Serena and I are off to a Chemistry party. I don’t remember the last Chemistry sex party I attended, but it was probably a decade ago. I’ll go back and re-read my posts to refresh my memories of the culture and the place. But I’m excited—excited both for the adventure that Serena and I will have and for my re-entry into what I think of as some of the most joyous versions of adventurous, non-monogamous, sexual culture.
Part of what it is to be N. is to feel eternally on the outside, not to identify with any particular subculture, and always to feel just slightly, if not inferior to, excluded from, pretty much every subculture. I felt that back in the day, as I recall, at Chemistry—thinking it somewhat cliquish, that the people there were part of a world that wasn’t available to me. I’ll be curious to see how I feel about it in the moment now, but my hunch is: I’m in a quite different place as it relates to questions like this. I think I’ve come to learn that I’m not excluded from that subculture so much as it simply isn’t my subculture, that I don’t, actually, long to participate in it. It doesn’t operate according to principles and preferences and aesthetics that grab me.
I find it compelling and seductive and exciting, but it doesn’t speak to me on a deep level.
There’s a whole kink culture and a poly culture that I have never resonated with. I’ve always thought of myself—or not always, but for a long time now—as both non-monogamous and kinky. But neither of those things ever felt to me like something that I wanted to organize (a portion of) my social life around. Whether because of my sexual shame, my anxious attachment, my fears of abandonment, my age, or what, I’ve just always preferred to live out my relationship to kink and to non-monogamy in individual, primarily sexual relationships.
There have been exceptions to this. A couple of people I’ve met either through the world of non-monogamous dating or just incidentally in the living of my life with whom I’ve been able to connect around sex and sexuality and kink and non-monogamy in ways that did not include our naughty bits touching. But I could count the number of times that’s happened on the fingers of a deficient hand. It’s exciting when it does happen, as when, recently a good old friend of mine introduced me to her new boyfriend, a guy in a poly marriage. He and I clicked. We liked each other, had lots to say, had lots in common, and I felt a surge of manic excitement at being able to share this portion of my life with someone in real life, not on this blog, and with whom I’m not having sex and with whom I don’t want to have sex (and who isn’t having sex with my wife). That was exciting, and I’m grateful for the connection that I’ve made and for the connection that I hope will evolve in the coming months.
But that doesn’t mean that I want to go to parties of people like us and just talk or hang out or integrate these people that I meet in events like this into the rest of my life. Maybe this has something to do with my history of compartmentalization. Prior to 2009, my survival depended on compartmentalization on some level. And while that’s no longer true, I have a vestigial preference for compartmentalization—for keeping my deviant, dissolute self separate from my more professional or intellectual or social self. Of course, both parts of me are always present. The people I meet in the world of dissolution are quite familiar with what I’m like in those other worlds, just as the people I meet in those other worlds are, for the most part, quite aware of my dissolution. I just don’t crave bringing those worlds together.
Shortly, I’ll post a bit more about Serena, in all of this….
