Is Your Relationship With Sex Actually Healthy? Mine Wasn't.

[me at 24, Easter bunny]

Feb 14, 2016. Omar came over at night. We were supposed to talk about why he never wanted to have sex with me, only he didn't know that. I'd been trying to bring it up for weeks, maybe even months, if I'm being still more honest. It just never came out of my mouth. Why would a 26-year-old guy be sleeping at my house all the time, acting like my boyfriend, if he wasn't attracted to me?

There are reasons it was hard to talk about, the principle one being that I was afraid of the answer.

I was already in love with him. I'd moved across an ocean because I couldn't risk not pursuing him, not seeing where my feelings and all the energy we created together went. And now, 5 months later, it wasn't making sense why he wanted to be so close to me but never have sex. I had some suspicions that he might watch a lot of porn and like many people under age 30, have been oversaturated and inundated with unrealistic sexual situations, that my offering of "regular sex" was not lighting any fires inside him. I also thought maybe I wasn't as pretty as the girls he normally dated.

Alone in my room, I cried thinking about Omar. Even though I knew better, I kept asking myself if there was something wrong with me that was making him not attracted to me anymore. When we’d met, and all the times I had come to visit him before moving to Barcelona, where he was living, we had plenty of sex. Maybe being around me more often was making him realize I wasn’t the person for him, at least not physically.

Transparency in relationships is important to me, so my holding this in was eating me inside. I could feel the maggots digesting the metaphysical me, and it hurt. The longer I waited to bring it up, the more distance I felt between us, our conversations, our connection. It was a wedge I alone created and perhaps alone felt, too.

So after a few hours of watching some videos on my bed, when the clock pushed closer to midnight and I had given myself the deadline of the end of that day to say what I needed to say, I breathed in and out deeply several times, mouthing the words. At this point, he was lying on my bed next to me with his eyes closed. I opened my mouth to try to say the words at least a dozen times before something came out: Omar, why don't you ever want to have sex with me?

I started shaking.

Has it ever occurred to you that you've been living your whole life in a fucked up way, at least in some area of your internalized existence? When I was 16, I lost my virginity to a really attractive hockey goalie. Why did that matter to me, that he was super hot? I didn't know, because that is definitely not what Dawson's Creek had taught me about sex. No, losing your virginity was meant to be a special, memorable occasion. But for me, I was ok to do it in my friend's basement on a moldy mattress, all my friends upstairs probably with their ears to the floor, giggling as they took hits of a joint that I had only moments ago taken a long, slow hit of myself in preparation for the potential pain and discomfort that could accompany having a large penis in my vagina for the first time. I knew it was large, because I had given him head a couple times already. He was the type of guy that didn't pay attention to if the girl who has got his penis in her mouth is choking as he pushed her head down.

We broke up just before summer vacation because he had been cheating on me with a rich girl. I was so mad at the time, though in retrospect, it seems like my ego was crushed more than my heart. I kept sleeping with him over that summer, proximity being a factor. He lived a few blocks from my best friend. We would go in her basement, or wait for his parents to leave; it was so quick and easy. Another factor was rebuilding my ego. I wanted to be the one to reject him, and if I kept sleeping with him, it would show him, I thought, that I didn't give a fuck about him, that I just used him for sex the way he used me. We'd sleep together and then I would immediately get up to leave.

One day, my best friend told me that she had also slept with him a few nights prior. I was devastated, but I didn't tell her that. I think that must have been for the same reason I kept sleeping with Bill. I wanted to be a person who was not bothered by our human nature to fuck each other, not bothered by my friend sleeping with a shitty ex who cheated on me. No, I was in control. I was not hurt when he broke up with me. I didn't care so much that I could keep sleeping with him and it wouldn't faze me. So cool and calm and not a stupid, sentimental girl. I was fine. So I didn't tell her it hurt me that she slept with him. I just made sure he always wanted me more from there on out.

And I kept sleeping with him in the fall. He would pick me up in his silver Toyota sedan and we would drive around smoking weed until we parked on some unlit street. One time, he picked me up, and one of his friends was in the car. When we dropped him off, I was in the back seat, and he said, how fast can you get out of those clothes. If it's less than 10 seconds, I'm all yours. I watched his clear grey eyes watching me through the rear-view mirror.

If we stopped having sex, I knew we would stop seeing each other. I don't even think it was about him after awhile. Why did I want to keep seeing someone like him? I didn't. I just wanted to be in control. I offered him sex and he came running. The idea that sex was inherently linked to companionship had its seeds planted firmly in me, I guess. And that a guy's first priority in being with me is sex. So I subconsciously started using sex as a tool, and it worked in giving me a certain amount of power.

The first time I fell in love, I was 23. His name was Brandon and he was in the same tiny graduate program as me, an MFA in creative writing in Spokane, Washington. We had both moved across the country alone (as most people in the program did), so the lot of us quickly got to know each other through our intimate class settings and the fact that we didn't know anyone else there.

Brandon, even after months of us dating, even after years of us dating, even after getting so close we could finish each other’s sentences, were each other’s principal editors, kissed and traveled and drank and fell asleep in our underwear watching movies together and moved to Buenos Aires and only spent more and more time together in that foreign place, he never called me his girlfriend. Through all of that, I thought it was the sex that kept him around. He told me it was the best he’d ever had, which I had to believe at the time. Who knows if it was true, or really, who cares. Those kinds of things are so hard to measure accurately. In my head though, I had to be this dream girl who did things like dress up as a sexy Easter bunny as a surprise when he showed up Easter Sunday with a bottle of wine. Who would walk away from that girl?

How did I get to age 30 still with this hang up? I’ve considered myself to be a healthy person mentally—self-aware and fair and kind. Some things slip by though, especially if not attended to. My unhealthy connection between sex and romantic connection was one of those things.

Omar told me he didn’t know why he didn’t want to have sex often, but that it wasn’t because he wasn’t attracted to me. He told me not to worry. He told me that he loved being with me, and sex didn't have to be such a big part of it. Why does it, he asked? But I cried anyway, feeling sure he was masturbating thinking about other girls and watching porn as frequent as any guy does, maybe more. If he could do that, why not with me?

A day before I was leaving for a trip to Amsterdam to meet my brother, we were supposed to meet up and talk about it again, for real talk about it after thinking about it for awhile. That was a little less than a week later. He stood me up, claiming he didn’t realize he had made plans with me, an obvious and traceable lie. A few hours before I had to go to the airport, I was not only sad, I now was angry. I told him that if he didn’t want to meet me before I left, then things would be pretty broken when I got back. Leaving us on that terrible note would produce bad energy. I felt so disrespected at this point, on top of feeling unwanted. It was a drill in my skull and in my throat.

It sucks to talk about this kind of stuff. It sucks. We sat by a fountain in a beautiful plaza at first. The sun was shining but it was chilly. Then we moved to a bench along Port Vell. It helped to keep moving, not sit stationary in one place. I told him I was open to more unusual situations if that’s what he wanted. We didn’t have to have a normal relationship. It could be open, or kind of open, we could do a bunch of kinky things, find someone for a threesome, whatever. I was so in love with him, I was willing to try some different methods. Maybe he had a problem, I thought. He had gone practically his whole adult life single, dating and sleeping with someone until he got bored, then moving on. He never made much of a connection, never felt attached. So this was different for him. He felt attached to me, and it was making him feel detached from me sexually. As if sex were something less intimate, less magical, just a set of physical actions that elicit a brief orgasm and that’s it. And he viewed the girls he used to sleep with in a disposable way, and somehow that translated to not wanting to have sex with me. I was not disposable. Having sex was in itself associated with a kind of disrespect in his mind. We had something bigger than sex.

It was hard for me to process that. I'd never encountered it before, and it was hard to feel wanted without the sexual component. There were other things too. A guy in his mid-twenties, who knew nothing but sexual freedom, had been with me for a couple months exclusively, and felt his freedom being infringed upon. I get it. I got it. At the end though, I told him the worst was us not talking about it, about him feeling like he had to stand me up to avoid talking about it. He had maintained this selfishness. Instead of thinking about how I felt, being this girl he loved but didn't want sexually, and then ignoring me, it was just easier to ignore me, so he did it. Before I left for Amsterdam, as we finished talking on that bench beside the boats and the water, I told him if he planned on continuing that kind of unkind, selfish behavior, then it would have to be over. The sex stuff I could deal with, but not disrespect. And he looked in my eyes and promised he would be better.

It’s been long over a year since that conversation, and we have sex, but it’s not at all like rabbits. Some moments, I’ve felt a kind of strangeness about how much less frequent we fuck than in my other relationships, and so I’ve brought it up again. Something we talked about more recently is his brain's connection between sex and success. He’s still building his musical world, driving hard toward success, but it takes time and energy. The kind of time and energy it takes means that we have less time and energy together, and it means he’d rather be spending it smoking a joint and sitting at the table and talking with me for hours about something beautiful than fucking and falling asleep. That’s what we do. We spend long hours having this intense mental intercourse and then falling into the night like we’d been dosed on something magical by fairies. Maybe when there is more time, more energy, when success hits us and we don’t have anxiety about money or the future in the prominent way we do now, our bodies will have a different response. Who knows.

It’s because of all this that I started to recognize my own unhealthy relationship with sex. Omar and I grew and grow closer and closer together. I’ve never been so close with anyone romantically, so honest, so real (and I’ve been close with a number of people). This all happened without me having to be some kind of sexual deviant, fulfilling his every fantasy. In fact, it has made me realize just how unrelated our relationship is to our sex life. I love love love having sex with him, but our relationship is built on something else. I’ve stopped associating sex with love, because he gives me so much love regardless of sex. We stare into each other’s eyes and passionately kiss and hold each other and hold hands and cuddle and purr into each other’s bodies without involving our genitals all the time. Who I was before, feeling like there was less love because there was less sex, it feels sad now to have looked at the world from that lens for so long.

Aside from my own personal relationship with sex that grew from my experiences, the media has a way of making people think they should be a certain way in their relationships. How could that possibly be true? We are all so different, and every relationship is so different. To apply the same rule as a blanket across them all and expect that to work in every case seems absurd. Yet, we read these articles that tell us how many times a week we should be having sex and what it means if we’re having sex more or less than the average person. Just saying, it’s been a huge relief for me to stop that horrible cycle in my brain, to think for myself about what works in my life and my relationship, not what supposed experts or internet journalists have to say about it.

I wonder if this happens to other people. It's not something I have told to many people because I feel like they won't understand, and that they'll tell me something is wrong when I know there isn't. Or if they don't say it, they will think it, and it will be something they bring up from time to time, and it will irritate me. Conjectures obviously, and I have talked about it as I went through it with all my close friends. But to others, even though I am generally very open, resistent to hiding things, this is a thing I consciously don't bring up. So I am bringing it up here, to Steemlandia. Maybe just to get it off my chest. Or maybe I'm hoping for feedback, wondering if others have experienced something similar.

That's all. At least I figured it out before dying.