I see Childhood Crush once more before he heads back to San
Francisco. He comes over on Sunday afternoon for a couple hours before he’s due
somewhere for dinner. Again, I feel unclear about what he’s doing here. He
doesn’t want any coffee; he doesn’t want to sit outside even though it’s a
beautiful day; apparently he wants to hang out in my room. He seems anxious,
like he’s waiting for something.
He sits on my bed and tells me about his fucked up family. He
calls his mother, “the neediest woman in the world.” She is always broke and
asking him for money, and she never pays him back.
“Once I had to borrow $10,000 from my dad to give to her,”
he tells me. “She is not his favorite person.”
His dad is a pretty famous writer who remarried a much younger
Chinese woman and now has two kids with her. I wonder how his father could hate
the mother of his first born child, and also see how that could really fuck up
said child.
“Me and my dad don’t get along,” says Childhood Crush, but
it’s also clear that he really looks up to his father. I know from my mom (still
living in the small town where we grew up) that there is also a history of
neglect there.
I can’t help but draw the parallels between Childhood Crush
and Gaffer Guy. Another wayward Man Child, Gaffer Guy also didn’t respect his
mother and had a kind of hero worship/loathing for his rich and powerful
father. This I see is a recipe for disaster with young men.
“No wonder you’re so angry,” I say, playing the therapist. I
actually enjoy hearing the more personal details of his life. It’s far more
interesting to me than the laundry list of his professional achievements. I
realize we are both in a transitional phase of our lives, we are both bored and
wanting change, and we are meeting one another at this specific moment for that
very reason. Perhaps to show us both what we don’t want anymore—letting go of
old habits.
He gets up and starts pacing around my room. He eventually
sits down in my desk chair. He asks me to close the blinds because the sun is
shining in his eyes. It’s very warm and I can feel myself getting sweaty. My
face feels hot and I think it must be bright red—it gets redder as I think this.
He tells me about the friend he’s staying with, who is at this very moment
getting dumped by his girlfriend. He won’t tell me how his friend knew he was
going over there to get dumped.
“Man, I told him he should just break up with her first.”
“Maybe you’re not the best judge right now,” I laugh.
Considering he’s still reeling from getting dumped himself eight months prior.
“He’s my friend but he’s kind of a pussy.” He tells me about
how his friend can’t fix anything around the house.
“Men should be able to fix shit,” he says. I have to agree.
“Just like women should be able to cook something,” he goes
on. I laugh.
He says his friend is “stuck on the models.”
“You should know about that,” I say.
“Nah, I’m done with models.”
I have to say his history of dating models makes me feel
weird despite myself. He seems generally obsessed with hotness and youth. He
talks a lot about “hot girls.”
He opens my bedroom door.
“Where’s the bathroom?”
While he’s in the bathroom, I lie down on my bed. When he
comes back, he lies down next to me. It’s almost time for him to leave for his
dinner. He stares at my breasts.
“How big are your boobs? D cups?”
I laugh.
“No, C. I actually wore a 36-B most of my life and then I
got fitted a couple years ago and the lady told me I was actually a 34-C. It
was awesome. I gained a whole cup size that day!”
He continues to stare, unamused by my story.
“Was that uncomfortable?” I think he means being told I was
a cup size larger than I had thought my entire life leading up to that point,
and I start to respond when he interrupts me.
“No, I mean wearing the wrong bra size.”
“Oh, no. I don’t think so. They’re pretty similar.” I
realize we often have moments like this, lost in translation—on a fundamental
level, we don’t understand what the fuck the other is talking about.
“If you want, after your dinner you can come back here and
we can have sex in this bed.” I smile at him.
“Fuck later. How about right now?” He chuckles.
He remains next to me and puts his arm under my shoulders.
We start to kiss and he takes my breast out of the top of my dress, sucking on
my nipple. The exchange feels oddly sexless, as though performed from a sense
of duty rather than any real impulse. He awkwardly crawls on top with his arm
still under me. It feels like a lazy choice—exerting as little energy as
possible.
He gets between my legs.
“It’s pretty sweaty down there,” I warn him, half-jokingly,
but actually I’m serious. I can feel the heat and moisture between my legs.
“Oh.” This seems to interest him.
I go to pull my dress over my head and he says, “No leave it
on, I like the dress.” He fingers me a little bit and then takes a condom out
of his pocket and starts fucking me without taking my underwear off. He buries
his face in my neck and pounds into me. I try to slow him down—he keeps
pounding. He kisses me, his whole weight pinning me to the bed. He doesn’t look
at me. Eventually, without a sound, he comes. And it’s over. He rests his face
in my breasts for a moment, and I pat his back. He gets up and takes off the condom,
tying it off and dropping it in the trash. He pulls on his jeans and heads for
the bathroom. I fish the condom out of the trash and wrap it in a tissue. That
familiar feeling of post-coital disappointment washing over me.
“Sorry to bang and dash,” he says when he returns. I walk
him downstairs and kiss him goodbye.
“I’ll give you a shout later,” he says and bounds up my
steep driveway.
I don’t see him again before he leaves. When he’s back in
San Francisco, he texts to ask if I used the rest of my fancy condoms yet. I
realize he thinks, probably from things I’ve said, that I’m constantly fucking
random guys when the truth of the matter is he probably has a lot more sex than
I do. I wonder if this is the reason the sex felt like he was masturbating
inside of me and also why he didn’t go down on me at all—because he thinks I’m
a slut, and not necessarily in a good way. My response to his text is to send
him a picture of my boobs. I can’t explain this except to say it turns me on to
do so.
I’m on a hike with my forty-something friend Paula and I
tell her about Childhood Crush.
“Did you get your gold back?” She asks.
I just stare at her, a quizzical expression on my face.
She explains: “When you’re young, you admire people and look
up to them because you think they’re special. But it’s actually not them. It’s
you. You’re projecting all your good stuff onto them because you’re not ready
to hold it yet. So, I wonder if you got your gold back from him and realized
what you thought was special about him was actually you.”
This idea had never occurred to me before. She explains it's from a book called Inner Gold by Robert Johnson, and offers to lend it to me.
“I wish I had known that for the last 28 years of my life.”
She nods.
“And the answer is no—I didn’t get my gold back from him.”
When I was younger I remember my mom warning me about
sleeping with guys too fast, not for any punitive reason but because she said,
“one tends to fall in love with men when you have sex with them.” At the time I
took this to be a very old-fashioned idea, and until recently I’d considered
myself immune to this cliché notion of sex-induced female attachment. But I
suddenly understand what she means. I think there’s something chemical that
happens to a woman when she has sex with a man. Maybe because they literally
put their things inside us, inevitably some remnant is left behind. A glue that
binds us to them, despite ourselves. It must be biological, because it feels
completely out of my control. It makes sense—in nature if a male has sex with a
female, it is to impregnate her and her impulse then would be to keep him
around to help provide for the baby. Right? This is the only explanation I can
find for the fact that after I have sex with a guy, I can’t stop thinking about
him. No matter if the sex is good or bad or whether I like him or not. I find
that it takes a couple weeks for this to cool off—and often the more I don’t
see him, the more obsessed I become. When I see the guy, usually it’s
disappointing. By that point I’ve made up so many stories in my head, his real
life presence can’t possibly live up to my expectations.
Now that I know there’s perhaps a biological reason for this
cycle, I can stop being so hard on myself about it. Or perhaps, practice not having
sex right away. This could be the solution to my problem—if I don’t have sex
with douche bags, I won’t think about them so much. It’s too late for Childhood
Crush, but a good lesson for the future. I’ve had my fair share of bad sex, and
as I age, it too gets old. It’s no longer worth the emotional roller coaster it
causes. I feel like at this point my expectations are so low that if I met a
man who was interesting, attractive, funny, and remotely good at sex, I’d fall
in love instantly. Now that’s a scary thought.
I think you're right that there is a chemical reaction that woman have once we have sex with a man. However, I think unattached, unemotional sex is absolutely attainable. The key to achieving it though, relies on the strength of your self love. I'm not saying you don't love yourself or that you don't believe yourself to be a special person. It's quite clear from your writing that you've got a sturdy self assured head on your shoulders.
ReplyDeleteIn our late 20s to early 30s, we all go through some kind of transition, weather it's within our love life, work life, family life or all of the above. The journey to self love is a very long and difficult one and it sounds like you're in the thick of it, right now.
I wish I could say there's some magical shortcut, but everything you're experiencing right now, is so important to that transformation. And you're doing a heck of job! I love how you go into these situations with a self awareness most women don't have. That is the most important tool you could ever cultivate.
One day, and probably not too far in the future, you'll wake up and feel a little different. And you won't quite know why or what is different, but things will start happening for you. It's the most freeing and wonderful feeling! And best of all, the unattached/unemotional sex that you'll now be capable of because you've learned, that you are enough! ;-)
Self love isn't something that can be achieved in a day and all of this experimenting and exploring and self reflection is what’s gonna get you there. Keep working away, keep staying aware and checking in with yourself. It’s just around the corner. I look forward to the day when I read a new post and think to myself, “Oh there she goes, she’s got it.”
I can't thank you enough for this. You're so right--it's all about self love, and I am totally in the thick of it right now! Looking back on my early blogs, I definitely see how far I've come, but I'm also very much aware of the journey ahead. It's so helpful to hear from those a little further along the path, it's actually really comforting, so thank you so much for your perspective! It's invaluable to me at this moment in time, which I know will not last forever. xSF
ReplyDeleteSo glad to help! While the process never really ends, you're close to making it through the toughest part. This is a great book with exercises that might help speed up the process. I follow this woman on Instagram too, and she's pretty inspiring: http://www.50waysofselflove.com/
ReplyDelete