Personal

10 Thoughts On a Long-Term Relationship Out of Left Field

Kate Sloan

1. I thought no one would ever love me this much again. I don’t know quite when or how I picked up this belief; 4 years ago I was deeply entangled with my last long-term love and I recall feeling rock-solid in that union, unshaken and unshakeable. Where did that strong girl go?

She was beaten down by all the rejections and breakups and disappointments, I suppose. Hammered into a smaller shape to account for the smaller and smaller spaces her partners made for her in their lives. I learned to believe, at some core level, slow to shift and hard to change, that big love wasn’t for me. That maybe all my big loves had happened to me already.

But then a new big love crashes into me like a wave and I think, Well, shit. I guess this is happening.

2. The beginning of our relationship contains many themes, patterns, traditions. One is this: I express fear he will leave. He assures me he has no intention to. I don’t believe him. He keeps right on assuring me.

The trouble with these sorts of assurances is that they guarantee nothing. My last boyfriend thought we’d be together for a few years, and then – 3 months in – may as well have said, “Oops, never mind. Joke’s on you.” This is what I meant when I wrote in my journal that I’d never trust anyone again after him: the sturdiest of words can crumble in an instant when their foundation does. There are no sure things.

But there are safe bets. And there are precautions. Instead of telling me he won’t break up with me – which even he knows he cannot entirely guarantee – my new love tells me, “If I did, here’s what I would say.” “Here’s what I would do.” “Here’s what I would try before I resorted to that.” Somehow, it makes me feel better – like when someone soothes my anxiety-ridden heart not by saying, “We won’t be late to the movie,” but by saying, “If we are late to the movie, here’s another theatre we can try, here’s a different movie we can see, and here’s a bar nearby where we can go instead if all else fails.” I like backup plans. I like knowing what those backup plans are.

3. Useful skills in short-term relationships (an abridged list): Flirting. Fucking. Negotiating sex. Making plans on a whim. Putting words to your new feelings, but having the self-control to keep those words to yourself when it’s not time for them yet. Taking cute coupley selfies. Pitching fun date ideas you think will make you seem interesting and cool. Maintaining the illusion of chillness, even to your own detriment. Keeping your body well-groomed, like a sexy cyborg. Telling friends about the latest dramatic development in your romance. Fantasizing too far forward into the future and feeling like an idiot about it. Mitigating disappointment. Saying, “Don’t worry about it, that’s totally fine!” when it totally isn’t.

Useful skills in long-term relationships (a list in progress): Talking about your feelings. Saying you’re sorry. Getting knee-deep in the daily dramas of someone else’s life, and keeping them up to speed on your own. Shouldering their burdens, and letting them shoulder yours. Asking for what you actually want, not just what you think it’s “okay” or “cool” to want. Talking about your feelings some more. Letting another human see what you’re really like when you’re sick, sad, unshowered, or all of the above. Believing they still want you after all that. Finding that you still want them, too.

4. My early-relationship anxieties are predictable as hell: He’s going to break up with me. He doesn’t like me as much as I like him. I’m too clingy. I’m too much. I’m making a fool of myself.

The timbre of my anxieties shifts as time goes on and I trust him more. They’re less pressing, but they also get darker: I don’t have what it takes to love someone well for a long time. We’re barrelling toward disaster, whether we know it or not. My past relationships failed because of some fundamental flaw in me, that he simply has yet to discover.

One night, I tell him, as I have many times before, “I’m worried I’m not good enough for you” – and he says: “‘Good enough’ doesn’t really compute to me. That’s not how or why I get into relationships with people or stay in them. I love you and I want to be with you. That means even if we are bad at something for a while, I want to figure it out and get better at it if we can. It’s not about you being good enough; it’s about whether we make each other happy and better.”

Floored, I splutter, “Most of the people I’ve dated have not looked at it that way,” and he writes back with utmost calm, “Yeah, that’s sad for them. But we’re not them.” I shiver like a leaf on the breeze but I feel stronger, all the same.

5. It occurs to me one afternoon, as I’m staring into space on the subway, that I think of myself as someone who can’t sustain relationships, but that perception just isn’t true.

It’s true that for years, my “official” relationships – the ones with people who called me their girlfriend – have all lasted a few months or less. It’s true that several of these ended in uncomfortable breakups I wish I could have found a way to spare us.

But it’s also true that a former friend-with-benefits is now one of my dearest pals, years after meeting him. And that my current FWB has been a consistent source of carnal comfort for over a year. And that I’ve had casual beaux and “comet partners” drift in and out of my life with uncomplicated ease. And that my friend group is full of people I’ve known and loved for ages. My social life is laced with longevity that too often goes unacknowledged because I’m hung up on “official” relationships, as though romantic feelings and labels are the only markers of social validity.

This isn’t my first long-term relationship in years; it’s just the first one of this specific type. My past relationships didn’t “fail”; they just ended, often for totally legit reasons. Those endings weren’t my fault; they were just part of the dating game. You can’t win ’em all. It’d be boring if you did.

6. He sends me a link to a page which keeps track of how long we’ve been dating. I keep an eye on it steadily, getting a little teary each time one of the numbers rolls over in a significant way.

One day in March, I text him excitedly that we’ve been together for 15 weeks, and immediately regret it. What if he thinks that’s stupid? What if he doesn’t care about these mini-anniversaries like I do? What if he says, “So what?”

But instead, he writes back, “Do you feel happy and fulfilled and excited about having been in this for 15 weeks? Do you wanna do another 15?” I do. I really do. He does too.

7. When I fell in love for the first time, friends used to ask me if I thought I’d be with my boyfriend forever. I always just laughed. At age 19, I thought forever-love seemed absurd. It wasn’t what I wanted, anyway. I wanted someone who’d walk through life with me until it no longer made sense for us to be together, at which point we’d go our separate ways. That is exactly what happened.

Friends don’t ask me that anymore. I think we’ve all grown up and learned how much and how quickly we change. Instead of asking, “How long do you think you’ll be with him?” they mostly just ask me, “Does he make you happy?” The answer is “absolutely,” and that is enough. For now and for however long our future turns out to be.

8. Having dabbled in promiscuity, I’ve ultimately learned it doesn’t thrill me. Some people fuck strangers aplenty because that’s what they want; I fucked strangers aplenty because I wanted something else and thought somehow I could find it that way. (I’m not ruling out sluttiness entirely. My inner slut may well surge back to life someday – but hopefully with clearer intentions and a healthier heart.)

Sex with someone who knows you inside and out is sweet and deep and qualitatively different from more distanced dalliances. Exploring a new body is fun, but for me, it does not compare with traversing a body you know by heart. Familiar topography, beloved landmarks, and an assured sense of ease: I’ll take these over uncomfortable first-time fumblings almost any day. Good sex with a stranger is a fluke; good sex with a stable partner is a process, a journey, an art.

9. Helena Fitzgerald once wrote, “Romance is mainly a repetitive act of remembering, a shared language of reference inflated and made important because someone else remembers it along with you.” I like weaving these sturdy neural nets of inside jokes and vivid events together. I like knowing that the information I’m filing away will actually go somewhere, will actually matter and be useful, instead of being relegated to the part of my brain deadset on remembering the lyrics to “Sk8er Boi” and that the mitochondria is the powerhouse of the cell.

A couple months into our relationship, we open the Notes app on our respective devices and create a shared note containing a list of the “characters” we’ve developed in our many, many hours of phone chats. There are lots, because we’re goofs: there’s the growly-voiced guy he does when he wants to caricature his own dominance; there’s the spot-on Ira Glass impression he breaks out randomly to crack me up; there’s our imitation of a gleeful waiter who tried to sell us on fingerling potatoes during one of our fancy dinner dates. At last count, there were over a dozen characters on this list. I howl with laughter whenever I read it.

Inside jokes and other niche references are a relational currency; they can measure a connection’s duration and depth. Every time we add to our dramatis personae, or share an experience I know we’ll reference later, I feel we’ve stitched another thread between our hearts. There’s a thick rope there now – and when I tug on it, I can feel him tugging back.

10. “I am in love with who you are,” he tells me one night, “and I want to be in love with who you become.”

Ever-articulate, all I can manage in response is, “Jesus fuck. SIR!” before my eyes spill over with happy tears – salty little signals of how safe I feel.

A Second Date in a Golden Room

Kate Sloan

Little one: I’m nervous and excited and nervous and excited about tomorrow
Sir: You like me so much you’re redundant
Little one: It wasn’t redundant, it was exactly the right amount of both things
Sir: Ughhhh. I want you. But I guess I gotta sleep one more time.
Little one:😭
Sir: Good night my sweet princess
Little one: Good night daddy. I hope you dream about all the things you want to do to/with/on me
Sir: Gulp. I will.

Our second date is at 7PM and I start getting ready at 2PM.

I can’t help it. I’ve been waiting so long for this night to come. An entire month. A month of slow-burn phone calls and scintillating sexts. A month of kink negotiation and feeling our way into our respective roles. A month of vulnerability, self-disclosure, learning, and (maybe) starting to fall in love.

I put my makeup on with precision and care. I step into red lace panties and clasp my matching bra. I slither into my tight black velvet dress, chosen weeks previous for this occasion specifically, tried on far too many times.

The other beau I’m staying with humors me and agrees to depart on our drive into the city at 5PM, which is fucking ridiculous. I know exactly how ridiculous it is. But I just. can’t. wait. any longer.

Sir: Turns out I’m also doing the way-too-early thing. But the café I’m at is closing at 6, so let me find somewhere better where we can meet
Little one: Oh my god that makes me feel so much better, I’m stressing so much about how early I’m gonna be hahah
Sir: Yeah I knew you would be. So I left early so you wouldn’t be alone
Little one: SIR
Sir: Little one. Gregory’s Coffee is open til 7.
Little one: I just read that exchange out loud to Dick and he was like, “Remember that. He’s a good one.”

My beau pulls over on a Manhattan side street and we hug and kiss goodbye. I try not to cry, lest I mess up the makeup I painstakingly applied hours ago. I smooth on some red lipstick in the rearview mirror and step out of the car. And then I wheel my little suitcase off into the night, wearing a cocktail dress and a knee-length winter coat. Stinging tears freeze on my cheeks in the January cold.

I glance up and down skittishly between the map on my phone and the street signs I pass. Two more blocks. My heart skips around wildly in my chest. One more block. I struggle to regulate my breathing and eventually give up. Half a block left. And then I see him.

He’s in an impeccable navy suit and shiny shoes, and he’s holding the door of the café open for me, and I feel like a goddamn princess. A princess who’s sweating through her coat.

We go in and sit down. He hands me his half-drunk cup of peppermint tea, and oh boy do I need it, because I am having an active anxiety attack. “Look at this,” I say helplessly as I hold out my shaking hands in front of me. “Do you see this?” He reminds me to breathe, and I sip the tea, and stare at this person I’ve talked to on the phone for dozens of hours but have only seen in person one other time before. It’s… surreal.

He holds my hand from across the table, calm and calming, as we catch up about our days. I start to feel a bit more normal, maybe. Or at least like I can handle these jitters if I put my mind to it.

As our dinner reservation nears, we pack up, put our coats on, and head out into the night. I’m still shaking a little, but I hide it well.

Little one: You have such nice long fingers. I noticed on our coffee date ’cause I’m a slut
Sir: Ooh, thinking about my hands. That’s hot. You noticed before we even kissed, wow
Little one: If I want to fuck someone, I always think about their hands
Sir: You’re a good little slut
Little one: I just know what I like. And I like your hands a lot
Sir: I wish I had held yours when we were walking back from the Breather
Little one: Aww. Yeah, that walk was weird. I wasn’t sure if you’d want to see me again
Sir: Oh nooo. Sorry, I was definitely reeling a little and worried that I had been gone too long and you were subspacey. A lot happened real fast. But yes, wanted to see you again aggressively.

He takes my hand immediately and easily once we’re outside. Like he’s been waiting a month to do that. Because he has.

We walk the block or two to Upland, easily one of the prettiest, fanciest restaurants I’ve ever been inside. While taking my coat, he leans in close and says, “Barack and Michelle love it here,” with an offhandedness I can’t quite believe. It just adds to my sense of this evening as something that isn’t really happening to me, but rather, is maybe a decadent hallucination I’m having from my bed at home in Toronto. That’s the only explanation that makes sense.

Our table isn’t ready yet, so we head to the bar and he orders me a cocktail without asking me what I want. It’s the sort of thing that would offend me if someone did it unprompted, but we’ve pre-negotiated this in many late-night chats, so it just sends a thrill through me. It reinforces the D/s dynamic we’ve been building, slowly and deliberately, over the phone. It shows me that his dominance is grounded in my reality.

He smirks at me as I taste it. It’s perfect, of course.

Little one: I’m really happy we’re going on a dinner date before we bang… because I think otherwise the immediacy of the banging would make me too nervous to enjoy the banging
Sir: Yes, I agree. Dates are underrated. And now I’m thinking about the place I’m taking you. And the specific kind of table I want. And the appetizers I wanna order you.
Little one: I’m so exciteeeeeddd!!!
Sir: You’re little and this place is big and fancy, but I think you can handle it
Little one: I’m gonna dress like a grown-up lady and be so good for you

Once we’ve been seated, I peruse the menu and notice a detail immediately that he no doubt meant for me to notice. One dish on the menu is cacio e pepe, the cheesy al dente pasta I fell in love with when my mom and I visited Rome last year. I asked him, on our first date, where one could get a decent cacio e pepe in New York, and he rattled off several answers from memory, impressing me immediately with his knowledge of this city I found so enchanting. And now he’s taken me somewhere beautiful that makes my favorite dish.

By my estimation, romance really boils down to enthusiasm, effort, and attention. I can see all three in his decision to take me here, specifically. It sets me swooning.

“She’ll have the cacio e pepe,” he tells the waiter, and I giggle irrepressibly like the spoiled princess that I am.

Sir: God I like you. Help.
Little one: I know a way I can help
Sir: Tell me more
Little one: I can come to New York, have flirty dinner ‘n’ drankz with you, and then maybe fuck you in a hotel? If that sounds doable?
Sir: You sound doable.

I haven’t called him “Sir” in person yet. This handsome besuited stranger across the table from me still feels disconnected in my mind from the playful, mysterious voice I’ve grown to adore on the phone. The boy who texts me puns and calls me “babygirl” over FaceTime is someone I know and trust; the person in front of me is… someone else. But I’m trying to bridge the gap.

It’s easier when he starts hurting me. Once our food has been ordered, he reaches across the table, as if to take my hand, like we’re any vanilla couple. But then he digs his nails into my skin, pinches me there, bringing the thrilling tension I’m feeling inside to the surface. “Sirrrr,” I say, for the first time tonight, wincing and smiling, both at once.

For sadomasochists like us, there is an intimacy to the exchange of pain – even moreso here, in public, where anyone looking at us must think we’re “normal” but inside we’re both screaming for him to bruise me, pummel me, lay me bare. I feel closer to him suddenly than I have all night, and my heartbeat hastens in half-pleasant panic.

But it is definitely still panic. I’ve never felt this nervous on a date in my life. Pre-date nerves are a thing, sure, but usually they melt away once I figure out who I’m dealing with. This distress has persisted, beating a hammer against my ribcage from inside me, shouting: You’re not supposed to be here, you know. This place, this boy, this night is all too nice for the likes of you. I dab my lipsticked mouth with my napkin and excuse myself. In the all-too-fancy restroom, I sit and tweet and try to breathe. I’m with someone who will keep me safe, at least. I know that much. I trust this stranger, because he isn’t really a stranger.

Little one: I feel like I’m floating and not real
Sir: You are floating and you are real.
Little one: Why does that make me want to make out with you? Answer: everything does
Sir: Yup, pretty much. Making out always makes things feel more real also. Because warm skin pressed against yours is hard to ignore.
Little one: Truuuue

I can’t finish my dinner because my stomach is clenching with fear and excitement about what comes next. But it’s okay; he likes me anyway.

We get our coats and my suitcase and huddle in the foyer, waiting for a Lyft. He stands so close to me, like our proximity is an inevitability. Like we’re magnets. He kisses me a little. I want to be kissed a lot.

In the car, we sit at opposite ends of the backseat, and he lifts an arm and says, “C’mere.” An effortlessly intimate gesture, and a much-needed one. I slide across the leather and settle against him, safe and warm. Maybe he can feel my heartbeat rat-tat-tatting under my coat.

I don’t know where he’s taking me. The hotel he’s chosen is a surprise. I don’t know what we are yet. Our future is a mystery.

But as New York City slides by outside the window, I decide it doesn’t really matter. I’m happy now, nerves or no nerves. I’m happy to be here with him.

This Is The Place

Kate Sloan
Image via Google Street View

“Here it is,” I announce, sweeping my arms wide with sarcastic grandiosity. “The location of my first kiss.”

My new boyfriend glances around the elementary school playground, and I follow his eyes across the jungle gym, the plastic slide, the painted murals on brick walls. It looks innocent enough. It doesn’t look like the birthplace of a future sex writer’s makeout career.

“It really wasn’t a great kiss,” I continue. My boots sink into the sandbox as I pace around it, trying to revive the memory. “We were playing Spin the Bottle after sixth-grade graduation. I spun and it landed on this greasy-haired punk-rocker boy who I did not want to kiss. It was a quick peck, no tongue. And then I thought: guess that’s what kissing is like.” I laugh bitterly. Sometimes I wish I could rewrite my first kiss, overwrite it. I bet many of us wish that from time to time.

My boyfriend hasn’t said much, but at this, he takes my face in his hands and kisses me. Long, slow, sweet. The barest edge of his tongue, and then a little more. Our bodies press together with flaring urgency. Overhead, the heavens part, and it starts to rain.

I laugh out loud against his mouth at the romantic absurdity of it. And I know, instantly, that this memory will forever trump that earlier one as my defining kiss in this spot. Maybe I can’t erase that first kiss entirely, but I can tweak its associations. Now this sandbox in a tucked-away Riverdale playground will always remind me of this moment, this boy, the rain gathering in our lashes.

“Was that kiss any better?” he asks, and I laugh and take his hand.

Image via Google Street View

When I was 24, I fell in love with someone who didn’t love me back – and I became obsessed with the places we’d been together.

To him, our late-night drinks dates and chatty brunch stops were probably just a chaotic jumble – part of that summer, but not emblematic of it. In my mind, however, they formed a sacred map. There’s the diner where we got bacon and eggs the morning after he fucked me in the ass, I’d think, moonily, as I walked by it. There’s the Banana Republic where I watched him try on shirts. There’s the bar where he told me not to “catch feelings” for him. That sure went well.

For all the places we’d been together, there was one that stuck out to me as all-important and forever memorable: a secluded parkette where we once had an ill-advised tryst. Late one night, after a party at which I’d drunk an entire bottle of white wine to deal with the agony of simply being near him, I playfully bent over a stone planter in the park and joked that we should fuck there. He, too, was drunk enough that this seemed a brilliant idea – so we did, for a few messy minutes, before abandoning the task to go get Subway sandwiches.

Many months later, when my sick love for him had gnarled into something more subdued, more manageable, we walked through that park again en route to his house. Our conversation was of a completely different timbre: we chattered easily – soberly – about the boy I was dating, the girl he was seeing, the forward motion in our respective careers. It was almost like we were friends. Real friends, without the spectre of unrequited love looming over us, threatening to splinter us apart.

We arrived at that stone planter, and I could almost see our tipsy ghosts. “Is this the place where we…?” I asked, gesturing vaguely. He quirked a cryptic eyebrow at me and said, “I think so, yeah.” We shared in a pause that seemed to wonder if we were, at last, okay. And I felt, in that moment, that someday we would be. We’d probably never fuck in a park again – we’d probably never fuck again – and that was a good thing, probably.

Image via Google Street View

Dates aren’t supposed to end in tears, but my second one with my current boyfriend did.

We capped off 24 whirlwind hours of flirting and fucking with a visit to the Upright Citizens Brigade to see an improv show. I laughed so hard I couldn’t breathe – probably harder than I would if I hadn’t been flooded with new-relationship adrenaline – and this absurdly handsome boy held my hand and scratched and pinched my skin throughout, making me feel simultaneously subspacey and enamored.

But when we left, and headed hand-in-hand toward the subway station where we’d be saying our goodbyes, the mood shifted. I could feel sadness welling in him like a river threatening to burst through a dam – and I felt that sadness mirrored in my own body, heavy and foreboding. “I don’t want to say goodbye yet,” he murmured, meaning: he didn’t want me to go back to Toronto yet; he didn’t want the distance between us to feel insurmountable again like it had for the past month. I rarely saw this effortlessly smooth boy ruffled in any way, but now he clearly was. “I need more time.”

“Do you want to stop somewhere and talk?” I asked, thinking of aftercare: the common kink practice of debriefing and decompressing after a scene, so you can return to reality without totally melting down. Our day-long date hadn’t been a kink scene, exactly, but it was just as intense. Maybe we needed to unravel our sadness over cocktails or a late-night espresso.

But whatever was bubbling inside him felt more urgent than that, apparently, because he tugged me into the next private-ish spot we passed: the concrete mouth of a hotel’s parking garage. We stood in the corner and looked into each other’s eyes as if we’d find answers there – but there were none.

“What do you think this is?” he asked, searchingly. “What do you want me to be to you?”

We’d only been dating a month, and he had other partners; I didn’t know what was okay to ask for, and what wasn’t. But I decided honesty was probably best. “I mean… Ideally I’d like you to be my boyfriend. Eventually.” I saw immediately in his eyes that this was not what he wanted to hear.

“I was afraid of that,” he said. “I don’t think I can make that work. I didn’t think I could do that with two people, let alone three… I’m afraid I wouldn’t live up to your expectations for me. I wouldn’t be the boyfriend you need.”

I bit my lip and looked away, because if I looked at him for much longer, I would definitely cry. “That’s okay,” I said, although it wasn’t. “You don’t have to be my boyfriend.”

“Are you sure?” he asked. “I don’t want you to be with me and be sad about it.”

I laughed a harsh, dark laugh. “I’d be sad if I wasn’t with you, at this point, so… whatever.”

He nodded bleakly and obliquely, and we continued our walk to the subway. I stayed silent so I wouldn’t cry. But inside, I was thinking: Why am I doing this? Why am I letting myself fall in love with someone who doesn’t have time for me in his life? Don’t I deserve better than this?

I stayed strong and didn’t cry until after we’d said goodbye and parted ways at the subway turnstile. As I walked to the train with my suitcase in hand and tears blurring my vision, I thought: What if I’m not okay with being his not-girlfriend? What if I want more than that?

Image via Google Street View

Over the next few months, we figured things out. His life circumstances shifted in unforeseen ways, and he found he had more time and energy for me than he’d thought he would. “You are not optional to me,” he told me on our third date. “Will you be my girlfriend?” Somehow, that hit me even harder than the first time he said “I love you.” It was so unexpected. I’d given up on that possibility, and yet here it was, gleaming and real.

The next time I came to New York after that, we went back to the UCB for another improv show. Again, he held my hand, scratched my skin, laughed along with me. And again, when we walked past that parking garage, we stepped into its entryway, as if magnetized to that spot.

I felt that familiar sadness in my bones as soon as we arrived there: that sense of despair, of wanting more than I could have, of not deserving what I wanted. I saw in his blue eyes that he felt it too.

And then he took my face in his hands and kissed me with enough passion and heat to erase all that melancholy. “Kate,” he said between kisses, “I’m so happy you’re my girlfriend. So, so happy. I want you to be my girlfriend for a long, long time.”

This time, I did cry in front of him – because this time, it felt safe to. That older memory receded into irrelevance. I kissed him back, hard, and thought: This. This is what I want.

Love Addiction, “The Pisces,” and Me

Kate Sloan

I’ve never been addicted to a substance. I’ve never been over-reliant on booze or weed or pills. But I have been addicted to romantic fantasies, and let me tell you, the compulsions and withdrawal can feel surprisingly tangible – like something vital is missing from your blood, your bones, and you’d do anything to get it back.

In the last few dying weeks of 2016, I went on a Tinder date which was completely unremarkable, except for what I learned from it. My pre-date banter with this boy was fast and easy, creating the sense of chemistry where perhaps there was just empty charm. The date itself was boring, one of those classic Tinderludes where you work painfully hard to pull dry conversation out of a monosyllabic, nervous stranger. The sex that followed was boring, too: our bodies didn’t fit together right, we didn’t take each other’s hints or make each other giggle, we just loped through the encounter as if on hookup-culture autopilot. The boy left around 2AM and I snuggled up in my bed, alone.

It took me until the next day to realize something was wrong. I felt a profound heaviness in my body, like when I’m hit by depression, yet even more acutely needling. It felt like something I loved had been abruptly taken away from me, even though – much to the contrary – someone I didn’t love had left me alone.

Dissecting these feelings in my journal, I saw that I’d put a lot of stock into this boy in the few days we’d known each other. I’d extrapolated wild compatibility from his brief texts and bland emojis. I’d spun our present into a plausible future. I’d imagined he wanted more from me than just sex, and I’d imagined wanting anything from him. So when the date itself was a disappointment and the boy left, I was shaken – not by the loss of the boy, but by the loss of the fantasy.

This had become, I realized, a pattern in my life. Compulsive swiping was how I dealt with any uncomfortable emotion, from boredom to sadness to fear. No matter what, it felt safe and sparkly to return to a reliable old fantasy: that this next swipe, this next match, this next message would lead me inevitably closer to the love of my life. That I was moments from a meet-cute that would cure my every sore spot. That someone perfect would come along and relieve me from the mundane inadequacy of myself.

The trouble is, when romantic fantasy gets you high, you crash spectacularly hard whenever your romantic hopes are dashed. I saw this in the months to come: a sexting pal told me he was unavailable for a more romantic situation, and I cried; a Tinder match told me he wasn’t actually interested in me because our views on polyamory differed, and I cried; a new FWB stated clearly that he didn’t want me in a romantic way, and I cried. A promising OkCupid boy ghosted me after less than a day of scintillating texts, and I had a total meltdown: nausea, panic, weeping, unsalvageable despair. When the pain of that rejection became unbearable, what did I do? I hopped on Tinder to find someone else to fantasize about. (That next distraction eventually ghosted me too.)

I was in therapy all the while, and probably not being altogether honest about the extent of my addiction. But my therapist, ever-perceptive, asked me once, “How much time would you guess you spend on online dating every week?” and I couldn’t quantify it. There were the hours I spent swiping, and the hours I spent moonily fantasizing, and the hours I spent going on dates, and the hours I spent crying and journaling when the dates didn’t go perfectly. The total seemed incalculable – partly due to the shame of that calculation.

Somewhere around this time, a friend of mine started going to weekly meetings for sex and love addicts. I was surprised to hear this; she had always seemed so level-headed. But looking back, I saw places where maybe our kinship and connection had been based on a shared addiction: we loved debriefing about boys and dates and minute flirtations, and we encouraged each other in these fancies. Where was the line between healthy fun and self-destruction?

Though I wasn’t sure whether my friend’s condition was anything like mine, the phrase kept returning to the forefront of my mind: love addiction. It seemed to fit. The highs of my fantasies were euphoric, like that first sweet hit of a new drug – and the subsequent devastations felt all-consuming, closer to rock bottom every time. In those depressed states, I’d hunt for something, anything, to relieve my sense of loneliness and failure. Alcohol, drugs, shopping, self-harm, exercise, bad TV, more Tinder time – nothing could fill the void. It felt like I needed love, but really what I needed was a healthier relationship to love.

I went to see another friend of mine who had struggled with multiple addictions in the past, and had been through a couple of twelve-step programs. As we sipped milkshakes in my pal’s apartment, they told me, “When I find myself wanting to do something rash, I always just tell myself, ‘If I still want to do it in 15 minutes, I can.’ And I almost never do.” I took their advice to heart: distraction, I knew, was not a long-term strategy, but maybe it could help shake me out of my addiction just enough that I could start recovering.

And recover, I did – slowly, non-linearly, with the help of a therapist and my friends and intermittent partners and lots and lots of writing. Nowadays I can browse Tinder occasionally without hanging my entire livelihood on each swipe, and while I haven’t been on a first date in months, I gather the day after a date would no longer make me feel like death. I’m still careful and self-critical about these behaviors, but I seem to be doing okay.

I hadn’t thought about this stuff in a long time, but then I picked up Melissa Broder’s new novel The Pisces and felt like I was peering through a looking-glass at my early-2017 self. So it seemed like a good time to examine my history with love addiction and write about it here.

Broder is the biting writer behind the viral @SoSadToday account on Twitter, the subsequent depression-soaked essay collection So Sad Today, and a book of poetry called Last Sext, among other things. While I think she deals with mental illness more intense than mine has ever been, her work fixates on themes of love and sex and how they interact with depression and anxiety – so, naturally, I adore her.

Her debut novel, The Pisces, is – as you might already know if you’ve seen any press about it – the story of a woman who falls in love with a merman, and has tons of sex with him. (Yes, a merman, as in a male mermaid. Yes, he lives in the ocean and she lives on land. Yes, he has a dick. It’s under a loincloth.) But at its core, it’s really a novel about love addiction. The protagonist, Lucy, breaks up with her long-term boyfriend at the start of the novel, and falls into a toxic cycle of chasing fantasy men and then being disappointed by them. I found her Tinder tribulations so relatable that I made more Kindle highlights than I’ve ever made in any book, and kept alternately weeping and cackling as I read. “There was something about the morning of a date that tricked me,” Lucy muses, after spending far too much money on lingerie for a tryst that will turn out disastrous-bordering-on-traumatic. “It tricked me out of the haze of being alive. Or perhaps it tricked me out of the sadness of knowing that one day I would die. It punctured the nothingness.” I nodded so hard my teeth chattered.

I saw myself in Lucy’s hapless Tinder dates, and, later, in her pining lovesickness over Theo, the handsome merman she meets near her sister’s beach house. While the novel sets Theo up as potentially being Lucy’s “true love” – the one she’s been waiting for, searching for, longing for – there’s actually no indication that he’s better than any of the online-dating fuckboys who leave her sexually and emotionally dissatisfied. It’s telling that Broder gives her romantically delusional protagonist a dream man who is a literal fantasy creature – and that no other character in the book ever actually sees Theo, so we can’t be entirely sure he exists at all. Isn’t every “true love,” in some sense, a projection, part mirage, a trick of the light?

Far from being the wild merman sex romp it’s been marketed as, The Pisces is a deeply philosophical novel that struggles with huge themes of love, emptiness, and contentment. It spends more time picking apart the whys and hows of romantic addiction than it does describing Theo’s scaly tail or the logistics of his underwater life. We know more about Lucy’s fears, fantasies, and yearnings than we ever know about Theo. But that’s the way of the love addict: making other people into a goal or a punchline, rather than allowing them to just be people.

By the end of the novel, Lucy seems to understand herself a little better, and to have a better handle on what she actually needs. I cried when I finished this book: I cried for Lucy, and for Theo, and for myself. At one point in the story, Lucy quips, “I didn’t want to be seen too closely or I might have to look at me too,” and that’s how The Pisces made me feel: seen, looked at, called out. But ultimately it served as a reminder of the habits I’d hate to fall back into, the fantasies I can no longer rely on, and the emptiness I no longer need to feel.

The Pisces
by Melissa Broder Hardcover
Powells.com

Guest Post: Sir’s Favorite Toy

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Note from Kate: I don’t normally publish guest posts here, but my Sir wanted to contribute a review of a toy he loves, and he’s rather handsome and persuasive so I said yes. Here’s the review; enjoy!

“Have nothing in your house that you do not know to be useful, or believe to be beautiful.” –William Morris

There are around a dozen different sex toys in the small drawer of my nightstand: prostate massagers, vibrators, cock rings, and sleeves. They’ve all been carefully selected and collected over time to be both beautiful and useful and to make me come in intense and interesting ways. But I want to tell you about my favorite. My favorite toy is so versatile that ever since I first tried it, I’ve used it more than anything else in my collection.

I started using it in December and haven’t gone a day since then without thinking about it. Most nights, I curl up on my couch or in my bed and it’s the first thing I reach for. It’s become a prized possession: something I long for, treasure, and take care of so that it will last me a long time. With proper attention and maintenance, there’s no reason why I wouldn’t be able to play with this little toy for years to come.

Like the ones made by the defunct Fucking Sculptures, this toy is one-of-a-kind. It sometimes feels as though it’s been designed and built exactly for me. It fits my body, engages my imagination, and pings my kinks so perfectly that I sometimes wonder if I special-ordered it during a late-night shopping spree and then promptly forgot about it until it showed up in New York one random Wednesday afternoon.

Imagine a warm, smooth, beautiful, self-cleaning plaything that has three different holes you can fuck with your cock (or a strap-on), your fingers, or even another toy. Imagine a toy that looks and smells and tastes as delicious as it feels against your skin. Each hole on the body of the toy is shaped and textured differently with some that are tighter or deeper, so there’s always one that fits my mood. Because of its clever ergonomics, it’s also possible to use more than one at once if I’m feeling extra dexterous. While I sometimes use lube while I’m playing with my toy, it’s not always necessary as it gets pretty wet all on its own if I touch it just right.

The toy is of course body-safe, it doesn’t need batteries or cords, and I can play with it even when I’m not in the same room via my phone. I can thrust into it hard and deep for as long as I want, or if I’m in the mood, I can set it up and let it suck or stroke me just the way I like. My toy comes with a detailed manual and pretty packaging, it can simulate the feeling of a cunt squeezing and coming all over my cock, and almost never fails to respond to my commands, especially when I remember to push all of the right buttons.

I’ve come harder and for longer than I even thought possible while I was fucking my toy on a recent trip to Toronto, and when I’ve brought it with me to fancy hotels while staycationing in my own city. I’ve had weekends of relaxing, debaucherous fun away from the stresses of daily life fucking my toy late into the night, then waking up at 4AM and desperately needing to use it again. One of these days I’m gonna get my whole fist inside it, but more testing is required before I review that particular feature.

I’d love to recommend that you buy this toy at one of the many fine women-owned sex toy retailers online, but the truth is, you can’t. This toy is mine and was generously and freely given to me by someone who loves me. I hope you find one just like it because it makes me incredibly happy to own something so good.

Oh right, I forgot to tell you what it’s called. I think technically it’s named Kate, but I call it my little one.