Ed. note: This was written in 2013. We had multiple reunions. And break-ups. After this was written. But this was a moment in time.
Recently, my torrid affair with V came to a close. Amicably, sadly, it ended.
Over the summer, it was harder for me to provide V with what she needed, what had drawn her to me initially. Partially, this was simply inevitable: V, in her mid-20s, is a single woman with a hefty sex drive living in New York. Getting men is no challenge for her. She’s hot as hell, confident, smart, and fairly (and literally) dripping sex all the time. She’s constantly being approached and asked out, and she loves this aspect of her life. She enjoys seating herself alone at a bar and seeing what comes of it. And something always does.
When we began seeing one another, she had no interest in a conventional relationship. She was engrossed in her work, and I was a pleasant enough distraction. Obsession.
But with the passage of time, inevitably, she began to yearn for more than I, a hypersexual, but busy (and married) man had to offer. This was true emotionally, to be sure, but I think also, in the end, sexually.
Regular readers of my escapades know that they have not just commonality, but even constancy. While I’m on a journey of sexual adventures and discovery, the truth is, most of the discovery I’m doing at this point isn’t so much behavioral – what do I like to do – as cognitive, emotional: how do I feel, what do I think, about what transpires in my sex life. V is at a different point than I, learning not just what she thinks and feels, but what she likes. To continue that journey, she needs an n of greater than N.
There was more, of course. The pace of interaction, both virtual and real, that obtained during the school year simply wasn’t an option for me over the summer, when family time predominates (in my family). And, there was my sometimes ham-handed and not infrequently insensitive use of her for my own stimulation. Don’t get me wrong: she loved being used by me, performing tasks for me, purveying porn (in which she starred) to me. But she found my intermittent availability, and demands, problematic. Particularly given my maddening tendency to disappear mid-interaction, leaving her feeling not just “high and dry” (wet), but disrespected, neglected. She had a pretty substantial tolerance for my unavailability, but far less of one for my seeming disregard.
And there was not just my behavior, but my feelings. Given my previously stated ultimately limited repertoire of fantasy and f(r)iction, after a certain amount of time, the discovery part, the “new relationship energy” part of our relationship, began to abate for me. It’s not that I didn’t want her, or didn’t enjoy putting her to use – I did, to the last day, and I would again, in a minute, were we to resume. But the intensity, the urgency, certainly had abated for me a bit by the time she called it quits.
For me, there was another complexity: whether accurately or not, I felt increasingly pressured by a sense of obligation to her. Just the standard male fear of commitment? Maybe. Or maybe not. Our relationship was founded on a basis of rapturous, spontaneous connection. As with any relationship, as it aged, it mellowed. And in a love affair, in a marriage, this mellowing has pros (comfort, security, familiarity) as well as the cons of gradually diminishing passion and excitement and risk and discovery. In our relationship, in a relationship like ours, the cons were present, but the pros were mostly unavailable. Or worse, actively problematic for me.
I – rightly, appropriately – fear them, avoid them, run from them.
Any relationship of mine that sustains features a certain level of the meta, of talking about the relationship. That talking can go in two directions, only one of which, alas, gets my dick hard: it can be problem-solving (cock-wilting), or it can be simply appreciative (potentially engorging, but quickly glinting). Too much, in our waning days, V and I were talking about us, what wasn’t working right, why.
Perhaps this was a symptom, not a cause, but it accelerated our demise. My appetite for the more ruminative interactions diminished, and one way this manifested, in retrospect, was in increasingly terse, non-demonstrative communication. Which, unsurprisingly, didn’t feel good. To either of us.
There’s a caution in this, I know: Sofia, with whom I have a very different, and yet very similar relationship, surely has noticed some of the same tendencies between us. Perhaps our greater distance, the likelihood that we’ll never meet, makes it easier for her to forgive me, deadens the sting a bit.
Or maybe not. I don’t, honestly, know. Our relationship has almost completely avoided the meta.
In any event, V and I are no more, and I mourn her loss, even while I remember her fondly (and continue to wank to her voluminous, insanely hot, porn).
I wish her well.