A general-ish update

September 6, 2008 at 12:58 am | Posted in reflections, relationships | Leave a comment
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I’ve been busy this week with writing assignments, classes, and my new job – all excellent and yummy things to be spending my time on. My blog has meanwhile become harder to post to because I’ve been getting caught up in page hits and this sort of thing – not exactly inspiring, at least not for me. But not posting at all is definitely not going to get me more readers, so what the hell, I’ll just post the drivel that’s been sloshing around in my head for the past few days.

I started reading Augusten Burroughs’s memoir Dry today. I have to say that 100 pages in, I don’t much care for it. I picked it up because I had the sense that it would be sordid, and substance abuse issues are perennially fascinating for me (as you might guess, it’s about his recovery from alcoholism). There’s even the gay male angle, which I’m always weak for. But the actual writing is sloppily done, and poorly edited to boot. My experience with memoir is very limited, though I understand that it’s a genre that has gained a large readership among the masses, and being the elitist I am, I naturally assume that this means memoirs in general can be poorly written and still make assloads of money because most people don’t care about that sort of thing. Which means they are, more often than not, poorly written and barely edited. This Burroughs piece only strengthens my ill-informed notions to this effect. So sad, so sad. It makes me want to avoid the genre altogether. Getting too close to that pulse of celebrity and commercialism is bad for my health, and I suspect it’s bad for my creative process as well. And yet I so love talking about myself that you’d think it would be perfect for me! 😥

In other news, this weekend I have my first OkCupid date since my breakup with Poly Dude and Kristen. It occurred to me only tonight that it would in fact be my first date since the end of my last relationship, which should be, like, a big deal or something, right? I don’t know. But it isn’t. I’m not really excited in that “oh god I need to look flawless and be funny and smell great and get my cunt waxed” kind of way. If anything I’m just interested in encountering another human being who has shown himself to be fairly intelligent and witty. I don’t think I could possibly feel less sexual than I have these past few days. I just want to know how people operate; I want to dig into the tender bits. Maybe this is a result of my stupid couple of weeks talking to Luke – I’m not sure I mentioned how that ended, by the way: he finally decided he would give his relationship with his girl-thing an actual chance instead of being a sleaze about it. Congratulations, Luke, on choosing (eventually) to be a decent human being.

As the loyal (and attentive) among you may recall, Luke and I had a purely physical cyber-fling for about a week before he busted out the “I’ve been dating a girl for 3 months but I really want to get to know you as a person before or while we have filthy, violent sex in real life” line. There are just so many things wrong with this sentiment. But the one I want to talk about at the moment is the getting to know me part. Because for some reason I didn’t really believe him, or maybe I just didn’t want to, because it only highlighted his inability to commit to the girl he was seeing and his cowardice in dealing with that situation. And so, strangely, while he at least superficially expressed an interest in understanding me as a person, I felt used by him. On top of that, I just didn’t see him as being very interesting, or nearly emotionally aware enough for me to feel safe exposing myself that way. And that’s a terrible feeling for me. I want, more than anything, to feel understood and accepted; conversely, I fear being regarded as alien, or perverse, or freakish. Sometimes I can handle this in small doses and even provoke it, but that’s all under my control. There’s no vulnerability there. So maybe what I’m saying here is that I encountered someone who professed to want to get to know me, and because of my gut reaction of “he totally won’t get it,” I walled myself off from him and maybe from all other potential suitors. Who needs that kind of rejection? I suppose it just goes to show that I’m not ready to put myself on the line again yet.

It’s probably for the best, as I don’t really need to be expending so much energy on looking for someone to share naked-time with. I have enough going on, particulary in the realm of grad school applications. And apparently the vague possibility of attraction/sex/intimacy, in the form of first dates with Internet men, is enough to tide me over until my craving for High Drama finally returns.

Friends with sexual tension

August 18, 2008 at 12:15 am | Posted in relationships | Leave a comment
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Last night during my cock-obsessed hours, I happened to leave the TV on a channel that started showing Will and Grace reruns. It’s not a show I choose to watch, but I tolerate it if it’s on. Anyway, I managed to catch a couple of the subplots; one revolved around Will running into an ex at a restaurant and making a big fucking deal about it. He was suddenly worried that he’d made a mistake in ending the relationship. When he finally talked to the guy, his ex reported that he was happy and his life was moving forward and he was seeing someone new.

Will came back to Grace devastated. And Grace held his hand and said, “Oh, I’m sorry, honey. It’s always hard to hear that your ex is happy.” And you could tell that the audience wasn’t sure whether this was supposed to be funny; no one laughed, but you could feel the tension. It’s a terrible, selfish thing to feel like crap about an ex being happy with someone else, but isn’t that just how it goes?

I talked to one of my more recent exes – Jon – tonight for the first time in about two months. He asked me what was new and I told him I’d broken up with that crazy poly couple (his response when I’d told him about the relationship two months before had been “That sounds terrible;” he had been right, though I didn’t want to admit it then). And then he told me he was seeing someone. I congratulated him; luckily for me, it’s a lot easier to fake sincerity over IMs.

This is a tendency of mine, if you haven’t noticed: I like to cling to past relationships, to look back and say, “yeah, that wasn’t so bad… he was a good guy… i really cared about him… we had something. Maybe there’s something worth going back for.” And I just like to have that option available. Never mind that Jon and I aren’t very sexually compatible (he’s extremely passive and his sex-drive is as close to non-existent as a 26-year-old male’s can get), and he’s also strongly opposed to open relationships, so there’s no way a romantic relationship would have worked out between us. As long as I’m settling for sexual/romantic arrangements that fail to satisfy my needs, he would have been a decent candidate. We had such a nice rapport: he was easygoing and comfortable and affectionate and goofy and intelligent and domestic. A really good balance to my moody insanity.

Bah.

I read a blog post tonight about how to handle a breakup. It was written in a blog that I’m coming to find irritating in its relentless positivity (but that’s a topic for another post). Anyway, in the first section there was mention of how the end of a romantic relationship doesn’t have to mean the end of the friendship, too. You can preserve the connection, the intimacy and the love you feel for one another and just remove all of the romantic baggage. Wow, that sounds really nice, doesn’t it?

But here’s the problem: I’m not at all sure it’s possible to be friends with someone you were once sexually or romantically attracted to (see my blog post on this topic, “Your guy friend wants to get into your pants”). Poly Dude was of this opinion too, more specifically that men and women in general are not capable of being “just friends” without sexual tension. Sex is always in the equation, whether or not both parties acknowledge it. In fact, because Poly Dude was bi and incredibly attractive to both sexes (sigh), he felt that friendship in general was not possible without sexual tension. In his opinion, then, there is no pure form of friendship in practice. His girlfriend Kristen and I disagreed with this, saying the problem was exclusive to men, though ironically my friendship/relationship with her came apart because she developed strong sexual feelings for me. I think I generally manage my female-female friendships without any significant sexual tension, though this may be simply because of brutal, largely unconscious repression mechanisms at work in my psyche.

But with men, I’ve come to expect that either I will want to have sex with a guy or he will want to have sex with me. Most men are willing to have sex with any given woman, under the right circumstances. Because of this, I can never get too close to a guy “platonically” because the more intimate we become, the greater the possibility that he will somehow misinterpret and try to make a move on me. Alternatively, even if he doesn’t misinterpret my behavior, his attraction to me might turn to resentment at not sleeping with him. Both of these scenarios have occurred in my life with boys I considered very close friends. Maybe they were just idiots and it’s unfair to generalize. But so far I haven’t found an exception to the rule.

I was thinking about this regarding Luke, who told me again the other night that he was happy “just being friends” when I said I wasn’t interested in casual sex. But come on. The level of attraction there is ridiculous; it’s force unto itself. Do I think we could hang out casually and not feel that lust coursing between us? Fuck no. Not possible, no way.

But when I think about it with respect to Jon I just get sad. It reminds me that the level of intimacy that we aspired to together is no longer possible between us. Maybe this is just how people in our society are programmed: you reach the deepest intimacy with your primary partner, the one you share your body and your life with. No one else. Maybe it doesn’t have to be this way. I don’t know. That’s a topic for another post.

Related reading:
Your guy friend wants to get into your pants.

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