once again feel rejected. I shouldn’t feel rejected in a relationship. You tell me you don’t know why you don’t want me, that its just as hard for you. I don’t believe you and I resent you. I’m so mad, but I don’t want to be. We can’t be together because I can’t give up any more of me. I can’t keep pushing my feelings and my needs down, I want someone to crave my body like you used to. Why did you stop? When did I start sitting on the bathroom floor trying to hold my tears back, or cry with as little noise I could manage because my boyfriend, the person I’m supposed to trust with my heart, stop wanting all of me. When did I start doubting myself. I love you, but you aren’t worth all of that. I need to keep telling myself this, I believe it, but I need reminding. I can find a love that is easier than this. Our love used to be easier than this. I want to touch you, I think about it all the time. I remember I use to think about it all the time before too, but then I’d hold back, afraid of rejection, again. There is only so much I can take, I don’t want you back. I feel relief, I won’t be put in a position again where I doubt myself. Yet. I want you, I don’t yet know how to stop wanting you. I can’t be with you, I need better, I’ll find love again, love that hurts less. I don’t even need love right now, I want lust combined with like in someone that hurts less. I can find that. I need to give myself time to heal from you, time to start wanting someone else. Time, it takes time, but it will happen. Give it time. Make it through each day. We’ll get there.
I am in a long distance relationship and I love this man, I really fucking love him so much and I’m scared of what parts of me I might give up to make this relationship work… I’m scared there are internships I won’t take because I want to be near him, but I can’t do that, I can’t change my ambitions because of a man, even this man… I’m also afraid of ending this so that I don’t feel held back from my ambitions, only to have terrible sex with men I barely find attractive only to feel empty and miss any shred of him. What if I do everything I ever want to in my career only to miss this one person I love, or more accurately, what if I end this and spend the next years of my PhD lonely, missing him, filling that void with sort of hot guys from Tinder whose personalities ultimately bore and depress me… Reasonably I see myself not wanting to feel so lonely all the time, to want to have a partner in the same city as me, but also, I rarely like someone for long enough to want to see them consecutively, so what are the odds I end this and am able to fall for someone again… I have someone I respect and whose personality clicks better than anything has ever clicked before, he may be far away for now, but isn’t something better than the alternative? He is not physically here, but he is someone to plan trips with, someone to call before I go to sleep, to text all day, the person I want to share funny things with or interesting news.
I need to find a way to be okay alone, to not feel so vulnerable, to not cry alone at night when I’ve had too much to drink, to not let the sadness and loneliness get in the way of my work and of living my life, forging new friendships and all that. I think its worth it, and even if its not I can’t bring myself to imagine the void of not having him at all and that dependence is fucking terrifying. I need to create some space between us, or this neediness I constantly feel will add more strain to the relationship. I just don’t know how to do it… for now I’m going to not announce every time I’m horny for him (because that’s also been a daily thing, thank goodness for porn and vibrators), and give him the space to text me first, also give myself the space to not rely on him so much emotionally. I also need to stop binging so much netflix/hbo etc., … but thats a whole other can of problems.
As someone who had never had a relationship, I never realized how your life becomes connected to someone else. It’s this thing that turns serious so fast, all of a sudden I’m not dating other people, now we have expectations from each other, a year in and I made plans to visit family over the holidays and didn’t think to first run my plans by him because the holidays are something you spend together… all of a sudden I need to think about someone else when I make plans, and that is so completely foreign to me.
I am an adult, but even that fact still hasn’t fully solidified in my mind, but this is an adult relationship. A future together is this thing you have to keep in mind, and plan for. It’s crazy how it goes from dating/hooking up to being exclusive, to 2 years in and that means we are invested in dedicating a large portion of our lives to each other, what does that even mean?
How do you go from feeling like life is so open, you have no commitments, to then creating this tie to another person? Especially when none of this was planned. You were attracted to someone, wanted to bang them, and now what? You are a ‘we’? You make plans for a trip 6 months from now, you have to invest in the emotional support of your partner.
I feel like a relationship is this thing that requires so much vulnerability so suddenly, especially when you get into a relationship with someone who is more experienced in this sort of thing.
How do you give so much of yourself?
How are people not terrified by the void that will be left if this thing doesn’t work out?
As someone who has always assumed each partner came with some expiration date in the future, and planned my emotional availability accordingly (or lack of emotional availability), how do I open up? I find myself wondering when and how this is going to end, and wanting to prepare myself for that, to keep myself from getting hurt. I also find myself wondering how I got here, how did things escalate so fast? Do I even want to be here?
We grab drinks and bang, then we proceed to grab drinks and bang a few more times. We maybe stay in and watch a movie and bang all while remaining completely commitment free. We maybe grab some food then bang, maybe you come over one night and we fall asleep without banging. Gradually we don’t always bang when we hangout. I want to bang one night and you are not available so I start to feel that maybe some sort of commitment wouldn’t be so bad. We go out with a group and you aren’t giving me enough attention, so I get it from someone else. Now you start to feel as if some sort of commitment wouldn’t be so bad (it’s important you feel this strictly after I have felt this). You tell me you want commitment, I concur. Slowly my brain has been tricked into a relationship. We bang monogamously.
I’m terrified of becoming my mother in relationships.
I don’t like saying this because I admire her in so many ways. She is such a strong woman in so many other sectors of her life, that I don’t understand the person she becomes in conflict with my father. She begins to act illogical. Everything I admire about her is lost in the critical and self conscious mess of their relationship. She is intelligent and beautiful, but she doesn’t recognize it when it comes to my father. She agonizes over the potential of his infidelity. Her insecurities obscure her ability to think critically. Every side ways glance, every remark from my father becomes oppositional. If his eyes passed over a woman; he was checking her out. Any remark he makes; it was a judgement of my mother. I can’t imagine the emotional toil this takes on her. I just want to shake her and tell her to stop being so suspicious, and that her self-doubt is unfounded. When she takes every remark my father makes as an insult, the arguments they get into become irrational. She becomes impossible to fight with because anything you bring up, no matter the validity, she outright denies. She takes small comments and spirals them into a conflict. I think a part of her realizes she’s being unjustified, but she just can’t stop herself.
That’s the trait I’m scared of perpetuating. I consider myself a reasonably logical person, and I’m terrified of reaching a point where my arguments become irrational. There are times when I’m in an argument, with a person I’m dating/ a friend/ a family member and I can’t help kindle a conflict I didn’t intend. Even worse, there are times I can’t help myself from making it worse. I think a big part of my mother’s frustrations with my father is due to a general frustration with how certain aspects of her life have turned out. I find myself making the same flaw in relationships, in not being able to distinguish a particular argument from my own general frustrations.
The other day I got semen in my eye.*
First of, I highly recommend never getting semen in your eye. It contains Ascorbic acidic and will burn. If you do get it in your eye, I’d recommend not getting it in both eyes. This debacle was one of the most excruciating eye experiences of my life. This is of course my experience and you are all welcome to learn your own lessons.
Now that I’ve gotten my public service announcement out of the way, I’d like to tell the story of how I got semen in my eyes:
It was a temperate summer evening and my partner and I were in the throws of passion. I had just experienced a damn good climax, and decided to finish him off orally. He tells me he does not want to come in my mouth. In the spirit of trying to sound sexy (and the leftover high of my orgasm), I asked where it was he wanted to come.
After a detour consideration of my butt (not an unpopular detour), he asked it he could come on my face. I interpreted his tone as really asking if my feminist identity was okay with a man ejaculating on my face.
I may have been deflecting the same thought that crossed my mind. Was this sexual act degrading? Would I be losing some sort of self respect if I let him do this?
The answer was and still is NO, and I scolded myself for bracing my self respect against any sort of socially perceived notion. I am so painfully aware of how much women’s sexuality is monitored and suppressed and put into little misogynistic boxes; yet I found myself doing the same. It’s so ingrained in our society that I find myself inadvertently scrutinizing my own sexuality. We were two consenting adults and the line for me was in what I thought his intentions were; and all I saw was a man wanting to try something new.
So I lay on the bed as he stood over me and my excitement to watch it all happen got the best of my eye(s).
*Not all blog posts will be sexual in nature.**
**Probably
I’m going to start this blogging thing with a story:
Last night I was over at this guy’s apartment that I’ve been dating; let’s call him Well Intentioned. This past week our friend group has been going out and drinking till late then waking up early for work, so needed a more quiet night in. Earlier we’d all gone to a happy hour, then gone over to Well Intentioned’s apartment to drink some beers and watch some shows. Predictably the night went later than expected and once everyone left, we headed to his room. We were both tired, it was later than we’d planed to stay up, but we’d also not had sex in a few days and I wanted sex. — Relevant side note: We are both doing a summer research program that ends a week from yesterday, so in a less than a week we’ll be moving back to our very separate states and our relationship of sorts will end. side note over — The side note was to say, we (definitely at least me) want to take advantage of the time we have to have sex (as well as each others company ladi ladi da).
Well, we started hooking up which led to sex which shortly after led to Well Intentioned saying he was close to cumming since it’d been a few days. I was not close to coming, but I could have been given a little more time. So he came a little after saying that, and proceeded to fall asleep. I was no longer tired, I was horny and a little sexually frustrated since I did not get my chance to come. Before when he’s come quickly, he’d take a little time to charge, then we’d go for a round two were I’d get my chance to also be sexually satisfied. So I tried enticing him into round two, but he was tired and wanted to sleep….
Here is my problem with the situation: Well Intentioned and I have talked about the inequalities of sex between men and women. This seems a pretty obvious statement, but he’d at first said he’s never really thought about it… I don’t understand how a socially conscious person like him could have never really thought twice about how most intercourse situations between men and women end with the man cumming, whether or not the woman has and a lot of the times she hasn’t. It seems that women’s pleasures aren’t something men our age (early 20′s) seem to really concern themselves with, while from an early age women are bombarded with articles on “how to please your man” in ridiculous ways. Conversations Well Intentioned and I have had in the past included me asking him to think about long blow jobs he’s gotten have usually lasted, and how after fingering me for maybe a minute his hand got tired and he wanted to stop. This is something many of my friends have commented on; many guys our age go down on us for a few seconds maybe a couple minutes, get tired and give up, while blowjobs almost always last until the guy comes, and that can sometimes take a while. I’m not trying to make this into a competition. I like going down on a guy I’m interested in; I want to make him feel good; I will take my time to insure he gets as much pleasure from it as I can give him. I just want the same consideration back, I want someone to enjoy making me feel pleasure. I think guys want to make their women feel good, but a lot of them (once again from the demographic pool of people in their early twenties) are oblivious to the painfully obvious inequalities they perpetuate. So I’ve made it a responsibility of mine to inform those men I sleep with, of the social inequalities related to sexual acts and what they can do to better their experiences with me and also with their future partners. I’m not saying I’m doing a great job at this, I sometimes have trouble actually saying what I’m thinking (one of the reasons for this blog), but I’m working on it. One of the instances of me not doing such a good job at it, is last night:
… Where were we? Right, Well Intentioned had fallen asleep and I was wide awake and sexually frustrated next to him. I grumbled to myself for a bit waiting for him to read my mind and body signals while he was asleep in the dark. When that didn’t happen, I woke him up and asked him if he realized how unfair what went down was, that he’d gotten his pleasure from sex and disregarded mine after. He grumbled a sorry, and asked what I would have wanted him to do instead. I said that he could have given any sort of effort to be up a little longer so we could have had sex again. What I didn’t say, but should have said, is that the problem was not that he came too soon, or he was too tired after to go again so that I could have a chance of also reaching an orgasm. The problem is that once his orgasm was within reach, he disregarded mine. He could have done any of the following; once he’d realized/commented on the fact that he was close to cumming, he could have stopped having sex, payed a little more attention to my pleasure for a little bit, and then proceeded to come to completion; He could have put my sexual pleasure above his desire to sleep and gone a second round; Or maybe more reasonably (though I think all options are very reasonable), he could have acknowledged that he got his orgasm but I did not get mine and commented that since he was too tired to go again, he would make it up to me the next morning/ the next night/ in any form (massages always welcomed) at any time. What I don’t think he realized last night is that in the least, all I wanted was some sort of unsolicited acknowledgment that he would be sexually satisfied that night and I would not be. Instead I got a lethargic “sorry” that left me feeling unreasonable and unjustified guilt for even bringing it up, when what I was saying was legitimate and rational.
Autofembot 