my earliest memory of romantic love (in relation to me) is this vivid dream i used to have - a man was on the brink of death, an apparition appears illuminated by my night light, she tells me that this man will die unless i love him, i agree to love him immediately, to save him. why do i agree to marry and love him so easily? why was my first conception of romantic love so linked with death?
if this is indicative of how i first became acquainted with love, then what was my first perception of sex?
when i was 13/14, i accidentally sexted a boy i met from this religious thing i used to go to. i was in my living room, sleeping on the couch (even though i had a perfectly good bed a few steps away), on my little Nokia phone, a luxury i was still getting used to, i was engaging in one of my first real "sms conversations". me and A were secret friends. at the religious place, we barely spoke, but for some reason, we texted a lot. it was odd. i didnt like being associated with him in real life. but the secrecy, the clandestine texts, reeled me in. A wanted to be a fashion designer. i knew he had to be gay. but he here he was texting me about some other girl he liked. we started playing an sms-text game of would you rather - we slowly transitioned from "would you rather nipples on your eyelashes or eyelashes on your nipple?", to "would you rather big boobs or small boobs?"
we both started feeling tingly - for me it was a tingly characterised by wetness, for him it was a tingly characterised by hardness.
my first brush with sex. post would-you-rather-sexting, my proverbial dry spell would go on to last about 5 years. until i actively sought it out.
it'd be reductive to say it was peer pressure. on C's bed, during one of our many sleepovers, she was telling me about the recent sex she had with her then boyfriend when i suddenly blurted out, "it feels like you've all been invited to a party and im the only one who hasnt been invited". (i always did like a party heheh). but it wasnt the act of "sex" that i felt like i was missing out on, it was the act of "feeling sexually desired".
ive always a sort of disjuncture between thinking i was pretty but realising that other people didnt think the same way. i used to think i had an actual shot with my childhood crush J, until i dug up an old photo of us in kindergarten and realised i was thrice his size. maybe not so much pretty, but attractive - i've always thought i was attractive because attraction (in my head) takes into account the person's personality. i think i have a nice personality. but, bit by bit, little me realised people werent always going to see it. what did they see was an obese little girl, red from running (mostly walking) around the netball court in TAF club. boys did not give me the time of day. i thought my neighbourhood-pal was cute but when i tried playing badminton, i distinctly remember him laughing at me and calling me some sort of fat-related insult. i think i skipped ahead to sex to compensate for all the years of feeling undesired - to me, sex was the most powerful indication of attraction, an attraction so alluring that it coerced someone into action, to act on it. having sex was a big fuck you to the boys i used to play with on the playground.
i can separate the physical act from emotion, yes. but what i didnt foresee was that it'd be disappointing to skip ahead to attraction-affirming-sex. because it skipped past a part of myself that i love: my personality. my approach was disaggregated - i tried to neatly segregate parts of myself and affirm what i thought i lacked affirmation in. i'm not gonna lie, it did work. knowing and experiencing that there were people in the world who were attracted to me and wanted to have sex with me did have a profound impact on how i saw myself. to an extent, it un-did the years of feeling undesired, feeling neglected or looked pass, but i would be constantly disappointed (to different extents) when these men didnt fall in love with who i was. a weirdly inflated ego i have. i'd unconsciously make myself extra charming, extra understanding, extra funny, extra articulate, and yet, all these men wanted to do was to spank my ass. my new conundrum: why were they not falling in love with me? is my personality not as amazing as i thought? do i have to fix this now?
so i lost myself a little bit. it's not that i didnt know who i was. i did, i really did and do. i just struggle to show it on dates(?) and ambiguous interactions with men(?). i could easily be a body to them but i didnt know how to be a person. D kind of shared this sentiment, she wrote a poem about how out of body it felt to have sex. not because the sex was gREAT. out of body in the literal sense, like we literally felt like we were outside of our body, riding a random bearded indian fella we met online a few hours ago. subconsciously, i yearned for them to know me.
i only became cognisant of this when i had a brief encounter with someone who somewhat married "knowing me" and "fucking me". it gave me soOoo much satisfaction that he could say things like he liked that i was independent, out-going, confident, and not just that he liked my ass, breasts, soft hands. i became even more cognisant of it when this was abruptly taken away from me. this man became a ghost (geddit, cos he ghosted me) but more importantly, this unity of my physical attraction and personality, ghosted off with him. my tiny brush with a more holistic sense of affirmation.
ok this is why i stopped having (a lot) of sex with (strangers). for one, i didnt want this to happen to me again because it was so hard to recover from. my friends and i almost got in am accident and my first thought was that my last thought was being sad over a man i barely truly knew and who barely truly knew me. for awhile i didnt trust myself to make correct decisions about boys.
"youre going to get yourself into this situation again, because you've programmed yourself to expect the bare minimum and be happy with the bare minimum. so you're going to do this again because you cant fathom how to expect more".
okay something about that little sentence makes my uncomfortable but i wont delete it. its not that these men were monsters, they entered into something purely physical, its just that they werent the nicest about it + i had some weird expectation that they would be so enamoured by me. so its not their faults, no.
my little break has served me well. in this time ive voiced out when i wanted to stop having sex with a man because i realised i wasnt attracted to him, had sex with a complete stranger and left immediately after because i realised i didnt particularly enjoy it or his company and had actual good sex where i had the space to voice out what i wanted.
baby steps.
i still like having sex and i dont think i can get used to a life where i go cold-turkey. but im appreciating it now for other reasons: no more rhetoric about affirmation - the only thing these men need to give me are orgasms and some kindness. they dont need to be fixing my years of insecurities.
now in my second attempt, i want to have sex with people that i attempt to get to know first. i want us both to make an earnest attempt at getting to know each other so the sex feel fuller, more whole. im still not out there tryna look for loVe or a reLationship. its taken me awhile but i truly dont want those things anymore. i like being a little free. ok some people have laughed and said that sex + vibing is basically a relationship with no commitment. but i think its different. (ok i could be wrong, like ive said before, i am not to be trusted). but it feels different??
who knows honestly. maybe the true secret to my happiness is celibacy.
thank you for reading this incoherent blabber. i will revisit this in my dark times, when i forget who i am. (or maybe when im in bed once more with a stranger)
