12 Days of Girly Juice 2018: 2 Fears Defeated

Kate Sloan

I’ve conquered a lot of fears in the past few years, or at least attempted to. Hell, life with an anxiety disorder is basically just a long process of battling fears, like walking through a brambly underbrush with a machete in each hand. In 2015 I upped my blowjob game and delved into threesomes; in 2016 I fucked on camera and navigated casual sex; and last year I explored polyamory more deeply and got better at tactful rejection. That’s a whole lotta scary things, and I’m proud of myself!

Here are two things I’d previously feared, that I managed to face head-on in 2018…

Long-distance relationships

I swore, when I was younger, that I would never fuck with an LDR. “I need a lot of attention and physical affection,” I reasoned, “and that just isn’t practical if the person lives far away.” What I had neglected to plan for, however, is that sometimes you fall in love with a geographically distant person even if you had planned not to – and that distance does not have to preclude the exchange of attention and affection.

Knowing full well about the hurdles long-distance couples face, my partner and I approached our relationship with thoughtfulness and intentionality. We built systems and routines that helped bolster our burgeoning intimacy: good-morning texts, near-nightly phone conversations, FaceTime calls whenever convenient, selfies and tweets and emails. We crafted a sex life from sexting and phone sex (more on that in a sec) that feels as real, enjoyable, and important to me as any in-person sexual connection I’ve ever had. We made it clear to each other, day by day by day, that we are committed to making this relationship work and making it last. We look for new ways to do that all the time.

We’re also deeply privileged to live not terribly far from each other – a 90-minute flight or an ~11-hour bus ride – and to be able to afford to see each other about once a month. It’s funny: when we first started dating, we agreed that 2 months was about the maximum amount of time we’d ever want to go without seeing each other, but we’ve never actually waited that long. The longest we’ve spent apart at a time is about 5 weeks, but we average around 3 weeks between each visit. Sometimes it’s hard, but it’s always doable.

Ultimately I’ve come to realize that long-distance relationships – if they’re as conscientiously intimate as this one – may actually be better suited to how my brain works than local ones, in some ways. I’m an easily-overwhelmed introvert, so being able to talk to my partner while pajama-clad in my bed at the end of the day is often preferable to, say, going out for drinks or schlepping my stuff to someone’s house in the cold. When a local partner is too busy to see me for a while, my anxious brain takes it as a personal affront – but somehow it still feels like a treat every time my long-distance partner spends time with me over the phone. Our in-person visits give me something to look forward to, like a life preserver to cling onto when I feel depressed, and also give me motivation to deep-clean my room at least once a month. It’s pretty ideal, actually.

I’m not saying long-distance relationships are something I’ll continue to look for in the future – it’s my hope that they’ll be a rare exception in my life, rather than a commonplace thing – but I’m not nearly as put off by the prospect of them as I used to be. And that’s nice, because it means more opportunities for love, sex, kink, and joy are open to me now, all around the world.

Phone sex

Another thing I thought I’d never like! Weird.

When I was a teen, my beloved friend-with-benefits would sometimes call me up and read erotic Harry Potter fanfiction to me over the phone. If I got turned on enough, occasionally I would touch myself while she breathed these fanciful words into my ear. I liked listening to her struggle to get through each sentence while straining to hear the changes in my breathing, the slide of skin against wet skin.

That was my only experience resembling phone sex, until about 9 years later, when a prospective sugar daddy emailed me asking if he could pay me for the pleasure of my company over the phone. The price was right and he was charming as hell, so we fell into a pay-to-play arrangement that culminated in a couple nights of him whispering filthy things to me while I moaned and purred and held a vibe on my clit.

I had always imagined that phone sex would require an equal give-and-take, a 50:50 exchange of dirty words and ideas back and forth, and indeed, I’m sure that this is how it works for many people. But I am a bottom, and a sub, and I go pretty nonverbal when subspace kicks in, so I knew I wouldn’t be well-suited to talk someone to orgasm. What I had overlooked, though, is that lots of tops and doms prefer to be the person driving the action, not only in person but over the phone too. That’s what my sugar daddy was into, and when I started dating my current boyfriend, I discovered that he was into it, too. He calls himself a “phone-sex top”: someone who says most of the shit and is more than happy to do so. It’s my reactions he gets off on: my moans, my squeals, my subspacily slurred responses to his questions. In this regard (and several others), we are perfectly well-matched.

It’s funny how I went from abhorring the idea of phone sex to it being easily 80% (or more) of my sex life this year. It’s a near-daily routine for us now, and as such, we’ve developed our own patterns, techniques, tropes and styles within our phone play, which you can read about in the interview series we did about it. Just like in-person sex with a consistent partner, our phone sex gets better and better the more that we learn about each other, and strives for a balance between reliable old favorites and exciting new explorations. It makes me so happy and doesn’t feel, at all, like a consolation prize for the “real thing.” Phone sex with my partner is real, deep, romantic, exciting, and a wonderful comfort.

What fears did you overcome this year?

12 Days of Girly Juice 2018: 3 Fave Encounters

Kate Sloan

Welcome to what is always the filthiest entry in my 12 Days of Girly Juice series: the one where I write about my favorite 3 sexual encounters of the entire year.

Moreso than being the best sex of my year, these are usually more like the most memorable, emotional, and/or ground-breaking encounters of my year. But yeah, sometimes they were also the best.

Predictably, this year all three of these were with the same person: my boyfriend/Sir/daddy, who I jokingly-but-not-at-all-jokingly refer to variously as my “dream dom” and a “sex god.” The only time this has happened previously was in 2016, when I guiltily chose 3 encounters with the FWB I was in unrequited love with, and he mimed affixing a badge of honor to his chest when I told him about it. But this time, it’s not embarrassing, because my BF not only knows I love doing sex and kink stuff with him – he works hard to make that the case. Aww. So without further ado, here are the 3 most memorable sex sessions of my 2018…

High Line First Time

I’m sentimental about first times. Many of us are. It’s a particularly useful trait for a sex writer, though, because first times are often juicy and exciting and strange and interesting and worth writing about. This can be true even if the sex itself is straight-up bad, as it often is when you’re learning a new person’s body.

However, my first time with my partner wasn’t bad at all, and I imagine that’s because at that point we’d spent many dozens of hours discussing and dissecting our kinks, sexting voraciously, and having phone sex in the dead of night. As a sex educator, I often advise people that sexting and discussing sex before the actual event can make it a lot better, but I think I didn’t fully realize that in practice until this year, when a boy I’d only spent about 2 hours with in person ever somehow fucked me better than… well, let’s just say… probably everyone I’ve ever met on Tinder, combined.

It happened at the Standard High Line, truly one of the most beautiful hotels I have ever seen, let alone stayed in. After checking in, we rode the elevator up to our room; he pressed the wrong button twice before finally getting us to our floor, because he was nervous, though he seemed otherwise as cool and collected as ever. The room had floor-to-ceiling plate-glass windows all along one wall, so I stared out at the city while we talked and giggled and took our coats off and laid out all our sex toys on a table. When a lull fell upon our conversation, he growled and pounced and shoved me up against that windowed wall, its coldness pressing into my back while his warmth pinned me there. He kissed me breathless and then started peeling my clothes off while looking up at me with utter reverence, like, “I can’t believe this is happening; I can’t believe I’m this lucky,” and that’s how I felt, too.

What followed was about 6 hours of sex, so things get a little blurry here. I remember feeling nervous and comfortable all at once, and crying out in pain while he scratched and bruised me in our big white bed. I remember that he hypnotized me in person for the first time, and I felt astonished all over again by his competence and the depth of perversion that matched my own. I remember that he bent me over his lap and spanked me with a paperback copy of Bluets – the first gift he ever got me – while intermittently reading passages from it aloud, which seemed to me then (and still) like the most goddamn romantic thing I could imagine.

When he held me down with one hand and pushed the Eleven into me over and over with the other, I thought about how this very dildo was the first thing we ever talked about, in a quirky and casual exchange on Twitter – and how it felt like things had finally come full-circle. And inside that circle was a lot of goddamn orgasms.

Melting in His Mouth

Speaking of orgasms… The gendered orgasm gap is still a rampant issue culture-wide, with countless factors contributing to its existence. In my own life, where this gap has existed, it’s usually been due to two main factors: the men I was fucking weren’t very good at touching vulvas, and I wasn’t very good at telling them how to touch mine. (If these problems sound familiar to you, please read and/or ask your partner[s] to read She Comes First and Becoming Cliterate, stat!)

This pattern explains why I’ve grown so blasé about new partners going down on me: they’re often not great at it, and it’s rare I feel brave enough or even invested enough to want to give them a crash course. But if someone makes it clear that they want to stick around in my life – and I want that too – I’m much more inclined to put the work in so they can learn how to get me off, especially if they’re appropriately enthused about this prospect.

My partner told me in some of our first explicit text conversations about his passion for eating pussy, but unlike many men who brag about this, he dropped some words and phrases that displayed a deeper-than-average understanding of cunnilingus, such as “stamina,” “enthusiasm,” and, uh, “Ian Kerner.” (Sex nerd in the haus!) My interest was piqued, though I remained skeptical.

The first time he made me come with his mouth, we had been dating for 6 months. I’m confident it would’ve been sooner if we weren’t long-distance, but even local partners usually take a while to figure it out. We made out for a long time, him grinding a thigh firmly against my vulva (a mutual fave) and biting and spanking me. He told me I’d been so good that I could choose how I wanted him to get me off, and I requested the Eleven and Magic Wand – but we didn’t even get that far, because in the midst of him warming me up with his mouth on my clit and his fingers pressing into my G-spot, I realized I was quite possibly going to come that way. I managed to choke out, “I’m getting really close, Sir,” and he knew just what to do, staying the course until my whole body tensed, spasmed, and finally relaxed.

He kept pounding me with his fingers afterward, because he knows I like that and is a gem. Hot tears poured out of my eyes. I know orgasms aren’t a dependable measure of love, devotion, or even attraction or skill, but it felt to me in that moment like he had found yet another way to prove how much he loved me. Figuring out how to make me come is hard, and actually executing the process is hard too, but 5 of my 30 lifetime sexual partners (!!) have managed it. In each case, they were people who really, really cared about me, and who made me feel comfortable and safe. What a beautiful thing.

His eyes sparkled with emotion when he crawled up my body to lie beside me. I asked him what he was feeling and he said, “You just came in my mouth. That’s really fucking intimate.” I had to agree.

Woodhull Wonderment

A friend-who-shall-not-be-named was able to procure me some marijuana-spiked edibles at the Sexual Freedom Summit (shh), and it led to some of the best sex of my year. Thank you, anonymous and resourceful friend o’ mine.

Prior to meeting me, my boyfriend had never tried weed, but under my careful stoner tutelage, he waded into high sex this year with me. While I’ll gladly smoke up and bone down any day, there is something special about sex on edibles: the high is (in my experience) slower, trippier, and more all-encompassing. True, you can overdo it more easily with edibles and it’ll take longer to come down from your fuck-up if you do, but if you get the balance of intoxication just right, it can be some of the best sex ever.

That was the case, this one fateful night at Woodhull. We each munched half a weed cookie, and by the time it hit us, we were on the balcony of our hotel room, kissing and pawing at each other in the stupefying heat. I’d paid extra for a room with a balcony, wondering when I booked it whether we would even use it – and because of this night, I’m glad I did.

Our makeouts got intense on that balcony, the way they can when inebriation strips away your self-awareness. I was craving pain, as I often do when high, so I asked him to slap my tits; he slipped them out of my dress, standing in front of me so no onlookers would get an eyeful, and smacked me around until I was panting. Then he switched to slapping my face, bringing me down full-force into a deep and disorienting subspacey state.

We wandered back inside and partook of what would soon become one of our favorite activities: high facesitting. Though we’re both fans of facesitting in just about any state, weed really amps up our enjoyment. The time dilation and disinhibition of a good high helps me relax into riding a partner’s face without worrying that I look weird, sound weird, or am taking too long. Meanwhile, I am sure the sense-heightening effects of weed help my BF enjoy tastes, smells, and sensations even more than usual – and in a reclining position, he can enjoy them in lavish repose. Ideal.

I fucked his face for who knows how long. Time didn’t fucking matter. When we were done, he told me, “You sat on my face for the perfect amount of time,” although neither of us could say with any certainty what that amount had been. As with most good sex, in retrospect I don’t remember many details – just the overall sense of hotness, closeness, and wild abandon.

What was the best or most memorable sex you had this year?

12 Days of Girly Juice 2018: 4 Fun Events

Kate Sloan

Hi, friends! Today’s 12 Days of Girly Juice instalment is all about sexy and sex-adjacent events I attended in 2018 – and because I am such a lucky lady, there were lots of them. However, these 4 were the ones that stuck out to me the most…

The Playground Conference

Organized, as always, by the inimitable Samantha Fraser, the Playground Conference was easily a career highlight of my year. I was invited to speak in two sessions: the opening plenary about personal storytelling as a form of activism, and a live recording of The Dildorks. As is par for the course at events like these, a lot of the most fun stuff happened “extracurricularly,” like hotel-room spanking parties, late-night phone sex, and a blogger get-together punctuated by boozy, frosty milkshakes. Yummm.

The sessions at Playground this year were as fascinating and eye-opening as always. I learned about kink negotiation, blowjob techniques, BDSM psychology, and lots more. I was reminded once again of how important and uplifting it is to spend time around other sex nerds, especially those wiser and more experienced than me. What a blessing to be able to do that.

On a personal note, Playground was also my first experience with following event-specific protocol assigned to me by a long-distance partner, including wearing outfits he chose for me and sending him daily updates in photographic form, and as such, it’s a fond memory in the history of my relationship. Aww.

Sex Writing 101

I was thrilled this year that the Naked Heart Festival, an LGBTQ literary event, invited me to teach an introductory sex writing workshop as part of their wide-ranging programming. I was surprised at the size of the crowd that came out, and it delighted me to talk to them about the practical, ethical, and creative considerations involved in sex writing: everything from consent to pseudonyms to pitching stories to sexual mindfulness. (My boyfriend was sitting in the front row, gazing up at me like a rapt angel, which helped, too.)

Someday I’d like to offer this class online, since I think I have a lot of useful stuff to say about the sex writing world, having been in it for 6+ years. Let me know if you’d ever be interested in attending a webinar, purchasing an e-course, etc. along these lines, and I’ll see what I can do in 2019!

The Bed Post Sex & Sexuality Variety Show

Bed Post is the brainchild of Erin Pim, a brilliant, kinky firecracker who also hosts a podcast of the same name. I’ve guested on both the podcast and the live show several times, and it’s always a raunchy good time!

I can’t think of any other event that does quite what Bed Post does: it’s a blend of storytelling, burlesque, comedy, and music, all united under the overarching theme of sex. On the Bed Post stage, I’ve crooned ukulele tunes about BDSM, explained the joys of knife play, read my review of a Teddy Bear vibrator, and given fisting advice to strangers. I’ve wolf-whistled at a curvy redhead doing an outer space-themed striptease, hung on the every word of a captivating phone sex operator‘s stories, and laughed my ass off at a weirdly hilarious tale about revenge porn. I never quite know what I’m going to see when I show up at a Bed Post performance, but I always end up loving every minute.

If you live in Toronto (or can get here) and haven’t yet checked out this great variety show, I highly recommend it!

Hookup

I’ve been attending improv shows in Toronto for well over a decade, and the Bad Dog Theatre’s runaway success Hookup is one of my favorites I’ve ever seen – to the point that I keep going back, again and again. Here’s the premise: the cast picks two single-and-ready-to-mingle audience members, interviews them about their personalities and aspirations, and then improvises a one-act play of sorts about what would happen if those two people met and hooked up.

Far from being the lewd or mean-spirited show this could so easily have turned into, Hookup is usually a sweet, incisive, hilarious celebration of love that leaves the entire audience glowing. If your ideal evening out at the theatre ends with your face hurting from laughing so hard and your very spirit feeling replenished, I think you would love Hookup. It regularly makes me giggle-shriek until I can’t breathe, and that’s a feeling we all need more of.

What sex-related events did you love this year?

12 Days of Girly Juice 2018: 5 Sex-Savvy Superheroes

Kate Sloan

Welcome back to 12 Days of Girly Juice, my year-end wrap-up series! Today I’m talking about 5 people who’ve influenced and inspired me massively this year in the arenas of sex, kink, and love…

Nadine Thornhill

There is a sex education crisis happening here in Ontario. As I detailed in a column for Herizons this year, our Premier, Doug Ford, has rolled back our schools’ sex ed curriculum to the one from 1998 – so naturally, it leaves out key information about consent, LGBTQ identities, and the modern sexual risks we face in the age of revenge porn and Snapchat. To say the least, Ontarians who care about sexual freedom are not happy with this development. There’s even a court appeal in the works.

Toronto-based sex educator Nadine Thornhill took things into her own hands in an even more direct way: she started a YouTube series called #SaveSexEd, in which she teaches every module of the scrapped 2015 curriculum, one by one. She’s creating a resource for kids and parents alike, which covers anatomy, consent, healthy relationships, sexual orientation, gender, and much more. She is the hero we need right now and I’m honestly amazed by her.

Sinclair Sexsmith

I’ve loved Sinclair’s writing for years, but this was the year when their work had the biggest effect on my actual life, so I knew I needed to put them on this list. I still keenly remember the day when, about a month into my relationship with my Sir, he texted me that he’d been reading a bunch of Sinclair Sexsmith articles – and I knew that our D/s dynamic was about to get an upgrade as a result.

Sinclair has written in detail about protocol – an aspect of my relationship that gives me great joy now but that I wouldn’t have even known I’d like if not for Sinclair’s writing on the subject. They’ve also written a lot about topping, dominance, and daddy identity – all of which has helped me better understand my partners’ headspace so I can be more empathetic and a better submissive. Their writing is often beautiful, or instructive, or both at once, and I find it inspiring as both a kinky person and a writer. If you haven’t explored their work, you owe it to yourself to check it out!

Eva

Eva is the brilliant mind behind the What’s My Body Doing? sex ed series on YouTube, where she takes a compassionate and research-backed approach to explaining concepts like sexual desire, threesomes, and Tinder. She’s also currently a Masters student, doing research on women’s sexting habits. Fascinating stuff!

When I was younger, I used to be intimidated by people like Eva – people who are close to me in age but have achieved so much already and are dazzlingly smart. But these days I’m more often able to be lifted up by their successes. Eva is so full of fascinating ideas and is so much fun to talk to (not to mention, she has the cutest laugh in the entire world) so every time we chat, I feel inspired and propelled forward anew in my own work in the sex field. What a lovely, clever person!

Dirty Lola

Lola does so much wonderful stuff in the world of sex and kink. Most notably, she founded Sex Ed A Go Go, an event which combines education and entertainment into an exciting night out that’ll leave you better informed about sex and kink. She also does a lot of storytelling, speaking, and tweeting about sex, polyamory, race, kink, and being a “picky slut.” I was lucky enough to share a stage with her this year at both the Playground Conference and the Woodhull Sexual Freedom Summit, where we spoke on a panel together (along with Bex and Kevin) about personal storytelling as activism.

Something I admire about Lola is her dedication to what she calls “edutainment”: that balanced blend between imparting important facts and entertaining the viewer in the process. I think it’s a remarkably smart approach to teaching people about sex, a subject many folks want to learn about but are scared of or intimidated by. Lola extends this approach even into her personal life, writing tweets or telling stories about times she’s been sad or angry or hurt, in order to illustrate points everyone can learn from and feel comforted by. She is a powerhouse and I’m honored to know her.

Mark Wiseman

Mark entered my life through a series of happy coincidences this year. I started dating a hypnokinkster, who urged me to read Mind Play, the best existing primer on erotic hypnosis. Later, I told my friend Dick I wanted to interview a hypnokink expert on the radio, and he immediately called up the hypno expert who’d recently guested on his show to see if he’d do it. It was only then that I put the pieces together and realized that this affable hypnosis nerd was the author of Mind Play!

Mark’s book is still the first thing I recommend any curious hypnokinksters read on the subject, because it lays out everything you need to know in order to start hypnotizing people for sexy purposes in a conscientious and ethical way. He’s done a lot to make an oft-stigmatized kink more comprehensible and clear for those who want to explore it, and that’s worth celebrating.

 

Who were your major heroes in the world of sex/kink/love this year?

12 Days of Girly Juice 2018: 6 Journal Entries

Kate Sloan

Where my fellow journaling fans at?! I flicked through all my journal entries from the entirety of 2018 (phew!) and picked 6 of my faves for you…

January 30th

I’ve been in love 3 times before and here’s what happened those previous times:

E___ told me after about a month and a half, which I thought was surprisingly early, and then I told him about 2 weeks after that, if I recall correctly.

It took me about a year to even be comfortable conceptualizing my feelings for C___ as love in my own head, or calling it that out loud. I don’t think I ever actually told him to his face that that’s what I had been feeling, though I’ve certainly used the word many times when I’ve written about him online.

I told G___ at about 11 weeks, which is the closest I’ve ever come to hitting the mythical 3-month threshold I’ve somewhat arbitrarily set for myself as a reasonable minimum before saying it. (We said it on July 10th. 3 months would’ve been July 18th or 25th, depending on how you count it.)

I don’t know why I’m obsessing over these numbers like they contain any kind of answer to the questions I am implicitly asking, which are: 1) Am I in love with Matt? and 2) Is it too soon to tell him that, if so?

I have a feeling he would say it’s not too soon and it’s okay to say it whenever you feel it, but I have objections to that, namely:

-How do you even actually know you’re in love? I don’t want to say it until/unless I’m sure, because you can’t really take that shit back. In the past, when I’ve said it, it’s been after a period of at least a few weeks where I consistently found myself thinking it and wanting to say it, and eventually reached a point where it felt like it bubbled over and I had to say it.

-I think it is perhaps irresponsible and premature to say it before you establish adult shit like “Do we have actual long-term potential?” and “Do we even actually like each other, once NRE has worn off?” and “Do we fit functionally into each other’s lives?” because, while “I love you” is technically just a statement of feelings, it is also, to some extent, a statement of intent and commitment and devotion, etc., and I would rather we figure our shit out before jumping to that.

-I would rather say it to him in person, because it’s so weighty and I just think that would be the appropriate and right way to do it. But of course, life happens, and feelings are intense and unpredictable. Who knows what’ll happen. (I do have a lot of romantic feelings about the idea of him putting my collar on me before the Hippo Campus show, though, and I have a feeling an emotional outpouring could take place when that happens.)

-Part of me is afraid to fall in love again (god, what a clichéd sentiment) because the last two times it’s happened have been probably the two biggest heartbreaks of my life and they happened within a year of each other and it was just… a lot. I’m hesitant to give someone else that much power over my heart again, although, let’s be honest: I already have. (Wow, this journal entry is getting REALLY REAL, huh!!)

-7 weeks is probably too short a time to have really fallen in love with someone… maybe… probably. We are still squarely in NRE territory, where everything about a person seems perfect and adorable and even your conflicts are kind of cute and quaint. I would feel more secure calling a feeling “love” if the smog of NRE had cleared and love was still visibly in the picture. But what is the distinction between NRE buzziness and love, anyway? What does any of this mean??

-There is also a self-protective, superego-y part of me that wants to carefully weigh and consider the idea of getting into a long-distance relationship before I wade this deep into it, but tbh, love is not controllable in that way (at least not this late in its development) and I, in particular, have never been good at moderating my feelings in that way. I remember friends suggesting to me, when I was in painful heartsick love with C___, that I take a step back, stop seeing him, at least stop fucking him, and that was utterly unthinkable to me. It literally did not feel like an option. I loved him, therefore, I needed his presence in my life to continue, to any and every extent possible.

-Re: it being fast – Matt and I have talked on the phone for so many hours that we essentially fast-tracked our relationship. I’ve honestly probably spent as much time talking to him as I spent talking to G___ in our entire 3.5-month relationship. So there’s that. Maybe that makes it less insane and more okay, I dunno.

I feel practically ill with emotion today. Having a heart is hard.

March 13th

Been dating Matt for 3 months today. Grateful for long phone calls full of intimacy, vulnerability, orgasms, and laughs. Grateful for emotional support that stretches across national borders. Grateful for a dependable smiling face so handsome it still makes my head swim. Grateful for a daddy/Sir who understands my kinks so fucking perfectly somehow and makes me feel so small, submissive, and taken care of. Grateful for gentle, loving pushes toward productivity, assertiveness, achievement and self-advocacy. Grateful for hot hard kisses in hotel rooms that make me feel adored and desired from the inside out. Grateful for emotional safety like a big comfy net to catch me. Grateful for impeccable cocktails in low-lit opulent establishments. Grateful for big blue eyes staring into me with a want and wonderment I’m always ecstatic to see mirrored back at me. Grateful for nerdy musical theatre references that make my heart soar. Grateful for silly giggles at 2AM. Grateful to feel so close even when we’re far. Grateful for his effort, his attention, his love.

April 15th

I wonder often what my therapist would think about Matt – she who witnessed my hero’s struggle to get over C___, my almost-compulsive hunt for a primary partner after that, my happy early days with G___ and then my utter brokenness when he changed his mind about me so suddenly. I think she would be very happy for me, but in the early days of our relationship she would’ve warned me to be careful, to modulate my level of investment, to keep my heart safe for a while before handing it over to someone else.

I tried to do that. It was hard; I’m not built for romantic reservation, not used to it. Both H___ and Matt have told me they admire my openheartedness and were surprised at my willingness to pour my soul out to them so quickly; I think this quality is a large part of why I’m so susceptible to ruinous heartbreak but is also what enables my relationships to frequently be so deep and electric and juicy. I feel things strongly and I don’t want to tamp them down once I feel them. It’s at once a blessing and a curse.

Despite the speed, I feel like we fell in love in slow motion – maybe still are falling – because of not having as much physical access to each other as most couples have. It was like one of those orgasms where you teeter on the precipice forever, dangling helplessly, until finally you tumble over the edge and it’s so sweet and delicious all the way down.

May 9th

Happy one-year anniversary to the day G___ first slept with someone else and started the slow, cruel process of breaking my heart! LOLOL. I think I’ve done a lot of useful emotional processing since then, in therapy and with friends and partners, to the point that it doesn’t sting anymore. And it helps enormously that Matt always affirms the validity of my reaction to that. “Non-monogamy” doesn’t mean “no rules.” It means you set rules, talk about them, mutually agree on them, and then follow them. It means you take your partners’ needs and feelings into account. It’s not a free-for-all.

I recognize, too, that I have been guilty of what he did – being too cavalier about boundaries and partners’ feelings on my sextracurricular activities – in, for example, my relationship with B___. It’s interesting how these past couple years have repeatedly shown me both sides of a particular interpersonal conflict or mistake, almost as if to give me greater empathy for someone who hurt me or to help me understand how I’ve fucked up and how to avoid making those mistakes again.

I think at this point, I’d definitely check in with Matt a lot before doing any sexy and/or date-y things with a new person – because our relationship is of foundational importance to me and no new thing, no matter how exciting, would be worth upsetting or alienating him or making him feel unconsidered. There are no such opportunities on my horizons right now, but I know they will come up whenever they come up and we will navigate them by communicating with each other as kindly and thoroughly as we always have.

June 4th

My mental health is predictably kind of tanking in response to Matt being at the nerd convention and being too busy for me for a few days. I mean, before he left, he said, “I love you and I will make time for you,” and I see him trying to do that – instating a protocol whereby I have to send him a daily nude, because he knows our protocols usually make me feel closer to him; calling me last night to say good night; texting me occasional updates – but it’s interesting how my brain is still responding by feeling rejected and like the safest and best thing to do is to pull away, act unaffected and uncaring, front like I don’t miss him and am not even thinking about him.

This is a conditioned response developed in former relationships where I wasn’t sure the other person liked me as much as I liked them – or I KNEW they didn’t – and I’d respond to their coldness and distance by mirroring it, instead of clinging, because I’d learned over the years that unreciprocated clinginess feels unimaginably horrible. It makes me feel pathetic, like the worst of the worst, impossibly unwanted, fundamentally undesirable. So I learned that the safer thing to do was to match their distance exactly, so that if anyone were to accuse me of caring, I could say, “Who, me? Nah. You must have me confused with someone else. I’m chill and casual and could take or leave this. Just like you.”

I recognize now that when this defense mechanism kicks in at the wrong times – i.e. with people who actually do care about me and are maybe just temporarily too busy to give me their usual level of attention and focus – it makes me come across as callously uncaring. I can see how I could actually sabotage relationships this way, backing up so hard to stay safe that I back my way right out of the relationship by mistake. That isn’t me; that isn’t what I want to do here.

The trouble is that fighting that knee-jerk defensive response feels as absurd and dangerous as fighting any instinct – like sticking your hand in the fire, touching your tongue to the outlet. It feels like I am literally endangering myself and the relationship, even though I know the opposite is true. To express love, and not have that expression returned for a while or in kind, feels too close to nauseously revelatory heartbreaks I’ve endured: the sudden (and sometimes stupidly repeated) realization that I thought I could be loved by this person but I actually was not. I’m in deep enough with Matt, I suppose, that that realization would crush me massively, so I get even more defensive than usual when it seems imminent. Maybe I even get mean. I’m sure it’s confusing for him. I’m trying to fight it but it’s hard.

My CBT training tells me to remind myself constantly of how much he loves me, to review the evidence of that until I believe it again, to do this myself instead of relying on him for constant reassurance. But then I just think about all the people were so into me until they suddenly weren’t. I don’t know how to believe that he won’t have a sudden change of heart and decide I’m too much work, too much effort, too much.

October 11th

Some climate scientists announced a few days ago that we don’t have much time left to avert the creeping disaster we’ve brought upon ourselves; that true chaos and destruction will be upon us by 2040 if not sooner, unless we change a lot real fast. And we won’t, because Republicans and big corporations believe in saving their bottom lines and their own asses more fiercely than they believe in saving the world, and the only thing that could really do any good now would be the total overthrowing of capitalism from top to bottom, and who the fuck knows how to do that? Not me.

I’m scared and depressed and everything seems so futile. But at the same time, this news is putting life into perspective. There have been times, in my current and past relationships, when I’ve wondered what the point is of staying in a relationship that has no conventional “future” – no hope of marriage, living together, or even living in the same country, probably – but this is making me reflect on how none of us are actually guaranteed a future anyway so we should cling to the things that make us happy NOW. It’s not possible to do this in all cases – for example, I can’t exactly quit my job and spend this planet’s last years making only the art I want to make, because getting through these years will require money and shelter in the meantime – but I should prioritize my happiness in the present whenever possible. And I am in love with Matt and he makes me happy even though there are things I want that I know I can’t get from this relationship. Happiness is a valid criterion. It’s maybe the only one that matters. Maybe I’ll be able to find those things with someone else someday, but there might not be a someday. This exists now and it’s very good and I want it, even if it’s not all I want.