Policy: Don’t travel to fuck someone you haven’t met.
Yesterday, as T was reading over the e-mails and chats I’ve been exchanging with the woman I’ll call “P,” T shook her head admiringly and said, “I think you should go see her.”
in response to which, I articulated the policy above. This is a woman whose face I haven’t even seen, whose voice I’ve heard but once, whom I truly don’t know. I mean – I do know her. We’ve exchanged all sorts of intimate details of our lives, some sexual, some not. I know a bit about her travails and woes, and joys and pleasures. She knows some things about me that even the most diligent reader of this blog wouldn’t know.
But hell: I’m not spending real money, real time, getting on a big plane and taking a long flight to fuck her.
Right?
The brain/cock connection is so funny. Rationally, consciously, I know that’s right, not just prescriptively, but predictively. (And for the record, I won’t get on a plane just to fuck her.) But…
I can think of all sorts of reasons why I might need to find myself in the town in which she lives, all sorts of excuses to travel there.
T says to me, “What proportion of flights do you believe people take primarily for sex?”
“Oh,” I say. “Obviously, much more than half. I’d say, 73%.”
T nods, sagely.
Interesting, this was a topic of a blog post that my husband wrote. How far is one willing to go? Coincidentally, my husband met a woman in person, whom he did know what she looked like because her face is openly displayed on the internet, but she did not know what he looked like. The tickets had already been booked and she finally said, oh wait, I don’t actually know what you look like! Good thing for her, she found my husband very attractive. I find this absolutely fascinating. I would never travel to see someone… even less than an hour away, that I have never seen in at least a photograph with the intentions of sex for this meeting. I just couldn’t do it. I’d have to know what they looked like to even seriously make plans of going to be with them.
For me, far more than looks is in-person chemistry. For the most part, I know what P looks like. I mean, I have an insane number of pictures of her parts. If I were that kind of crazy, I’m sure I could stitch them together into a portrait that’s complete. Or, if I had that kind of a visual brain, I’m sure I just could do it in my head. But I’m neither crazy nor visual, so I’m stuck with the 250 different parts, instead of one sum. But that said, what concerns me isn’t what she looks like. It’s what our conversation is like. Because while I can fuck anyone once, if I find her even basically attractive (and I’ve seen enough to know that I find her more than basically attractive), what scares me is the conversation after our first fuck. Will I annoy her? Will she annoy me? Will we have anything to say? Will the conversation be stilted? Awkward? Painful?
The truth is, I think (I’m pretty sure) I know the answers to these questions, based on our e-mail and IM exchanges. But still, you know, there’s something about in-person physical chemistry. And I guess the point is, the stakes are so high – when you get on a plane to go see someone, carve out big chunks of time and money – then you’re really * invested* in its being a certain way. And that’s a terrible amount of pressure to put on something as unpredictable as human interaction.
I’ll let you know how it goes when it happens, because all the good judgment in the world notwithstanding, I got a nickel that says somehow, we find ourselves in the same bed (or alley, or bar, or bathroom, or field, or
car, or plane, or club) some time in the next (relatively short) span of
time.