On t (part 1)

I have competing urges when it comes to writing about T, about our relationship, about our sex. I’m proud of us, and like a little boy with his penis, I want to show off the things of which I’m proud. We’ve been through the wars – only some of which you’ve read about, even if you’ve read every word of this blog. And I’m proud not just that we are still standing, but that we’ve forged a path to unprecedented contentment for both of us. (“I’m happier than I’ve ever been,” she said to me one morning last week. I feel the same.) And that our marriage, so unfamiliar in its structure and organization to many, seems, at least for now, to work so very well – and yet, so very differently – for each of us.

I sometimes feel bad about the image created by this blog, of me as a hypersexual free agent, doing my own thing: that’s wrong. I am, on occasion,a free agent. But by far the largest part of my sex life, whether physical or mental, is with my wife – and, that part which isn’t? The sharing of it is itself a big part not just of our sex life, but of our emotional relationship. She reads all of (or at least, all of what she finds interesting in) my (N’s, that is; not my alter’s) email. I read hers (T’s, that is; not her alter’s). And we both read one another’s blogs. (Yes, she has a blog. The writing is far superior to mine, but has about one entry or two per month. And no, you can’t have the link.)  More on our reading one another’s e-mail below.

And there’s the fact of T, of who she is, of how she is, of what she means to me. Anyone reading this blog knows a fuckload about me, and there’s something wrong with someone thinking they know me and not knowing about T, about my feelings about her, about her role in my life, my recovery (such as it was/is), my existence today and prospectively. We are fundamentally in so many ways a unit, and who she is is so fundamental to who I am that I feel almost as if there’s a massive chasm in any image you may have of me from reading this blog without understanding our relationship better.

And finally, about my desire:  this blog is mostly about my desire for people other than T.  But it is, more than anyone else, T whom I desire.  I’ve written about that self-serving lie I told myself during my compulsive, CPOS days – that all of my sexual sojourns were, on some level, in service of our marriage, in service of my sex life with T.

It’s a strange thing, this lie:  clearly it was a self-serving, deluded, pathetic lie.  But you know what?  Just because it was a lie doesn’t mean it wasn’t true.  I wanted, I want, an awesome, fulfilling sex life with T.  I desire her, her body, her mind.  I love fooling around with her, love fucking her. And while it turns out that I’m not (at least not today) either particularly good at nor capable of conventional monogamy, it is in the realm of our relationship, our SEX, that the greatest improvement to my happiness has come since this path all began.

T’s insanely, smolderingly hot – she turns heads, invariably; her legs were the first thing I noticed about her, but they weren’t the last.  Her eyes – steel blue – are glorious, clear, loving and sexy at the same time.  The hottest thing about them?  How they can’t meet mine after we’ve been apart for a day or two, how she gets shy and hides them from me, until we reestablish our connection.  Her ass is perfect, heart-shaped. I have been buying her successively smaller, successively shorter pairs of denim shorts in recent years, as well as sexier panties. I want her clothes to communicate how sexy she is, how sexy I know she is to others, how sexy I find her, I want her to feel it in her bones.  Her breasts are perfect – C-cups, delicious, just more than a handful.  Her cleavage is awesome in just about whatever she wears, even if it’s not meant to highlight her cleavage. Her belly is flat, her neck long, her clavicle, prominent.  In other words, I desperately desire, and am grateful for my access to, her body.

But my ability to communicate this desire, and yes, to a certain extent, this desire itself, was somehow dampened by the sense of her disapproval of, shaming of, me.  I had (have?) a profound, internalized sense of shame; T has, at times, been capable of reinforcing it.  Since that’s eased, first through her forgiveness of me, her acceptance of me; later, through the opening of our marriage; and later, still, through the blog, my ability to communicate my desire for her, the ways in which her body haunts me in the hours we’re apart, the excitement I feel at the thought of sex with her at the end (or beginning) of a day, has blossomed.  Or maybe, has begun to bloom, just a little.  And further, since she has found some of what she had craved from those other than me, she has become infinitely more desirable to me:  hotter, more radiant, more confident.

It pains me that for so long I couldn’t give her this, that I couldn’t do this for her at all for so long.  And I remain ham-handed in my attempts to communicate my desire for her.  But I’m so pleased that she has been able to find some of what she craves – what, for sure, she’s entitled to – away from me.  A guy she has, at times, fucked, recently wrote to her, “There is not a single square inch of your body that doesn’t make me hard.”  She and I haven’t discussed this particular e-mail, but I know her, I know that with this sentence, she got everything she always wishes I would, could give her.

But alas, this is a sentence I just don’t have in me, or at least, haven’t yet.  Not because it’s not true – it is.  But because it’s not how I communicate my desire.  Surely, in part, this is because I’m scared – of being rejected, shamed, of getting it somehow “wrong.”  If you’ve read much of this blog, you’ve seen the depersonalized, somewhat detached way in which I articulate my desire.  I continue to struggle here, to develop. But also, it’s just not how I write.  As I said to her just this evening, discussing this post, “When I write about my desire, it’s about actions, about verbs – it’s not for body parts.  That’s just not how I express my desire, how I feel it.”

In my twenties, I had a long-term girlfriend who was model-hot.  As we were breaking up, she asked me why I’d never once told her I was attracted to her, that she was hot.  The unfortunate answer?  The child my parents raised simply would never so disrespect a woman by commenting on her appearance.

I’m doubly reticent to say things like the things T craves hearing:  first, there’s simple fear – of rejection, of shame.  And second, there’s that internalized political reluctance to reduce a woman’s appeal to her body.

more to come