Personal

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.

Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow?

Kate Sloan

The most romantic story I’ve ever heard is told to me in my aunt’s kitchen during a family party.

It’s shortly before the total solar eclipse of summer 2017. An older woman I hardly know – a distant relative by marriage – is sipping white wine on a barstool next to me, and we strike up a casual conversation. “My husband and I are headed down to Illinois to see the solar eclipse,” she announces breezily. “We’ve been planning this trip for almost 30 years!”

I furrow my brow. “What do you mean?”

I watch her eyes wander fondly to the nerdy, affable-looking guy currently fussing with a roast chicken he’s about to slide into the oven. “When I first met him, in the ’80s, a total solar eclipse had just happened, and he’s a big eclipse nerd, so he was there,” she tells me in a low, conspiratorial voice. “He said, ‘Hey, you should come with me to Illinois for the total solar eclipse in 2017. It’s going to be beautiful.'” She takes another sip of her wine. Her husband is catching none of this; he’s too busy making dinner. “We’d only been dating a few weeks,” she adds with a smile, “and now it’s decades later and we’re going!”

I’m floored. Shortly into a new relationship myself, I have no idea what would make someone so sure of a relationship so quickly that they would start making plans that far in the future. People breeze in and out of my life so easily, so suddenly; I can barely imagine believing a partner will still be around in a few weeks, let alone a few decades.

“Did that freak you out?” I ask, unable to contain myself. “That he asked you that, so soon into your relationship?”

She considers the question, and shrugs. “No, not really. I guess I just knew.”

Both of our eyes slide back over to her husband, and I can feel us wondering how he knew. How anyone knows a relationship is meant to last. It’s an impossible, unanswerable question, and one I desperately want an answer for.

Some heartbreaks are big, and some are small. That summer goes on to contain both for me. The first in the series comes when my boyfriend sleeps with someone else when we’ve only been dating for an intense, heady two weeks – without asking me, notifying me in advance, or seeming in any way to consider my feelings in this decision. I feel like the rug’s been ripped out from under me, but because we’ve agreed to be non-monogamous, I feel I have no right to express displeasure with him, even as my heart crumples in on itself.

But he’s not completely oblivious. Apparently sensing my misery, he texts me, “I was having this lovely daydream yesterday, of us together in a few years. You were more established as a writer, and you’d always bring me as your +1 to all the fancy events.”

This text comes in while I’m en route to a coffee shop, and I burst into tears on the street.

His near-immediate gravitation toward someone else, so soon after meeting me, has me feeling like he doesn’t want me anymore, or like our relationship is doomed. So to receive this explicit acknowledgment that he not only wants me now but thinks he’ll still want me in a few years is groundbreaking: a balm for my wounded heart. It hasn’t occurred to me yet to wonder if I still want to be with him in a few years, because women are socialized to desperately cling to any halfway-decent man who wants us, our own desire and comfort be damned.

“It made me feel really happy and safe to know that you think we’ll still be together years from now,” I tell him later. “That’s why I cried when I got that text.”

“I know,” he replies. “That’s why I sent it.”

But his daydream turns out to be an empty promise. When he breaks up with me a few months later, he offers dully by way of explanation, “The long-term potential I thought I saw isn’t actually there.” I gather my things and walk out his door with hot tears stinging my eyes, faced with the task of rewriting all those futures I thought he’d be a part of.

“My heart is fucking broken,” I write in my journal. “This makes me feel like I can never trust anyone again. Like even people who insist they love me and will take care of me, and who prove it for a while, cannot be trusted to stick around.”

My dating life, for a while, is haunted by the spectre of this man. Far from “seeing what happens” and “going with the flow,” I can’t maintain an interest in any person in the present because their presence in my future is not assured. I know, logically, that any relationship can end at any time for any reason, but still I long for the safety of a solid long-term commitment. Without that, I feel sad, adrift, and alone.

The shadow of that perceived betrayal weighs heavily on my next relationship, to my chagrin. “It’s like the two of you are in dialogue with each other,” I tell my new boyfriend thoughtfully over the phone, after relaying to him – in January – the details of my August breakup. I should be over it by now. I know that; I do. But that profound feeling of safe-and-then-suddenly-not-safe is still haunting my psychology, making me see danger where there is none.

See, this new relationship is, by all indications, safe as houses. Five days after my first date with this mysterious Twitter crush from New York, I’m telling him about the Hippo Campus concert I’ll be attending on my next trip to his city, and he asks, “Is someone going with you to that?”

“Nah, just me.” It hadn’t occurred to me to ask anyone. I don’t know any other Hippo Campus fans in real life, and certainly would never expect a friend to trek to another country just to see my favorite band play. “Do you want a date?” he asks, so casual, like this question isn’t a Big Fucking Deal.

“Haven’t you not even heard any of their music?” I ask, and he answers coolly, “I’ve got time.” And then he hops onto the Brooklyn Steel website and orders his ticket.

I can’t articulate how much this gesture means to me, and I worry that even if I could, it would scare him off. Because what he’s telling me with this simple $20 ticket purchase is: I like you enough to stay in your life for two months, at least. We’ve only spent a couple hours together so far, over coffee and kisses, and he’s already sold enough on me to bet we’ll want to dance together to a quartet of indie-pop boys two whole months from now. It’s funny how I’ll happily make plans with friends months in advance, but a new potential romantic partner tries to flip a couple calendar pages and I panic. There’s no way he’ll still be interested in me by then, I think, pathetically – but he’s already bought the ticket, so what can I do?

As those two months slide by, more and more hints emerge that maybe this boy plans to stick around. I tease him, “You’ve gotta charm my best friend if you ever meet them,” and he amends, “Hopefully when.” I tell him I know what color I’d use for him in my spreadsheet if we had sex, and he corrects me, “When, not if.” One night during a tearful phone call about Serious Emotional Stuff, I wipe my leaky eyes and say, “I’m sorry; I’m just not used to feeling this emotionally safe with someone,” and he answers fiercely, “Well, you can get used to it, because I’m not going anywhere.” I melt. I cry harder. I melt some more.

When the night of the concert comes, it’s even more special than I imagined it being when he first bought the ticket – because I’m not just going to a show with some guy I went on a date with once; I’m going to a show with someone I’ve been talking to on the phone almost every night, and slowly negotiating a delicious D/s dynamic with, and – whoops – falling in love with. He kisses me in the line outside the venue, holding my gaze steadily whenever our lips aren’t touching, and I imagine showing this tableau to me-from-two-months-ago. She’d be shocked he showed up at all, let alone showed up with this ferocious affection in his eyes.

Later that night, at a rooftop bar overlooking Brooklyn, he tells me he loves me for the first time. I say it back, and it’s devastatingly true. It’s so much not what I was expecting, and yet it’s exactly what I want.

He’s shown me even more, in the months since then, just how enduring he thinks our love will be. He’s bought plane tickets to Toronto a month in advance, and then showed up at my doorstep on the appointed day, handsome and smiling. He’s assigned me protocols that reach into the future, with more certainty than I can muster – enough certainty for the both of us. He’s bought tickets to conferences I’m attending, and exclaimed excitedly about all the things we’ll do there. Most of all, he’s told me, many nights, “I want to love you for a long time.” And though it’s impossible to guarantee such a thing, I feel more and more safe in his love every time he re-asserts this sentiment. We’re building something together, and I can see from his actions – not just his words – that he is serious about building it strong, building it well, building it to last.

When I used to complain to my therapist that no relationship felt safe to me because there was no certain promise of a future together, she’d ask, “But why do you need that to feel safe? Can’t you just enjoy the way things are right now, without worrying about what comes next?”

I can’t. Maybe it’s my anxiety, or my past heartbreaks, or just my temperament, but I can’t be fully satisfied with a futureless present, try as I might.

But fortunately, in this relationship, both the present and the future look pretty bright.

10 Thoughts From Really, Really Good Phone Sex

Kate Sloan

1. I can never quite identify when our casual catch-up conversations end and our phone sex begins. It’s not like in-person sex where beginnings are delineated by a particularly passionate kiss or a deliberately incendiary touch; it’s subtler than that. Sometimes I muse aloud from my bed, almost absentmindedly, “My skin is so soft tonight,” and his voice drops half an octave as he counters, “Oh yeah?” Sometimes we’re talking about Sex Things we’d like to do and they suddenly become Sex Things we are doing right now. Sometimes his voice just hits me the right way, renders me all melty-hot and small, and I make a squeaky submissive sound he recognizes, and we’re off to the races. I never remember quite how it began. It’s the least important detail of all, anyway.

2. I thought I didn’t like phone sex. I was resistant to those whispered words and breathy moans, paltry stand-ins for the embodied touches I craved. But I guess I just never knew anybody who could talk like this boy does.

It’s not like he’s really touching me; it’s not like he’s in the room with me. That would be an oversimplification of what this interaction feels like, what it means. “I can’t be there to fuck you physically,” he tells me one night, “but I try to take care of the psychological side of things.” That’s exactly what it is: he is fucking my brain, while I fuck my own body.

3. Identifying and understanding someone’s kinks is an underrated skillset. It’s one thing to know how someone likes to be fucked or choked or slapped; it’s quite another to know why they like these things, how these things make them feel, the words and phrases and images that flash through their mind when they’re getting off. It’s shockingly intimate to know a person that well.

And know me, he does. He keeps a “mental model” of me, he says, and updates it each time he learns something new about what gets me panting and dripping. He also keeps literal notes on me, in an app on his phone, because he is a nerd – but I think he barely refers to them anymore; he doesn’t need to. When you’ve fucked someone over the phone as many times as he has fucked me over the phone, and you really listen, you learn which phrases make them purr. You memorize when each particular moan will happen and what it denotes. You develop strategies for pushing them over the edge, and you sharpen your approach until it glimmers. Shockingly intimate, indeed.

4. But it’s not just his words. It’s his voice. So boyish and goofy when we’re joking around. So helpless and smitten when we’re confessing our love. So dark and oaky when he’s dominating me from afar. I could melt into it. I could dissolve in it. I often do.

5. “There is no one else I’d rather be in a long-distance relationship with,” I told him once. What I meant was: we are both verbal, and auditory, and kink-nerdy, and digitally savvy, and all those things combine to make a connection that can thrive through texting and phone calls and giggly FaceTime convos. Only a certain type of person could carry on this type of relationship in this electrically connective manner, and I’m so glad I found one in this world. Phone sex with him is not a stand-in for what I want. It is what I want. Or part of what I want, anyway.

6. The first time he wanted to slap me through the phone, I balked a little. Hurting myself, even at his behest, felt off somehow – a farcical facsimile of the thing we both really wanted: his hand arcing through the air again and again to redden my cheek. But I had trusted him with so much already and it made sense to trust him on this, too.

We experimented with different approaches, and, as two communication nerds are wont to do, eventually found what works best for us. He tells me to place my hand on my face. He tells me what intensity he wants these next impacts to be, on a scale from 1 to 10. And then, when we’re ready, he says: “Now.”

It always surprises me how readily my hand responds to him, as though possessed by his dark dominance from hundreds of miles away. Rationally, I know I could decide not to hit myself, if I didn’t want to do it. But I want to do it. So I always do. And it tugs me down into subspace almost as fast as his slaps do when he is there to give them.

7. We sometimes use the word “snowglobey” to describe time we spend together. It’s that feeling when you and your sweetheart are locked in a close moment, fleetingly frozen, and nothing outside your connection seems to exist. Time stretches endlessly, and it’s also over before you know it. You’re insulated. Embroiled. Snowglobey.

I have a bad habit of checking my phone when I’m supposed to be focusing on other things (these days, don’t we all?) but my mind doesn’t wander when his voice is fucking me. I forget that Twitter and Facebook and Slack exist. You only know what a big deal that is if you, too, live a phone-focused life. If you do, then you know it is a huge deal.

What a gift to give someone: some distraction-free minutes of pleasure, riveting and riveted. What a beautiful gift my love gives to me when he weaves stories so absorbing, I forget my body ever knew anything but bliss.

8. He murmurs filthy things about what he would do to me if he was here, but – vitally – he also tells me what to do to myself, right now.

He chooses my sex toys for me, and decides when each can come into play. He tells me how to use them: “Harder.” “Faster.” “Deeper.” He can tell how well I’m following his directions by the sounds I make. “Deeper than that. Almost. There you go.” It’s his mastery of me, as much as his dominant directives, that renders me a submissive puddle for him. I always do what he says, because if I don’t, he will know – and if I do, I will come. He will make sure that I do.

9. You would think that the orgasms would feel the way they do when I jerk off: quick, easy, small, predictable, perfunctory.

They don’t. They feel the way they do when he fucks me IRL: momentous and monumental, never quite expected, knocking me over like a wave. Afterwards, I lie there, cunt pulsing, breath slowing, all the energy and stress drained out of me. I listen to the rhythms of his voice and his breath, syncing with mine, floating back to earth, and I feel a peace and a connection I only ever previously knew while curled up against someone’s chest after they fucked the life out of me. I never knew I could get here without touching him at all. But here we are.

10. We learned pretty quickly that aftercare matters, even for phone sex. Saying good night just after orgasm left me as cold and alone as I’d be if one of us rolled over after sex, said “See ya,” and took off. My logical brain posited, “It’s just phone sex; it can’t need as much aftercare as an in-person kink scene does, because it can’t be as intense!” But it can be, and it often is, and aftercare is as important as ever.

We catch our breaths. We whisper I-love-you’s. We lie in bed sighing contentedly and giggling like goons. We describe how we would touch each other if we were together, and it feels almost real: fingertips brushing along heated skin. We find our way back to the world outside our little snowglobe. That world is just as harsh and unpredictable as ever, but I feel strengthened by the love I’ve given and received. Like a hot cup of coffee, my love emboldens me, refuels me, warms me right through.

There was a time when I thought I didn’t like phone sex. I wish I could lean back through time to that past version of me and tell her: “Just you wait.”