There’s something I left out of my recent post — or rather, something I only glimpsed as I was finishing it — that I need to come back to now.
I was writing about my fantasies involving sex workers and the repetitive emotional uses to which I’ve put those relationships. But as I was wrapping up, something dawned on me: much of what I was describing, although heightened in the context of sex work, has been present in many of my commercial and non-commercial relationships over the years.
I think about Milica. Yes, my relationship with her was at least initially commercial, but it quickly transitioned away from that — stopped being commercial altogether. And yet the ultimate disposition of that relationship, the ghosting, revealed a distance between my emotional understanding of what we had and its evident reality. A chasm, really.
This has happened a dozen times. More, probably, to varying degrees. It happened with Charlotte, with Serena, with Sarah. It happened with Jude and Emilia. On some level, it even happened with Marina and with V.
To a certain extent, this is about me — about the intensity of my own idiosyncratic reality distortion, my insane commitment to simultaneously courting and avoiding abandonment. But I don’t want to let myself off the hook too easily with that explanation, because it isn’t the whole story. There is real reality coursing through this tale, not just distorted reality.
All of these women did present some version of themselves, and of their feelings about me, in a way that ultimately was belied by their actions — by the distance they took, and more than that, by the way in which they took it. There’s something about me, about the relationships I have, that predisposes them to ending in disappearance, in ghosting, rather than in mindful and intentional termination.
Don’t get me wrong — there have been a few of those. With V, in many ways. To a certain extent, with Marina and Charlotte too. Notwithstanding my longing to still be in some communication with Sofia.
This is a story about my commitment to repetition in every realm in which I interact with women. The venue changes. The dynamic doesn’t.