What Got Me Here: Part 1
In my first post here on the blog, I mentioned something that’s been a bit of a sore spot for me for many years, but I only barely scratched the surface of it:
Like a lot of people, I spent my mid-adolescence to early twenties experimenting with sex and romance and relationships, trying to find what worked for me. Even at 16 or so, I can remember thinking that I didn’t want what I was supposed to want, that I must somehow be emotionally damaged or sexually defunct (or possibly both). But that’s a story for another day.
Writing is how I process emotions and deal with my shit, and I’ve written about this thing before. Once or twice. A few times. Okay, many times. Just not publicly. If ever there were an appropriate audience for it, though, I think this blog might be it. I’ll warn you in advance: I have a lot to say. This is going to get long, so I’m breaking it up into three parts.
Content warning: mentions of uncomfortable sexual situations in my past, including times when I felt pressured or coerced into sex I didn’t really want.
A lot of things have changed for me in the past year – chief among them: my relationship with sex. We’re finally on speaking terms again after a very rocky, tumultuous, on-again, off-again decade and a half. I used to have a complex about it: a mess of incomprehensible FEELINGS creating a baffling pattern of capricious, hot-and-cold behaviour in my romantic and sexual relationships.
Theoretically, I liked sex and affection. I fantasized, masturbated, crushed, and pined. So why did sex inevitably start to feel like a chore a few months into a relationship? Why did the sexual overtures of my partners sometimes feel so stifling and unwelcome that even the slightest physical affection – a hug, a snuggle, even just the brush of their hand against mine – could make me deeply uncomfortable and desperate get away?
Who was this cagey, cranky, touch-averse recluse and what had she done with the warm, affectionate, adventurous, sexually curious person who had preceded her?
I started my first serious relationship when I was 17. He was a friend of a friend, and I was his second choice; my friend introduced us in the hopes that his crush on her might transfer over to me if I showed any interest in him.
Well, I did. And we were 17, so his affections were easily swayed in favour of the girl who wanted to make out with him.
A few months in, I remember he and my friend calling me up – conference calling was relatively novel at the time, so of course as teens we took full advantage of its possibilities – to tell me they needed to talk to me.
You know, a “We need to talk.” kind of talk. My boyfriend told me that my friend had changed her mind about him, and that he was still interested in her, so they were going to date now, sorry for the inconvenience.
I remember feeling surprised. A bit disappointed, maybe, but also genuinely happy for them. He’d liked her first, after all, and she dated so many assholes that I thought she deserved a good dude for once. I think I mostly felt relieved that they’d told me up-front rather than lying to me about it and seeing each other behind my back.
Still, it had caught me off-guard, so it took me a moment to formulate a response. I said something along the lines of “Oh, okay. Well, good luck. I’ll see you around.”
I knew that I’d be fine, I’d get over it, and I still wanted to be friends with them both. I was about to say goodbye, hang up and retreat to process and have a think about it all when my friend said “What the hell, Bri?” She was laughing. “It’s a joke. We’re not interested in each other. We just wanted to see how you’d react.”
I’m not sure what they expected. Did they want me to cry? To feel betrayed, beg him not to leave me? Beg her not to “steal” him (a concept I knew to be bullshit even then)? To make demands of them, yell at them, throw a fit?
If anger was what they’d been after, they got it. I was livid. They’d lied to me, tricked me, just to see if they could provoke a response, and that hurt me far worse than any rejection or break-up could have done. I told them if they ever did anything like that to me again, it’d be the last time they ever spoke to me, and I meant it.
In retrospect, I think they were testing me because he felt insecure in our relationship, didn’t know if I actually liked him in particular or if I was just with him in order to have a boyfriend, and she was trying to help him figure that out. I’ve always been quick to warm up to people but glacially slow to develop any kind of emotional attachment. I did like him, but after just a few months together, that’s all it was or even could be: fondness.
I ended up forgiving both of them, and the relationship with my boyfriend lasted almost another year. Though it turned out that the last six months of the relationship were a long, drawn-out break-up, of which I was entirely unaware until the very end. It ended, as most of my romantic relationships have, because of sex.
You Had This Spark In You
Aside from a few scattered experiences with people’s hands and fingers, he was the first person I explored sex with, though we didn’t have penetrative sex until long after we broke up. He was patient with me in my timid attempts to familiarize myself with his bits, and he never pressured me to do anything to him that I wasn’t ready to do.
Letting him do things to me, on the other hand…
I felt pressured to let him do what he wanted to me because what he wanted was to give me a lot of oral sex, and that didn’t seem like it should be much of a sacrifice. He really enjoyed doing it, and it made him feel good, and wasn’t that the least I could do if I wasn’t able to give him head yet because I was too shy, and all I had to do was just lay there and receive pleasure, what was so hard about that? (For the record, those messages weren’t overt, and they didn’t all come from him.)
The problem was that I hated it. It made me feel exposed, self-conscious, and very unpleasantly vulnerable. Sometimes if he managed to get me off quickly enough I wouldn’t cry, but the longer it took to reach orgasm, the more those awful, uncomfortable feelings compounded and grew, which made it harder to get off, which made it go on longer… the only way it ended was either an orgasm I resented because of what it had taken to get to that point, or an emotional meltdown complete with hyperventilating and sobbing.
Of course, thanks to that insidious cocktail of personal and social pressures on girls and women regarding sex, combined with 17-year-old-me’s inability to articulate her needs and limits, all he knew about it at the time was that I was crying because I felt insecure and vulnerable. Time and time again, I agreed to let him do it. I told him he could. I told him I wanted him to. After all, it was the least I could do.
The thing I learned from that is you can only put up with repeatedly engaging in sex that actively makes you miserable for so long before something gives. For me, what gave was touch. It got to a point where just a casual hug or an attempt to cuddle would send shivers of revulsion and disgust through me. I wasn’t disgusted with him, though. I still liked him, and I liked spending time with him. I just didn’t want him to touch me, because every touch was both a reminder of and a potential lead-in to an act I had come to loathe.
When we were alone together, I put literal physical barriers between us to keep him away from me. I held onto pillows or my purse – a comfort gesture I’ve retained to this day – or kept myself on the other side of a piece of furniture from him, because I didn’t want him to try to initiate anything. I didn’t know how to turn him down, so instead I made it increasingly difficult for him to ask.
From his side of things, you can only put up with a relationship in which you are repeatedly and consistently rejected, rebuffed, snapped at, and otherwise made to feel like you’re disgusting before something gives. For him, what gave was affection: his for me. The last six months of our relationship he spent growing closer to a friend of his who was interested in him, and in touching him, and in having sex with him.
We broke up because he said something disparaging about Our Lady Peace, a band I loved at the time, and I got upset with him for it, and he said “This just isn’t working out. I don’t think we should see each other any more.”
At the time, I was floored, because really? We just broke up over Our Lady Peace? I had no idea what to do with that. Two days later, I called him and begged him to reconsider, because Our Lady Peace was such a stupid reason to break up with someone, and if music was really that important to him then I’d just deal with the fact that he hated a band I loved.
That’s when the truth came out: he was breaking up with me because I didn’t want him touching me. “When we first met,” he told me, “You had this spark in you. It’s not there anymore.”
We hadn’t touched, hugged, kissed, hadn’t done anything physical in months. I’d just started to feel a bit normal again, to feel like I could breathe in the relationship, and then I found out he’d metaphorically moved out and changed the locks months ago.
It being my first serious relationship, and me being 18 years old, I internalized all of it. It was my fault. I wasn’t sexual enough, there was something wrong with me, I must be broken.
My second serious boyfriend broke up with me because neither of us was comfortable initiating sex, so it just never really happened. I think I gave him three blowjobs and a handjob in the entire year and some-odd months we were together.
Subsequent relationships have always ended because, even if they start off with good sexual energy and chemistry, eventually there is a tipping point and I begin to pull away. After the second boyfriend, I started warning my partners about this habit, but I don’t think they ever believed it’d happen with them. It always did.
I still don’t like receiving oral sex.
I think that’s a good place to stop. Up next: the fumbling attempts of my twenties to make sense of everything that had happened and how I felt as a result.
Windsor Polyamory 