music

5 Frank Sinatra Songs That Are Definitely About Kink

Kate Sloan

I’ve Got You Under My Skin

The addictive, all-consuming qualities of love often described in these Tin Pan Alley-era love songs remind me so much of my kinky relationships. Modern-day dating is so much about “chillness,” or the illusion thereof, that it’s refreshing to hear these old-fashioned confessions of feeling utterly un-chill. I’ve mostly experienced this “I’d sacrifice everything, come what might, for the sake of having you near” level of devotion in kink dynamics, not vanilla relationships.

The moment that really kills me in this song, kink-wise, is this: “Don’t you know, little fool? You never can win. Use your mentality. Wake up to reality.” In the narrative of the song, it’s the voice of Frank’s own anxiety and inadequacy whispering this to him – but it’s also something the most merciless humiliatrix might spit at a submissive. And it makes me feel all tingly. Oh, Frank.

Can I Steal a Little Love?

This is pure submissive Frank. “Hug me, kiss me, til I’m red,” he sings, “til my eyes bug out my head.” Consensual violence ahoy!

Later in the song, he swears, “With a smile, I will lead you down the aisle. I won’t even need a shove.” He’s talking about marriage, sure, but it’s also this super subby promise that he’ll happily do things other men find scary or uninteresting, because he’s so devoted to his darling. Aww.

Fly Me to the Moon

This charming classic reminds me of how immersive and otherworldly kink can be. Unlike vanilla sex, it takes me out of my head and makes me feel like a temporarily different person in a temporarily different place – like I’m in outer space.

“Fly me to the moon, and let me play among the stars,” he sings. “In other words: baby, kiss me.” Oh, swoon.

Somethin’ Stupid (featuring Nancy Sinatra)

Look, it’s a little weird that Frank Sinatra sang a romantic duet with his daughter. Asked about the song 40 years after it was recorded, Nancy said, “Some people call that the Incest Song, which I think is, well, very sweet!” What a strange non-response, perfectly in line with the overall strangeness of the song and its enduring popularity.

Setting aside any implications of actual incest between Frank and his daughter – of which I haven’t seen any suspicion or proof – this song makes me picture Ol’ Blue Eyes as a Daddy dom. Several of my favorite Daddy dom tropes are based in traditional 1950s masculinity: well-tailored suits, protectiveness over women, shellacked hair, an easy and assumed dominance. That type of gender dynamic was less than consensual in actual 1950s nuclear family units (well, most of them, anyway), but it’s hot to imagine consensually reclaiming it in a contemporary context. And handsome Frank would make a hell of a father figure.

My Way

When I told friends I was working on this post, they all insisted I had to include this song – because what could be a more dommy sentiment than “I’ll do it my way”?!

However, examining the rest of the lyrics, there’s not much of kinky substance in this tune. I think what makes me think of dominance, moreso than the lyrics, is the calm confidence with which Ol’ Blue Eyes performs this big, showy song – and that same confidence when it shows up in karaoke aficionados’ performances, since this is a mainstay of that genre. Listening to this song stiffens my spine with pride and surety, so this shy little submissive can get a taste of what it might feel like to be a whole-hearted dominant.

What are your favorite kink-tinged jazz standards?

My Top 10 Favorite Songs About Marriage

Kate Sloan
The closest thing I have to a photo of me in a wedding dress.

I’m a romantic sap and I don’t care who knows it. I cry at Hallmark cards, I sob whenever I watch the episode of The Office where Jim and Pam get married, and I certainly weep profusely at real-life weddings. What can I say?

I once briefly dated someone who edited wedding videos for a living, and he frequently lamented how boring certain songs get after a while. (You would not believe how many millennials want Bright Eyes’ “First Day of My Life” to feature prominently in their nuptials. Or maybe you would.) That said, wedding-related songs still get me all choked up pretty much whenever I listen to them, whether they’re about beautiful brides for marriage, or offbeat vows, or an oddly-romantic desire not to get married. Here are 10 of my faves…

The Magnetic Fields – It’s Only Time

Why would I stop loving you a hundred years from now?/ It’s only time/ What could stop this beating heart once it’s made a vow?/ It’s only time

This is my #1, play-this-at-my-wedding, first-dance-contender, most romantic song ever. I once sang it and played it on the ukulele in Malta while my cousin walked down the aisle; she hadn’t heard the song before I presented it as an option, but she quickly fell in love with it, as did basically the entire wedding party. Stephin Merritt is a brilliant songwriter, blessed with the ability to write lyrics that are quirky and quixotic sometimes, and utterly classic and simple at other times. This song is of the latter type – it feels, somehow, like it has always existed, since the birth of love.

Rosie Thomas – Wedding Day

I’m gonna stop at every bar/ And flirt with the cowboys in front of their girlfriends/ It’s gonna be so great/ It’s gonna be just like my wedding day

This isn’t actually about a wedding – it’s kind of about a rejection of romance and an embracing of self-love instead, with Rosie sweetly breathing lines like “I’ve had enough of love; it feels good to give up, so good to be good to myself.” But your relationship with yourself is so deeply rooted, so permanent and important, that it may as well be a marriage, am I right?

Tegan and Sara – BWU

All the girls I loved before/ Told me they signed up for more/ Save your first and last chance for me/ ‘Cause I don’t want a white wedding

I have a long-standing theory that Tegan Quin is anxiously attached (to use the parlance of the psychological concept known as attachment theory) while her sister, Sara, is avoidantly attached. You can see the difference easily if you know which T&S songs are written and sung by each sister: Tegan’s songs tend to be desperate “I want you to love me/Why don’t you love me?!” bops, while some of Sara’s greatest hits include lines like “I’m not unfaithful but I’ll stray,” “I swear I tried to leave you at least a hundred times a day,” and – yes – “I don’t want a white wedding.” I admire her level of self-knowledge; I just suuuper don’t want to date someone who approaches relationships the way she does (or the way she seems to in her songs)!

Alvvays – Archie, Marry Me

You’ve expressed explicitly/ Your contempt for matrimony/ You’ve student loans to pay/ And will not risk the alimony

This is a song about a girl trying to convince a boy to marry her. Even though she sounds feminine and sweet, there is something remarkably brash about it. “Hey, hey,” she sings in the chorus, “marry me, Archie.” I admire that level of straightforwardness, and of clarity of desire!

Punch Brothers – Don’t Get Married Without Me

Let’s not fool ourselves/ Taking a break is dragging out a break-up too long/ Help yourself to whatever you like with whomever you like/ But don’t get married without me

The feeling expressed in this song is one I’m sure a lot of us have felt, even if we’re not proud of it: the sense that, even when you’ve broken up with someone, you still have (or want to have) some sense of ownership over them. It’s a shitty monogamy-culture knee-jerk reaction, but what can ya do. I like that this song has a sense of humor about itself; clearly Chris Thile knows how ridiculous it would be to put conditions on the romantic life of someone you’re dumping, but it’s an impulse that comes up nonetheless.

Death Cab For Cutie – Cath…

You said your vows/ And you closed the door/ On so many men/ Who would have loved you more

Ben Gibbard, for some reason, is really good at writing songs about women with romantic regrets. (See also: “Lady Adelaide,” the solo-project track of his that makes me weep for a fictional character.) I find this song relatable even though I’ve never been married; being romantically entangled with “a well-intentioned man” while your “heart is dying fast” is a tough spot to be in, and yet I think a lot of us have experienced some version of that. You want to get out, but you’re worried about what’ll happen if you do.

The Japanese House – Worms

Sharing your house/ Sharing your life/ Sharing your home/ There’s so much pressure not to be alone

I feel this song in the marrow of my bones. It feels like a post-breakup anxiety spiral: “She’s my lullaby and I can’t sleep right,” Amber Bain warbles mournfully, before deep-diving into feelings of large-scale rejection and loneliness. She’s right that our culture is overinvested in pairing people up, and in making single people feel like shit.

Company – Getting Married Today

Listen, everybody/ Look, I don’t know what you’re waiting for/ A wedding? What’s a wedding?/ It’s a prehistoric ritual/ Where everybody promises fidelity forever/ Which is maybe the most horrifying word I’ve ever heard

Just about everything Stephen Sondheim writes is gold, but this is a fave of mine. It’s a nervous breakdown in song form: Amy, a neurotic bride-to-be, has a panic attack the morning of her wedding and enumerates all the reasons she can’t possibly go through with it. I like to think that if I ever get married, I’ll listen to this on the day of, just to bring those last-minute jitters to the surface and exorcize them so I can proceed.

West Side Story – One Hand, One Heart

Make of our hands one hand/ Make of our hearts one heart/ Make of our vows one last vow/ Only death will part us now

On the opposite end of the spectrum, here is a musical theatre song about a wedding gone right. Tony and Maria – based on Romeo and Juliet – sing this beautiful love duet to bind them together. It’s so over-the-top that I think it would actually be too cheesy to be a first-dance song… and yet, I love it.

John Mayer – Home Life

I can tell you this much/ I will marry just once/ And if it doesn’t work out/ Give her half of my stuff/ It’s fine with me/ We said eternity

The J-man has a bit of a reputation as a player, so it’s rare for him to grapple with questions of domesticity and long-term love in his songs, but he does in this one. Mayer has never gotten married as of yet, but has been romantically tied to the likes of Jennifer Love Hewitt, Jennifer Aniston, and Katy Perry. Guess he didn’t click with any of them enough to have “said eternity” with ’em.

What are your favorite songs about weddings/marriage?

 

This post was sponsored. As always, all writing and opinions are my own.

12 Days of Girly Juice 2018: 10 Perfect Sex Songs

Kate Sloan

Welcome back to 12 Days of Girly Juice, my year-end celebration of all things sexy and beloved! Today I’m writing about 10 of the best songs I enjoyed for sensual (and adjacent) purposes this year… (As ever, you can listen to all these songs – and most of my picks from previous years – in my 12 Days of Girly Juice playlist!)

Cruisr – Kidnap Me

So, uh, as you might have intuited from the title of this song, it’s kinda kinky. I don’t know if that was the band’s intention – to write a love song that is at once adorably sweet and ruthlessly perverted – but that is what they have done. “Shackle me up and lock it; I can live in your pocket. When you gonna kidnap me?” the lead singer chirps. “Tie me up to a chair; I could live in your hair. When you gonna kidnap me?”

I’m sure a vanilla person would listen to this song and think it satirical, like montages in horror movies where a killer dismembers somebody to the stylings of ’80s pop. But when I listen to it, I just hear pure, deep, perverse romance.

Say Anything – Wow, I Can Get Sexual Too

Making playlists for each other (or perhaps mix tapes, depending on your era and your level of dedication to the analog arts) is sort of a millennial-romance rite of passage. It’s a way to show your beloved both how you feel about them and how brilliant you are. A double-whammy of confessional hotness.

My Sir and I engaged in this time-honored ritual way back in February. I remember I was running around the Playground Conference, ducking in and out of panels and workshops and podcast recordings, while receiving many a text from this new beau about the epic playlist he was making me. I listened to it on my way home from the conference and cried… a lot. It had Imogen Heap and Feist and the Beach Boys and the Beatles, musical theatre and bubblegum pop, classically millennial love anthems like “Such Great Heights” and “I Really Like You.” It made me feel cradled and appreciated and seen.

One of my faves in the playlist, though, was this Say Anything song, which is about phone sex – something my Sir and I had done a lot of at that point and would continue to do a lot of. “I called her on the phone and she touched herself,” the lead singer whines in the chorus, and maybe it doesn’t sound especially romantic, but to me, it was.

Hippo Campus – Warm Glow

After my first-ever knifeplay scene, Dick asked me what I wanted to listen to during aftercare, and I told him to play some Hippo Campus. They’re my favorite band, so I didn’t even really care which songs we listened to – I know all of them practically by heart. But when he hit shuffle on their discography, this song, “Warm Glow,” was the first one that played, and it was absolutely perfect.

Longer and slower than the Hippo boys’ usual fare, “Warm Glow” has been called “a perennial anthem of positivity,” and that’s part of why I love it as an aftercare song. But I also love that it’s comfortingly repetitive, full of beautifully soothing sounds, and takes its sweet time to build up to an emotional climax. It’s exactly what I need from an aftercare song. (Want more like this? Check out my Aftercare playlist.)

The Japanese House – Saw You in a Dream

This came up in one of my Spotify Discover Weekly playlists and I was immediately hooked. Dream-pop is my jam (thanks, Spotify, you know me all too well) and this song epitomizes my favorite qualities of that genre. It’s loopy and lazy and hauntingly beautiful and sweetly wistful.

I think most of us have had the experience described in this song, of seeing an ex-lover in a dream and feeling shaken up beyond reason by seeing them again, even just in unreality. People can seem so much lovelier in retrospect than they did when they were in your life, and sometimes it’s painful. “You were the sweetest apparition, such a pretty vision,” the Japanese House’s lead singer Amber Bain croons in verse 2. “There was no reason, no explanation: the perfect hallucination.” Sometimes reminiscing about an ex can be too agonizing to bear, but other times it can be a mollifying meander down Memory Lane. Maybe it can even turn you on.

P.S. If you can’t get enough of this song – and I can’t blame you – listen to this a cappella rendition. Ideally while blazed.

Ought – Beautiful Blue Sky

This song is sexy in the way that it’s sexy to fuck someone who is almost robotically dominant: “We do this my way, we do it efficiently, and we do it now.” The driving drums and mechanical guitars forge a rhythm that builds and builds, and then there’s Tim Darcy shouting erratically on top of it all. At times, he seems to be making fun of the whole concept of small talk – “How’s the family? How’s your health been? Fancy seeing you here! Beautiful weather today!” – and the effect is of someone who desperately wants to fuck you, and will do a good job if he does, but doesn’t quite know how to get there from here.

I want my G-spot pounded to the beat of this song. It just feels right.

Ben Rector – Paris

This song is the purest distillation I’ve found of what it feels like to be in New Relationship Energy – or to be in an established relationship that still lapses back into an NRE-esque mode, raw and fresh and sweet. “I haven’t seen her for a month or so,” Ben sings; “Young love feels like finding buried gold.”

I listened to this a lot while falling in love with my Sir. Ben sings in the second verse, “I feel sixteen while we are making love,” and that’s how I felt, too: transported back to a youthful mood where everything was warm and hopeful, and nothing could touch me because I was in love! That’s not always an explicitly sexy feeling – I could write a whole essay about how NRE makes me feel a bit like a haggard zombie running on endorphin fumes – but sometimes it is, and that’s what this song feels like to me. Lust, love, and silly optimism.

John Mayer – Love on the Weekend

My brother showed me this one first. We share a long-standing love of John Mayer – his problematic qualities notwithstanding – and when this song dropped, Max said, “You’ve gotta listen to this one.” Max is usually right about such things, so I did, and damn, the boy knows me: this track is very up my alley.

Like “Paris,” “Love on the Weekend” is definitely an NRE anthem. John sings, “I’ll be dreaming of the next time we can go into another serotonin overflow,” capturing the clinical reality of love’s early days without diminishing its effects. I found this song relatable as my Sir and I fell into a more-or-less monthly routine of one of us visiting the other for a long, luxurious weekend. “It’s a Friday; we finally made it. I can’t believe I get to see your face. You’ve been working, and I’ve been waiting to pick you up and take you from this place.” Oh, John. I’ve loved you for almost two decades and you still manage to sing what my heart is thinking.

Sufjan Stevens – Movement II: Sleeping Invader

This is a standout track on Stevens’ gorgeous instrumental album The BQE, which I’ve loved for years and listened to most memorably through noise-canceling headphones during a sensory deprivation scene with my Sir this year.

Sensory deprivation – like some drugs – can have the effect of amplifying the sensations you can feel. Listening to music while high or sensory-deprived (or both) can cause my brain to organize the input it’s receiving into a narrative that fits with the music I’m hearing. So as my Sir did painful/pleasurable things to my restrained, blindfolded, high little body, I found that those sensations mapped themselves onto the orchestral swells and pulses and pings of The BQE. The album wasn’t just background noise for the scene; to me, it guided the scene, echoed it, co-created it, fused with it.

This felt like a natural continuation of my relationship with this album, which I had once listened to while high and gotten so turned on from the beauty of it that I almost came, untouched. Music is strange like that.

Alina Baraz – Yours

Alina is on this list every year, and not just because it’s tradition at this point: she creates some of the sexiest music I’ve ever heard.

I got a little misty-eyed the first time I heard this song, because in the chorus, Alina sings: “Love me like I’m never gonna leave. Love me like I’m yours.” It reminded me so much of my Sir’s dependable assurances that he has no plans to break up with me, despite my anxious brain always fearing I’m about to lose him. There is something so sexy about simply feeling safe, especially when you go through your day-to-day life never being entirely convinced of your safety. I am skeptical of the whole concept of “lovemaking” – that ooey-gooey brand of hyper-vanilla sex that’s overrepresented in mainstream media and makes my skin crawl – but the arguably romantic act of my Sir murmuring “You’re safe” while he spanks me and steps on me and fucks me is nonetheless as hot and rejuvenating to me as a shot of cinnamon whiskey. It warms me from the inside out. So does this song.

The Esbjörn Svensson Trio – Eighty-Eight Days in My Veins

I can’t believe this song hasn’t made it onto this list before! I’ve loved it for at least ten years, since the days when I’d listen to JazzFM when I couldn’t sleep and take diligent notes on my favorite tracks if the announcers remembered to mention their names (this was pre-Shazam!). I remember hearing the intense, complex lead piano part on this track and feeling transported to another dimension, somewhere icy and angry and full of longing. (My love for this song, and this trio, deepened even further when I found out years later that Esbjörn Svensson had tragically died in a scuba-diving accident at age 44, with decades of beautiful piano-playing still left in him. Rest in power, you Swedish god.)

This song’s been in my aftercare playlist for a while, because it’s so familiar to me as to be soothing – I can sing along with the piano part as it skips erratically all over the musical map (what a nerd). But it’s a sexy song in its own right. One memorable evening this year, my Sir connected my phone to the Bluetooth speakers in the hotel we were staying at so I could pipe my aftercare playlist throughout our room after sex, but by the time we got to this song, we were already fucking again. He came in my throat sometime around the intense, syncopated climax of “Eighty-Eight Days.” It was for that reason that I texted him gleefully to announce when our relationship turned 88 days old. We are nerds and we are in love.

What sexy songs did you love this year?

12 Days of Girly Juice 2017: 10 Perfect Sex Songs

Kate Sloan

Here are 10 songs that gave me sexxxy feelings in 2017… What were your faves this year? (Pro tip: you can listen to all 10 of these, plus all the songs I’ve profiled in previous years of 12 Days of Girly Juice, in my Spotify playlist!)

Shady Elders – The Night Air

I made a note way back in February to include this song in this list; I’ve loved it for that long. It’s a sultry, spacey unfolding of sound. I especially love jerking off to it when I’m stoned off my ass. Marijuana makes the slick beats and smooth vocals coalesce so it feels like someone is playing my vulva like a jazzy old Fender. I can’t listen to this without wanting to roll my hips, close my eyes, and sink into sin.

Betti – Ordinary

In the tradition of Amy Winehouse and Adele, Betti’s hearkening back to the ’60s with this mellow and melodramatic love song. And like many mid-century hits, this one describes a relationship that borders on toxic and abusive, but is painted as quixotically romantic. “We argue til midnight, and make love til daylight,” Betti sings; “Fold your clothes out the dryer; one wrong move, and I’ll light them on fire.” I’ve never been in a relationship this mercurial, and I’d like to keep it that way.

Sometimes I like to imagine this song is about a consensual D/s relationship – or a relationship between two kinksters so closeted, they don’t even realize the capricious game they’re playing is a function of their kinks. It makes me feel a little less conflicted about lyrics like, “We break up just so we can make up… We’re so perfectly fucked up, one step short of crazy.”

Hippo Campus – Boyish (Acoustic)

There’s no way I could omit Hippo Campus from this list. Their music isn’t “sexy,” per se, but it’s most of what I’ve listened to all year. This jazzy acoustic rendition of “Boyish” is the closest thing they have to an anthem of lust – and in classic Hippo Campus fashion, it’s difficult to entirely parse what the song is trying to express. But it sounds sexy, anyway.

There are lyrical elements that remind me of various kink scenarios: “Daddy’s coming home but mama’s looking guilty,” for example, or “Wolf-child’s heavy with the weight of the world, storing all his love in an adolescent girl.” Then there are lines that allude to the tropes of toxic masculinity, like, “I never really knew if I did something wrong; all I ever heard was it wasn’t my fault.” I can never quite decide if I think this song is about a complicated, conflicted man, or a literal werewolf, or the latter as a metaphor for the former. In any case, this version is beautiful. (And I have a hell of a crush on Hippo Campus’ graceful, goofy guitarist, Nathan Stocker. Hnnng.)

Sleeping At Last – Venus

This is a song about finally finding a planet you’ve been sleuthing out in your telescope for ages, but it seems intentionally written like a love song. It’s a metaphor for that moment when you spot someone from across a room and instantly realize they’re going to matter to you. “After a while, I thought I’d never find you; I convinced myself that I would never find you… and suddenly I saw you,” Sleeping At Last mastermind Ryan O’Neal murmurs romantically as the first verse resolves. I’ve listened to this song dozens of times and it gives me chills every. fucking. time because I know that feeling so damn well.

“Venus” reminds me, too, of the electric exploration of a new partner’s body the first time you get them naked: the constellations of freckles and hairs, the sparks of sensation when you discover an erogenous zone, the effervescent present moment that extinguishes all external distractions. You are entirely focused on this beautiful person’s beautiful body – like you’ve got a telescope trained on them and nothing else fucking matters.

Oliver Nelson – Stolen Moments

This track was the theme song for a late-night show I used to listen to on a local jazz radio station when I was in high school. When insomnia loomed over me, and I felt too scared or sad to lie in the dark by my lonesome, I would turn the radio on – and there would always be someone at the station, growling in a rough baritone between meticulously-chosen jazz tracks. This was one of my faves, and still is.

Fucking to jazz feels inherently classy, like you’re doing it under a streetlight’s smoky beams in a gritty 1970s movie. Jazz is also a safer choice than some others on this list (see: Nick Jonas) if you’re wary of sexual partners judging you for your taste. I can’t imagine anyone complaining if you wanted to fuck to this sultry, stunning tune – and if they did, surely you wouldn’t want to fuck them anyway.

DVSN – Sept. 5th

I had a boyfriend this year who told me he wished every band sounded like DVSN. He used to blast their music while we had sex (along with Alina Baraz; see below) so I deeply associate their pulsating R&B jams with deliciously slow-paced kink trysts in a basement apartment that smelled of sandalwood and marijuana.

“I could make it better, if I could have sex with you,” the singer of this track warbles in the chorus. This notion resonates with me. Sometimes sex is like medicine. But medicine that goes down smooth.

Paul Cook & the Chronicles – Ships Pass

Has there ever been a sadder song about one-night stands? I’m no expert, but I don’t think so. This one hits the nail on the head, perfectly capturing that empty feeling that follows an ill-advised hookup with a stranger when what you really want is something more substantial. “It’s cold outside your window, but warm between your thighs,” Paul Cook croons. “We both know what’s happening, but we leave it aside.”

I spent a lot of time this year contemplating what kinds of sex I want to have, and why. I’ve come to the conclusion, again and again, that one-off hookups are not my heart’s desire or my genitals’ jam. For me, they’re like throwing back a few McDonald’s fries when you’re aching for a steak and a heap of roasted veggies. But sometimes you’re starving and there is nothing else available, and that is both dissatisfying and sad. “I will find someone who stays with me all night… Yeah, I will find somebody just right,” Cook promises himself, but it rings hollow. You never know how long it’ll be until the next special person crests over the horizon of your life.

Nick Jonas – Teacher

This year I went to a Body Pride workshop, at the end of which we were encouraged to choose a song that made us feel sexy and dance around doing a naked photoshoot. This is the song I picked. It’s impossibly slick and sexy, overflowing with funk, like a modern-day “Short Skirt, Long Jacket.” If you listen to this while you walk down the street, you will end up strutting like a supermodel. There’s no way around it.

As you might infer from the title of the song, “Teacher” also pings a lot of my subby kinks. With lyrics like “It’s like your mama never taught you how to love – so let me teach you” and “This game we’re playing makes me wanna break the rules,” my boy Nick fuels the fire of my staunch belief that he’s a big ol’ kinkster. You can pry my Daddy Dom Nick Jonas headcanons from my cold, dead, submissive-babygirl hands.

Dirty Projects – Little Bubble

This song does things to my vagina. I don’t know what else to tell ya.

Alina Baraz – Buzzin’

I’ve put a song of Alina’s on this list every year this list has existed. What can I say: girl knows how to make a sexy track. I don’t have much to say about this one except that I can’t listen to it without wanting to make out with someone, grind against a cute person’s thigh while they press against me, and/or party down on a great vibe. Alina nailed it again.

What sexy music did you love this year?

Tegan and Sara and My First Sort-Of Love

Kate Sloan

Tegan and Sara’s album The Con came out ten years ago, in the summer of 2007. That was a year full of significant events for me: I turned 15, came out as bisexual, and dated someone for the first time, that someone being, notably, a girl. And all of it is linked inextricably in my mind with The Con, because it was the soundtrack of my year. The soundtrack of my first real romance.

This was the era when someone’s taste in music seemed to say something about them, when MSN Messenger away messages and Facebook statuses were peppered with oblique song lyrics, when I’d creep someone’s Last.FM page alongside their LiveJournal if I wanted to know their heart.

That fall, I had the burn-your-life-down kind of crush on a purple-haired girl I’d met the previous semester in English class. I hadn’t really noticed her until, early in my sophomore year of high school, she confessed to me via Honesty Box that she loved my writing, and then revealed her identity to me, sheepishly, but wanting me to know. She was only the second girl I’d ever had tingly romantic feelings about, but I still recognized them immediately. Oh shit, I am in trouble, I thought one day when our eyes crossed from across the hall and I saw her blush as I felt blood rush into my own cheeks.

“I think I have a crush on her,” I confessed to my best friend, the first person I’d come out to earlier that year, in the girls’ bathroom.

“You should ask her out!” my wildly brave and confident bestie suggested. “I’ve seen the way she looks at you. She likes you too.” I feel a certain kinship with 15-year-old me, because a decade has passed and I’m still that girl who refuses to accept anyone could be interested in me until they tell me in their own goddamn words. I just don’t see myself as worthy of that kind of revere.

As I pined over her, summer hardened into autumn and I listened to The Con on loop. It jibed appealingly with my fledgling queer identity, giving me an image of gay women who were neither fully butch nor fully femme, and who didn’t quite fit the stereotypes of effusively romantic women nor stonily reserved men. They existed in an in-between space that felt familiar to me then. And though their love songs were ambiguous enough that they could’ve been about anyone of any gender, I felt the specialness of these being love songs written by women about women. If there is a particular aesthetic or mood unique to sapphic infatuation, I felt that in the songs of The Con.

One day we had plans to meet up at lunch, but my crush had earned herself a lunch detention, probably for being late to class – she was always late. She told me she’d be stuck sitting on a bench in the office at the time we were supposed to meet. I vowed to come visit her. At the appointed time, she snuck out under the guise of using the bathroom, and we chatted awkwardly and grinningly outside the bathroom door. “Kate! Your face is so red! Are you feeling okay?!” a friend of mine asked when she walked past and spotted us. I blushed even harder. No one was supposed to acknowledge my obvious massive crush on this girl; we weren’t at that stage yet, I felt. I just wanted to luxuriate in the pretense of mystery for a while.

Weeks of coy flirtation elapsed. She called me a “pretty girl” in a Facebook message and I squealed with delight as I read the text to my best friend over lunch. I saw the way her friends eyed her knowingly when she talked to me between classes, like they knew the significance of this because she had told them. We rode the subway together after school and a sudden movement of the train threw me against her as we were hugging goodbye, igniting a million fiery sparks in my nerve endings.

I don’t remember how exactly I decided, but one night I came to the conclusion that I needed to ask her out and I was going to do it by writing her a letter. Tegan and Sara are as likely an explanation as any; there’s a verse in “Soil, Soil” that goes, “I feel like a fool, so I’m going to stop troubling you; buried in my yard, a letter to send to you. And if I forget, or God forbid, die too soon, I hope that you’ll hear me and know that I wrote to you.” I wrote several drafts of the letter and eventually gave it to her at the end of a party. To my surprise, later that evening she called me and said, “So… We should date.”

We had talked many times before that night about how “Call It Off” may have been our favorite track on The Con, an especially perfect jewel on an incredibly perfect album. I even quoted it at the top of the letter I wrote her: “I won’t regret saying this, this thing that I’m saying. Is it better than keeping my mouth shut? That goes without saying.” But it’s a song about a break-up, and I didn’t see the dark prophecy of that at the time. It wasn’t until later that I recognized the foreshadowing as foreshadowing.

Our relationship only lasted five weeks, ending in a tearful phone call where she broke up with me for somewhat vague reasons: “I’m not in a good place to be in a relationship,” “I feel trapped,” “I don’t know what I want but it’s not this.” She cried more than I did. It was a small trauma that has informed every other relationship I’ve had since then: whenever I’m dating someone, I live with a constant anxious fear that they will suddenly decide they don’t want to be with me, and will break up with me for reasons I can neither predict nor understand. That was precisely what happened at the end of my last relationship, almost ten years after that initial blow, and it felt almost exactly the same: a shattering and a crumbling and a sense that I would never adore someone like that again. Like O, like H in your gut.

The break-up was compounded by the fact that we remained friends afterward. Immediately afterward. This is the sort of mistake I doubt I would make now; I’m an emotional masochist in many ways but I also know how to set boundaries and I know what will make me miserable. Remaining friends with my first sort-of-love after she dumped me made me miserable. She told me over and over again, in many different ways, that she regretted the breakup, wished it could’ve gone differently, thought we were a good match, wanted to get back together with me eventually, and didn’t want me to see other people. She was 15, so I forgive these ridiculous manipulations now – but at the time, they felt like knives going in.

“I may have done the upbreaking, but to quote ‘Call It Off’ in its entirety, well, I won’t do that because that would be weird and you probably know the lyrics by heart, but you get where I’m going,” she told me in a loquacious Facebook message a month after the break-up. “So really I’m the heartbreaker for breaking my own heart, except not quite to that crazy heartbreaking angst-ridden extent. And then I had a good thirty-six hours of physically restraining myself from attempting to grab the phone and call you and shout, ‘JUST KIDDING!’ or something to that degree but less comical.”

I listened to “Call It Off” in bed every night, sometimes crying, sometimes just numbly staring into space. “Maybe I would’ve been something you’d be good at,” Tegan warbled. “Maybe you would’ve been something I’d be good at.” It was my first introduction to the idea that sometimes what you mourn after a break-up is not the relationship that was, but the relationship that could have been. The idea of the romance you wanted, moreso than the romance you actually had.

It wasn’t until many months later that the spell finally broke. In July – more than seven months after our break-up – I told my ex-girlfriend about the new girl I was seeing, who absolutely, fully adored me and treated me well, both emotionally and sexually. I was excited and wanted to share the news with my ex, who was also one of my closest friends at the time: I’d just had sex for the first time, and it was great! But I worried she was anti-my-new-relationship, and told her as much in the message.

Her reply came back sooner than expected. “I am not, repeat, not anti-you-having-sex. This is because I am very much pro-you-being-happy-and-doing-whatever-you-want-and-not-giving-a-rat’s-ass-what-anybody-else-thinks,” she wrote. “The only reason I tend to shudder and vocalize rude things at points such as these is because I also happen to sometimes be pro-my-own-sanity. But really, who needs sanity? And anyways, do I really have to go into why I don’t like picturing you having sex with people, when honestly you can probably guess?”

It occurred to me then, as an uncharacteristic blinding rage swept over me, that she was holding me prisoner in a relationship that was never going to be a relationship. Seven months after breaking up with me, she was still moping like it had been anyone’s decision but hers. Still acting like she had any right to withhold love from me, even love from other people. It disgusted me. I couldn’t believe I had been stuck on her for so long.

I stopped clinging to the fiction that maybe we could get back together someday. I stopped hoping against all logic that she might someday be the girlfriend I needed. I stopped obsessively checking her Last.FM page to see if she’d been listening to Tegan and Sara, with the assumption that her musical nostalgia would signal romantic nostalgia about me. We remained friends, but I refused to continue “walking with a ghost.” I had better things to do.