Super Sleepy

Intimate Intercourse: Dating a Sex Writer (Part 2)

Kate Sloan

Hi again! Welcome back to Intimate Intercourse, a series where I interview my boyfriend/Sir/daddy, who goes by Super Sleepy Dude, about various topics related to sex and kink. This week we’re discussing what it’s like to date a sex writer! This is part 2 of a 3-part interview; you can read part 1 here. In this instalment, we discuss his decision to “come out” as my partner last October, why he made that decision, how he did it, and what’s happened since.

KS: So you were anonymous to my readers and followers for the first several months that we were dating…

SS: Yeah.

KS: How did you start to feel that you didn’t want to be anonymous anymore?

SS: I started to feel like I didn’t want to be anonymous anymore over a period of a few months. It was like, mostly me thinking about how it would feel if we were in the reversed positions – if I was a sex writer and the long-distance partner of somebody who couldn’t be out about dating me. I think that that would hurt me, and even though you said that it was okay, and that it wouldn’t necessarily hurt you, I felt like it might start to. And it was starting to. So, even before I had made the decision to definitely do it, I was talking to people about it from a risk-assessment perspective, of like: “I’m feeling [like I want to come out], I don’t know if this feeling will grow or shrink or what, or if it’s New Relationship Energy, or what direction it’s gonna go, but if I did this, how would you feel about it? Would you support me doing this? Does this seem like a dumb idea to you?” And people were really supportive of it.

KS: Yeah. I had thought I was okay with it for several months, and I think it was just that New Relationship Energy thing where everything seems perfect and great – and then when that starts to dissipate a little bit, you have to start thinking about real-world, real-life things. And I was noticing that there were a number of different ways that I was feeling like a secondary partner, one of which is the distance, one of which is being a fairly new relationship, and a major one was being a secret. Or feeling like I was being kept a secret, in that you weren’t talking about me publicly anywhere.

SS: And we’re both people that talk about a lot of things publicly. Maybe if I didn’t use social media at all, or that wasn’t as important a thing to both of us as it is, it might’ve felt different, but me being able to talk about other things, and wanting to talk about other things, and [being unable to] talk about you publicly, or even post a photo of you, or anything, was really bizarre, in terms of my life. That’s not a thing that I’m used to having.

KS: Yeah, and I would try to CBT myself out of feeling that way. I would go, well, look at all this evidence, privately, of you loving me and valuing our relationship. But it was this cognitive dissonance that I found really difficult to overcome, because I’ve been in so many relationships where people would say, “Yeah, I love you, I value you, you’re very important to me,” and then their behavior was just very different from that, because I think it wasn’t actually true.

SS: Yeah.

KS: And so I started to react with this sort of anxiety and fear that you were lying about it, in some sense, because you hadn’t made yourself vulnerable enough to go public with it. Some part of me felt like, if you really, truly loved me and cared about me, you would do that – which I recognize is shitty if it were an ultimatum, because not everybody is able to do that.

SS: Yes. Right.

KS: But I did get to a point where… I don’t think I would’ve broken up with you over it, at least not right away, but I was kind of like… This is important to me. I need you to at least start thinking about this.

SS: Yeah. What strikes me is that we were both kind of wrestling with that question in our own ways, and it only got better and easier when we started talking about it more, instead of just trying to deal with this in our own brains. That’s how we were able to solve it.

KS: Yeah. It was weird because it hit me kind of all at once, very quickly. I remember someone asked me on Instagram, I think a month or two before we started talking about this, “Will we ever see your boyfriend? I’m so curious about him!” and I wrote, at the time, what I honestly felt, which was: “No. He’s anonymous and I choose to respect that, and I hope that you all will too.” At the time, I remember feeling really confident, like I really believed what I was writing – and then, only a month or two later, I started to feel like, “Actually, this is like, ‘emergency’ levels of distress. I don’t actually think I can do this.” Because I also had the realization, around the same time, that this had been a recurring pattern in my relationships, and that it was just sort of slowly eroding my sense of self-worth, and my sense of deserving to have a partner who was proud of me.

SS: Yeah. It also makes me think back on some of the other sex bloggers that I’ve read for a long time, or read a long time ago, where they had many many many anonymous partners in a row – you know, ten, twenty anonymous partners that their audience never really got to know – and how they must have felt, or how they could’ve felt about that. I haven’t really read a lot of writing about that, about the feeling of not being able to talk about who your partners are.

KS: Yeah, because I think the assumption is that that’s just how you do it, that that’s just how sex writing works.

SS: Right, it’s a convention of the genre.

KS: And a lot of sex writers themselves are anonymous, so maybe they have less of a problem with it, because they understand it directly. But I have been not-anonymous for… almost 4 years now? So I’m just not in that world anymore, and I’m kind of past wanting my partners to be in that world too.

SS: Mhm.

KS: I remember being in the NoMad with you and we were waiting for an Uber that was gonna take us wherever we were going next… Oh, we were going to the Hippo Campus concert. And you were like, “Should I just do this now?” and you took out your phone and you had written this tweet draft where you called me your girlfriend. And we chose a photo to go with the tweet, and you sent it out, and then I had this intense sense of exhilaration, like: we just did this really important thing together.

SS: Yeah. Yeah, I remember that moment too, and I remember pulling to refresh a lot of times.

KS: [laughing]

SS: …Because, even after talking to my other partner, and my friends, and my business partners, and random people in my industry, and my family, I still had this sense that at least one person was gonna be really mean.

KS: Yeah.

SS: I didn’t think it was gonna be the primary reaction; I didn’t think it was gonna be a big deal, and I knew how I wanted to handle it. But I was like, “Okay, where is the mean person? Where is the troll?” And they just never showed up.

KS: Yeah, that was kind of how it was for me too, when I came out and started showing my face and using my name. For a short period of time, I lived in terror. I was like, “When’s the other shoe gonna drop? What’s gonna happen?”

SS: Exactly.

KS: And nothing happened. Everybody was perfectly lovely. It was more surprising than it would’ve been if people were awful.

SS: It’s super surprising, because we see so much negativity online and sex-negativity in culture, and it’s just expected that if you’re admitting to being a sexual person, having a bunch of stuff about your sex life online, that something bad is going to happen, but it doesn’t necessarily happen.

KS: Yeah. So you’ve been out now as my partner for five-ish months. What has the reaction been like?

SS: Let’s see. We went to a party together with a bunch of my friends, and apparently, before we arrived, people had been reading and discussing a bunch of your posts about me, and saying stuff like, “Oh, I could never do that sex act,” or whatever, and then when we got there, it kind of just vanished. I only heard about it later. [laughing] So I think there’s probably a decent amount of that going on – people just reading stuff quietly, not saying anything to me about it. Or waiting for me to bring things up, instead of bringing them up, which I think is a really respectful way to approach that.

KS: Yeah.

SS: There’s no way to prevent people from reading this stuff. You can say, “Hey, I’d prefer if you don’t read it,” or you can say, “I’ll send you the stuff that I want you to read,” but that’s really not workable. People are curious, especially about the sex lives of people they know, even if they don’t admit it publicly, and so I’ve kind of just said, “Hey, if you want to read it, read it. If you want to talk about it, talk about it.” But people have been pretty reluctant to do that, I think. What else? People were really excited to meet you. My sister, when I told her about it, I was like, “[Kate’s] a writer, she writes about sex,” and she asked, “Where does she write? What’s her site?” and I was like, “Well, I could tell you that, but I don’t know that you necessarily want to read it.” And she was like, “Oh, yeah, I just realized after I said that that I probably don’t wanna read it.”

KS: [laughing] My brother doesn’t follow me on Snapchat, for the same reason.

SS: Yeah. What else? I have gotten, lately, one or two kind of “off” comments about it. Just things that struck me. Not from friends, but… I’m thinking of one comment from somebody who said, “On Twitter, it seems like your life is pretty complicated.” And like, that just strikes me as either someone who’s uncomfortable with polyamory or someone who’s uncomfortable with being public about sex, or whatever, but who doesn’t want to go so far as to say what makes them uncomfortable – and that’s kinda sad.

KS: Yeah, that sounds like it’s probably a poly thing.

SS: It could be, yeah.

KS: What about your own feelings on it? How has it felt to be out as my partner?

SS: Great! It feels great. It’s just a thing that I don’t have to worry about it anymore. I was talking about it in therapy most weeks, and it was causing me a decent amount of consternation internally, of like, “Can I like this Instagram photo? Will someone look at all the likes and figure out the New York app developer that is in there?” It was causing me to behave in ways that I don’t want to have to think about. I want to be able to just talk to my girlfriend online and post about my girlfriend if it’s our anniversary or whatever. So, it’s great!

KS: Did it feel different from how you were expecting?

SS: The major difference was just that people weren’t mean. The positives were as positive as I was expecting. It’s great. How did it feel for you? Not just the moment of it, but how has it felt since?

KS: It has made me feel like our relationship is a lot more real and important to you, and also to me, which is something that I was struggling with. It has made me really happy to be able to show you off, not only to people in person but also online. It raised a lot of questions for me about, is it shallow or shitty or wrong somehow to glean enjoyment from this sort of exhibitionistic mode of expressing my love externally? But I think the conclusion I’ve come to on that, ultimately, is that that’s the age we’re living in, and that is a way that people express their love now, and that is valid even if it maybe seems kind of weird or unnecessary to some folks.

SS: Yeah, I feel that way too. It’s just another one of the consequences of living in a super connected, very online world, is that ways you might’ve been seen with your partner before are augmented by seeing people with their partners online. And it generally makes me really happy to see people in love and enjoying each other online. The times that it doesn’t are when I’m going through really hard romantic stuff myself, and then I think it’s kind of on me to moderate that.

KS: Yeah. I also have found it really satisfying and uplifting to watch how you have become more confident and relaxed about your kinks and your kink orientations since coming out – which I didn’t anticipate because I already think of you as a very confident person and someone who is very relaxed about your own kinks. But I did notice a marked difference in your willingness to accept identities like “dominant” or “sadist” or “hypnokinkster” very casually, and in some cases publicly, and that’s been really nice to see.

Check back on Friday for the last instalment of this interview, in which we’ll be talking about the upsides and downsides of dating a sex writer, and his advice for anyone considering it.

Intimate Intercourse: Dating a Sex Writer (Part 1)

Kate Sloan

Hello! Intimate Intercourse is a series where I interview my boyfriend/Sir/daddy, who goes by Super Sleepy Dude, about various topics related to sex and kink. Previously we’ve talked about phone sex,Daddy Dom/little girl kink, and erotic hypnosis; this time we’re discussing what it’s like to date a sex writer! I’ve split this interview up into 3 parts, which will go up over the course of this week. In this first part, we touch on his history consuming sex media, how he felt about my work when we first started dating, how we initially navigated consent in my writing, the perils of dating people who don’t want to be written about, and how he feels now about the stuff I’ve written about him. Hope you like it!

Kate Sloan: We’re gonna talk about dating a sex writer. Me! That’s me! I’m a sex writer.

Super Sleepy: You are a sex writer.

KS: So, you have a long-standing history as a consumer of sex writing.

SS: It’s true. I have been reading sex writing as long as I have been interested in sex, because I was a kid that had access to the internet, and when I started thinking about wanting to have sex or masturbation or whatever, I naturally gravitated toward it. So I’ve consumed lots of different types of sex writing. I always remember having a category in my RSS reader of sex blogs, sex webcomics, sex podcasts, and erotica.

KS: Did you ever envision yourself dating or fucking a sex writer?

SS: In fantasy, yes. Definitely when I would read some of the more erotica-heavy sex blogs, I would jerk off to, and fantasize about, dating/fucking the authors of those things. But never thought about it as a realistic thing.

KS: Why did it appeal to you?

SS: I think because I was somebody that was interested in sex not just from a perspective of “I’ll have it and then it’s over and then I’ll never talk about it” – I was, and am, somebody who wants to talk about the sex that my friends and partners are having, and want to talk about it beforehand and afterward, and want to know more about it from a scientific perspective and experiential perspectives… I think the fantasy of fucking somebody that was really good at it, knew a lot about it, and would be able to write really eloquently about it was just hot for me.

KS: Yeah. I think that the fact that you and I are similarly analytical about sex is one of the things that makes you a good partner for me, because I don’t feel like I’m bugging you or inconveniencing you by asking you really weird detailed questions about the sex and kink we do together for posts and stuff, because you’re always happy to talk about it.

SS: Yeah. Yeah. You’re not at all inconveniencing me. In fact, that’s a really important part of the experience for me. When I talk about what I need in terms of aftercare, it’s mostly the recapping and talking about it is the most important thing.

KS: When we went on our first date, were you conscious of the possibility that I might write about it?

SS: Let me think about that… In the back of my head, I suppose. There was a lot going on that day. I was not 100% sure if it was a date. I thought it might be. [giggling] It was in the middle of the day, so I didn’t think that there would be very much worth writing about. And, from following your tweets and reading posts on your blog, I didn’t get the sense that you would write about it without talking to me about it first, so I wasn’t nervous about that.

KS: And then we got to the Breather and I, for some reason, was like, “I wanna take pictures of this.” Did I say “for a post”? I don’t remember.

SS: You said they “might come in handy for something someday.” I don’t think you said “for a post” but I intuited that that’s what it would be useful for.

KS: Did that seem weird to you?

SS: No, that didn’t seem weird to me at all.

KS: [laughing] Okay. But you still didn’t want to be in the pictures.

SS: No, I didn’t want to be in the pictures, because, if you were gonna use it for a post, I didn’t want to be outed by it.

KS: Right. Yeah, I know. We’ll talk more about that in a bit… Do you remember the first thing I wrote about you?

SS: The first thing you wrote about me was that post. “Slow Burn.”

KS: Yeah. How did you feel about that?

SS: I was elated. I was over the moon when I read it, not just because it was about me, although that helps, but because it was so well-conceptualized and executed and it was beautiful. It made me smile really big and I wanted to send it to everybody in the world, but I had to pick and choose at that point. And everybody else that read it felt the same way.

KS: I was very careful about having you read it before I published it. I was very nervous about it, at that point, that you might feel uncomfortable about it.

SS: Yeah. Do you remember what you said to me?

KS: I think I said that I wanted you to check, in particular, the direct quotes, because it would be bad to get those wrong.

SS: Yeah.

KS: Yeah. Do you remember our conversations about consent around my writing?

SS: Yeah, I do. I remember us talking about it first in the abstract – like, how do you approach this? As a curious consumer of this stuff, I wanted to know how you approached this, just in your life, not assuming that it would be super relevant to me, necessarily. And then, as we got more into it, figuring out, oh, this might actually be a thing that applies to me, so I should think about how I feel about it. What am I comfortable having written about me? I remember I said that I don’t want you to only write positive things about me. I don’t want you to feel like you can’t write negative, true things about me – which I think some people might struggle with. But I think it doesn’t feel real to me if you’re only writing the good stuff.

KS: Yeah. I appreciated that a lot, because I’ve had so many people in the past who would be mean to me and then say, “Don’t write about that,” which feels insulting on many levels, one of which is like… I kinda feel like they knew what they were getting into. Not to victim-blame… but at this point, I only want to be with people who understand what I do and are at least somewhat on board with it and with being part of it.

SS: So at this point, you don’t think you would date somebody that said, “I don’t want you to write about me”?

KS: I think that even if I said okay to that initially, the amount of resentment that that would gradually breed would be too much.

SS: I think so too. I mean, maybe there’s a person who it’s not under their direct control, and they would want you to write about them, but they would get fired, or whatever, where it’s more of a grey area, and I don’t know how that would go.

KS: That, I feel, is a different issue, because that’s an issue of me identifying them, which I do with hardly anyone. But if they just didn’t want to be written about, even in abstract or anonymized terms, then that would be an issue for me.

SS: Yeah. Good point.

KS: Do you think that when I write about you, I capture you well and accurately?

SS: Yeah! I do. I think the mode in which you capture me the most accurately is actually on Twitter [laughing], because you get these little tiny slices of how silly I am and how my sexuality works. Slices of my dirty talk, but also slices of my silliness and my desire to make you laugh and make you smile and take care of you. If you read all the tweets that mention me, I think you get a really good sense of all the interesting parts of my personality.

KS: Yeah. I enjoy live-tweeting you. It makes me happy. Have I ever written anything about you that you felt was unfair or untrue?

SS: No, I don’t think you’ve ever written anything about me that’s unfair or untrue, but sometimes… so, I have tweet notifications on for you, and sometimes I get a tweet of something and I have an immediate “Uhhh, I don’t know if that’s quite right” reaction, but usually it’s just a momentary thing while I re-read it and am like, “Okay, I see what she’s going for here.” It’s like a flash of insecurity about it. But I can’t remember of those in particular, because it fades so quickly, and I’m like, “Okay, I get it.”

KS: Yeah. And I would delete things if you thought that they were wrong or bad.

SS: Yeah. I think I’ve asked you to delete one or two things. It was very early on, but I don’t remember what they were.

KS: Yeah. I don’t remember any. When we go on dates or have sex or do kink things, are you thinking about how I might write about it, and does that make you self-conscious about it?

SS: It doesn’t make me self-conscious about it. I think about it sometimes as another reason to push into new areas, another reason to explore things I haven’t done before, or things you haven’t done before, because it might make a good, interesting experience and a good thing to share. But I think about that in terms of, like, going to new cities and trying new restaurants… Everything in my life is sometimes looked at through the lens of, “What’s a thing I haven’t done before that might be cool, that I might wanna try?” Like, if I’m looking at a menu and there’s a bunch of things I’ve had before and something that sounds good to me that I’ve never had, maybe I’ll pick that thing this time. And we also plan our sex more than maybe most people might. [laughing] So there’s some thought that goes into that, too. Like when we’re trying to decide how we want to fuck each other on a particular weekend – like, “Let’s do some stuff that we know we like, let’s do some stuff that we’ve never done, or let’s do that thing that we did a while ago but you haven’t written about yet, to see if we can find a new angle of it.”

KS: Yeah. This is one of the reasons that you’re such a great partner for me in particular. I’ve had partners in the past who either clearly were uncomfortable that I might write about them, or that wanted it, in a way that made me uncomfortable. I could see that they were sort of playing up their sexual persona or their romantic loverboy persona because they knew that I might write about it, and that artifice is really easy to pick up on. It also makes me feel sort of like, “Oh, you don’t like me enough to do this for me, but you like the attention or the thought of how you’ll be perceived by my readers, and so that’s why you’re doing it,” and that’s sort of gross to me.

SS: Oh, yeah, no, I don’t feel that way at all. What is an example of a time that you noticed that, or a thing that tipped you off to that?

KS: If someone who doesn’t ordinarily do a lot of dirty talk suddenly says something really dommy, in a way that almost feels scripted or rehearsed, that’s always weird to me. And I understand it. I think, honestly, that if I was dating someone who wrote about sex, that I would have a hard time shutting off that self-critical part of my brain that’s like, “Oh, is this good writing fodder?” So I get it. But I think it’s one of the reasons that you’re a good match for me, because you’re just more relaxed about that stuff.

SS: Yeah. I know that if we’re in a good relationship and having good sex, then the stories will come out of that. You don’t have to invent them.

KS: Yeah. I think a lot of people who I’ve dated wanted to seem really interesting in my writing, and the thing is, if sex or kink are really good, then they are interesting. They’re worth writing about. They don’t have to be wacky to be worth writing about.

SS: Right. Exactly.

KS: You mentioned earlier, showing my writing to your friends, which I find really interesting. What is your motivation for doing that?

SS: It’s similar to the feeling that I get when, like, I was interviewed on a podcast, or somebody quote-tweeted something I said on Twitter and it got a lot of likes. If I’m close with people, I want to share those types of accomplishments and appearances and stuff with them, so they can see where I’m at and what I’m up to. Texting a friend a new piece that you put out, that includes some stuff about me or is entirely about me and what we’ve done together, is a way to give them a window into a more private and vulnerable side of my life, and connect and discuss the things that happened in it, also, which is nice. Instead of just texting somebody, “I hypnotized my girlfriend the other night,” and then forcing them to figure out what that means and come up with all the questions, I’m like, “Here’s this beautiful thousand-word essay about it.” It gives you a million jumping-off points, you know?

KS: Yeah. It makes me happy that you do that, because I feel like a lot of people would be inclined to actively try to keep their friends from seeing stuff like that, and you’re just like, “Here, check it out!” It makes me feel like you’re proud of me and my work.

SS: I am!

To be continued on Wednesday, when we’ll discuss his decision to “come out” as my partner last October, why he made that decision, how he did it, and what’s happened since.

Obsessed & Distressed: Reflections on Rabid Love

Kate Sloan

I learned what love felt like from someone I couldn’t bring myself to love.

She was a close friend in high school whose harmless puppy-love toward me darkened into something deeper over our sophomore year. Try as I might, and try though I did, I couldn’t conjure the caliber of crush in return that she shone on me like fervent floodlights. Love can’t be forced, and she knew that, but I’m sure it made her sad anyway. I’m sure it also made her sad that we had a sexual relationship for over a year that remained only one-sidedly romantic. Look, tenth-graders don’t always make the most rational decisions.

I’ve spent ten years processing that relationship, and I guess she probably has too. We’ve made amends for the ways we fucked up, each trying to squeeze the other into an ill-fitting box. But what’s stuck with me most from that relationship was how obsessed with me she was.

(A note worth noting: this post will throw around the words “obsessed” and “obsessive” in their colloquial senses, and not the sense used in mental health diagnostics – although I and at least some of the people I’m describing have mental illnesses that feature some degree of invasive thought-loops one could consider obsessions.)

My tenth-grade paramour wrote me long emails and romantic poems. She kept up with my foibles on Facebook and Twitter, both relatively new and uncommonly-adopted technologies at that time. She mined me for minute trivia, plumbing my lore like I was my own cinematic universe. After a while, she knew everything from my favorite flavors of ice cream to my top 5 favorite Regina Spektor songs to my darkest fears. When our English teacher gave our class carte blanche to do a deep-dive on a topic of our choosing for our final project, she did her project on… me. Those documents are still tucked away in my Google Drive somewhere, curious little remnants of a love that once was.

It is, of course, flattering to be someone’s top priority and main focus – assuming this attention doesn’t frighten you or make you uncomfortable. But I think the reason her love comforted me was that it felt familiar. My crushes had always taken on a similarly obsessive tone: when I pined over pseudo-celebrities of the local comedy or theatre scene, I Googled them late into the night, memorized their answers to interview questions, gave them more real estate in my brain than perhaps they deserved. So when I felt that similarly laser-focused love being aimed at me, I recognized it for the love that it was. Though she was the first person ever to fall in love with me, it wasn’t hard for me to believe or accept; I knew what it was because it looked how I expected it to look. It looked like how I would love someone, if I ever did.

Almost a decade later, the shadow of that old love filtered through my consciousness again – because I fell in love with someone who wasn’t obsessed with me. And it hurt.

I wonder, in retrospect, if I was drawn to him because he was everything I’ve never been able to be: chill, cool, aloof. Aside from initiating our relationship by asking me out on Twitter, his expressions of enthusiasm toward me were scant. Maybe that just made me want him more. (Is this a lesson we all have to learn at some point? That the chase is fun but also exhausting? I hope I’m done learning that one.)

I felt – to partly dilute a word that maybe I shouldn’t be diluting – gaslighted. He told me over and over again that he liked me, loved me, wanted to be with me, but his behavior was comparatively devoid of evidence he wanted me around. He’d ignore my texts for hours at a time, neglect to keep his promises, back out of plans at the last minute, and pull away coldly when I wanted closeness and warmth. I don’t know that he was doing this intentionally, as the “gaslighting” label would suggest – but the net effect was, regardless, a sense of emotional whiplash. I kept reminding myself to listen to his words, because they no doubt were truer than my anxiety-warped perception of his actions – but actions, as you well know, tend to speak louder. His were drowning out his words.

I brought this to his attention only once, and came to regret it. We were looping the same argument we’d been having for basically our entire relationship: I resented that he wouldn’t give me the assurances I felt I needed, and he resented that I needed them. Grasping at straws, I tried to explain: “It’s hard for me to recognize love as love when the person isn’t kind of obsessed with me, because when I like someone, I want to know everything about them, I want to see them as much as possible, and I think about them almost all the time.”

Some part of me hoped he would counter with what I wanted to hear: that he did think about me constantly, that he was obsessed with me; how could I not have noticed? Instead, he replied, “I don’t really get obsessed with people. I never have. That’s just not how I operate.”

Wise and level-headed people in my life, like my therapist and my best friend, would probably tell me to just accept a lower level of attention and devotion from partners. Just because someone doesn’t pine over you nonstop, they might tell me, doesn’t mean they’re blasé about you. If you broaden your view of what love can look like, you expand your ability to be loved, to feel loved.

That’s true, I guess. But I wanted love I didn’t have to do cognitive backflips to understand. I wanted love that was more joy, less compromise. I wanted love that mirrored my own, that matched me in my wild zeal. So when that boy broke up with me, although I was crushed, part of me was relieved. It felt more peaceful, more pleasant, to know for sure that no one loved me romantically, than to beg for scraps of affection that never quite felt like enough.

When I met my now-boyfriend, then-Twitter-crush, one of the first things he told me about himself is that he’s obsessive. I thrilled at the possibility of familiarity.

It didn’t take long for me to discover how right he was, how core this quality is to who he is. Intrepid Googling and curious research have left him well-informed on a broad range of topics. He can tell you the top 5 best cocktail bars in any neighborhood in New York, off the top of his head. He geeks out about etymology, psychology, philosophy. Once, during a conversation over drinks about whether or not our D/s dynamic is technically 24/7, he said, “That reminds me of this quote from SM 101…” and pulled it up on his phone in seconds. I swooned.

As we got to know each other, he’d casually reference old videos of mine, tweets, blog posts. He got embarrassed each time I called him out on it, backpedaling and blushing audibly over the phone, but my screeches of “How do you know that?!” were never accusatory – only excited. For me, combing through a crush’s internet presence is par for the course; it had been years since anyone had made me feel spotlighted that way in return.

He commissioned me a custom perfume based on a list of preferences he cobbled together from research. He devoured my sex toy reviews so he’d know what I like to be fucked with, and worked his way through my podcast so he’d know how I like to be fucked. When he sends me flowers or brings me treats, his selections are educated guesses – or sometimes, exactly the right thing.

The more I think about it, the more I doubt that “obsessive” is the right word. The essence of romance, and indeed of love, is focusing on your paramour: giving them your attention, putting effort into them, demonstrating your enthusiasm for them over and over. That sharp passion is what was missing from so many of my past relationships, which is why it feels especially good in this latest one. I spent years making desperate excuses for aloof partners, twisting their apathy until it looked like love. I settled over and over for paltry affection that barely warmed my skin, let alone my insides. I gave up on thinking of myself as someone worthy of obsession, even as I continued to furtively memorize my crushes’ likes and dislikes by the dim glow of my laptop in the dead of night.

I’m so happy now to be loved in the way I’ve always craved, and so happy to have discovered that love doesn’t have to be a compromise at its core. Sometimes it can just be exactly what you want.

Love Through a Voyeuristic Lens

Kate Sloan

In the age of the internet, it’s normal for our private lives to play out in public. In just a few clicks, you can peek into a beauty influencer’s medicine cabinet, peruse a sex toy blogger’s prized collection (hi), or visit voyeur house private cams where you can watch the life of real people. Not everyone is thrilled about all this openness and exhibitionism, but it’s undeniably part of our culture now.

So, as a sex writer and certifiable member of the Oversharers Club, it surprised me how private I was about my current relationship in its infancy. I talked about it in oblique terms on Twitter, and mentioned to a few friends that I’d been texting with a promising new dude who lived in New York, but for the most part, I wanted to hold those cards close to my chest. Our courtship happened primarily late at night via FaceTime and iMessage, encrypted end-to-end, cordoned off from the rest of our lives. It felt weird to bring it out into the open by talking about it too much – like someone throwing open the door of a darkened closet during a heated game of Seven Minutes in Heaven.

But because this private intimacy was shared between only me and my new crush, it felt almost like it didn’t really exist – like it could be a mirage, a hallucination, a midnight fever-dream. It brought me back to my early days on the internet, when I’d build elaborate romances with strangers in IRC chats and then just go to school the next day like nothing had happened, like nothing had changed. Even as we escalated to using weightier words for each other – partner, boyfriend and girlfriend – still, part of me felt like: here is my “real life,” and here is this relationship, and scarcely the twain shall meet.

So it was quite a jolt the first time my new love – Matt – came to visit me in Toronto. Seeing him in familiar locales, like my bedroom, my parents’ living room, and the coffee shop I go to every week, was as jarring as a bad green-screen sequence in a low-budget movie. How could such a cute, sweet person, who had taken on an almost mythical quality in my mind, exist in the world at all, let alone in my life? I felt like Rob Gordon, the antihero of High Fidelity, when he looks up his long-lost college girlfriend: “She’s in the fucking phone book! She should be living on Neptune. She’s an extraterrestrial, a ghost, a myth, not a person in a phone book!”

He met my family. He met my friends. I took him to my birthday party. But none of it quite felt real – until, shortly after leaving the party, I got a text from my friend Suz, who had left at the same time as us. “Okay, so, creepiest thing I have ever done,” she wrote, “but when we departed at the subway, I could see y’all from the other side. You both looked so in love, so I took some creepy stealth pics for you.”

Matt and I giggled over the photos, crowing “We’re so cute!” and zooming in to examine our amorous body language. Something clicked. Seeing my relationship from the outside allowed me to believe in it from the inside. I felt validated: Yes, he really exists; yes, he really is that cute; yes, he really loves me! Some part of me had been continually nervous that he would evaporate somehow, that I would wake up from the dream or forget to save my game, and he would be gone. But there he was, in a handful of .jpegs, flirting with me on a Toronto subway platform, irrefutable.

Feeling observed in a feeling can make that feeling all the more palpable. Maggie Nelson writes about it in Bluets: “We sometimes weep in front of a mirror not to inflame self-pity, but because we want to feel witnessed in our despair.” Beauty vloggers know this, as do reality TV stars, theatre actors, Instagram influencers, exhibitionists and voyeurs. Like Schrodinger’s cat, sometimes it is the very act of seeing that heralds the seen object into existence. My relationship would have been real with or without spectators, of course – but my rock-solid, comfortable, life-affirming belief in that relationship? Maybe not so much.

 

This post was sponsored. As always, all writing and opinions are my own. Thank you to Suz for the photos; we love them!

Date Diaries: Towers, Oysters, & Amorous Nights

Kate Sloan

Hi! Welcome to something new I’m trying, Date Diaries, a feature where I’ll write about dates I go on. I’m revisiting a week I spent with my partner in Toronto back in December, for our first anniversary…

On Matt’s first night back in town, I went to meet him at the airport, which has become a tradition for us. We have a protocol whereby I have to ask him, prior to his takeoff, what he’d like me to bring him at the airport – food, gum, coffee, whatever – and then meet him in the arrivals area. It’s exciting, getting to see him at the earliest possible moment, rather than waiting for him to Uber to my apartment like I used to.

On this day – December 12th – I subwayed across town to Pearson Airport in the west end from a psychiatrist appointment in the east end, trying to read my Kindle on the train but failing because I was too excited to concentrate. Once we found each other in arrivals, we took a car back to my place, ~reconnected~ with some sex-‘n’-kink, and then were faced with the question of where to go for dinner.

This always happens. Usually he gets in late, because air travel is a chaotic nightmare, and by the time we’re settled and ready to eat, many restaurants have closed their kitchens. So it’s become a tradition of sorts for us to go to Bar Isabel on those first Toronto nights, because their kitchen is open until at least midnight (bless them, bless them all). It’s one of the best-reviewed restaurants in the city, and for good reason: the ambiance is chill and romantic, the tapas-style menu is impeccable, the cocktails are swell, and the servers are top-notch.

As the clock ticked over to 12:00AM of the next day – December 13th, our anniversary – I tweeted about how happy I was to have spent a year with such a wonderful person, and we toasted to our relationship, our love, and our future. Aww.

What I wore: I was feeling romantic so I put on the dress I was wearing the day that we met, one year previous. It’s a black and red floral-print fit-and-flare dress I got at H&M god knows how many years ago. I also wore my collar, of course.

What we ordered: We usually get the punch when we go to Bar Isabel; I think this time we got the “fancy punch,” which contains liquors, citruses, teas, herbs, and bubbly wine (they change up the specific ingredients on a night-to-night basis), because we were celebrating! We ate oysters, bread, manchego cheese, shishito peppers, and grilled octopus. Divine.

My boyf is an over-the-top romantic, making him a good match for someone like me who is sentimental as fuck and also likes to write about dates she goes on (hiii). For our anniversary, he surprised me by taking me to one of the fanciest and most tourist-y places you can go for dinner in Toronto: the 360 Restaurant at the top of the CN Tower. As we were walking to the elevator that would take us up to the restaurant, we were bustled into a photography area where they snapped some cheesy pictures of us in front of a green screen – hence the adorable watermarked monstrosity you see above.

The whole conceit of the 360 Restaurant is that you get the best possible view of Toronto, and the entire restaurant rotates slowly, so you get to see all the way around over the course of your meal. I hadn’t been up there since my mom took me to an opening-night party for The Lion King back when she was working as an entertainment reporter more than a decade ago, so it was cool to go back, especially with someone I love so much.

After dinner, we checked out the famous glass floor and then cabbed to Civil Liberties for a nightcap before heading home. Ideal date night!

What I wore: Sir told me weeks beforehand that if I planned on buying a new dress for our anniversary, he wanted it to be blue and shiny/sparkly in some way – which, honestly, knowing me, it would’ve been anyway. I trawled the local mall all day, trying on several unsatisfactory contenders, before finally landing on this $17 pale blue velvet spaghetti-strap dress from Forever 21. I wore it with black tights, my collar, a black cashmere cardigan, and the gorgeous blue Coach bag Matt had just given me as an anniversary gift. The suit he’s wearing, by the way, is the same one he wore on our second date; aww.

What we ordered: We split a dozen oysters and I thiiink I had roasted salmon with risotto on the side. And, as per usual, we drank excellent cocktails, though I can’t remember what they were. I was pretty focused on the cute boy across the table from me!

Sir introduced me to La Banane and it’s become one of our favorite Toronto dinner spots. The food and service are both absolutely incredible. I feel like a queen every time we go here.

After dinner, we rounded out our evening by going to see Hook-Up at the Bad Dog Theatre (their hilarious and often quite romantic runaway hit) and stopping by Civil Liberties again for more cocktails. Three of our very favorite things in one night – amazing!

What I wore: This dress is one of Sir’s faves in my wardrobe so he chose it for our fancy night out; it’s a form-fitting, low-cut, navy velvet dress with an asymmetric hem. I bought it at Forever 21 when I briefly had a sugar daddy, envisioning wearing it on elegant dates with him, though that plan never came to pass! This time I paired it with black tights, a black cashmere cardigan, my collar, and my new Coach bag again.

What we ordered: Our appetizers were oysters again (we’re so predictable) and seared foie gras with hazelnuts and a little cup of wine on the side. I had their duck breast entrée (soooo tender and good) and Sir had the Eurobass. My fave cocktail here is the Penicillin; I don’t normally like smoky Scotch but this drink blends it with lemon, ginger, and honey, making it much more palatable. Toward the end of the meal, the restaurant staff had to re-seat us to make room for a big group that was coming in, and they sent over two glasses of amaro on the house for our trouble (my first time ever trying amaro!). Sooo fuckin’ classy.

Been on any date you’ve especially loved lately?