Concrete Musings

I live in a community with about thirty other sex positive adults with a common practice. My now ex girl friend lives across the hall from me. This is an interesting situation. We broke up over the weekend for a bunch of reasons. The one that I’m going to focus on right now is that I was unwilling to compromise and make space for her in my life. You might think, “Muse? Really? How hard could that possibly be? She lives across the hall from you. If you liked her wouldn’t you be able to make the time to see her and be with her? It’s not like you have to fight traffic or park or anything.”  But to be with someone I would have to open up a space in my life next to work, friends, and my practice. Next to finding my purpose and exploring my desires, I would have to hold someone else and make space to grow something between the two of us. And the truth is, it takes a lot of energy to make a baby relationship grow into a full-blown intimate connection, and I starved it. And now it’s dead. But so did she. She wanted a cushion from loneliness really, and she thinks I’m great. But she didn’t really want to build this whole big relationship web either. But of course there are still hurt feelings and awkward and weirdness, and I can’t just avoid her, I can’t avoid looking in her room and wondering where she is when she’s not home either.

There are some lessons that I’ve learned from this short relationship experiment:

1)   Being single brings up the voices in my head that I’m not worthy enough to be loved. Being in a relationship quiets those voices effectively, but brings up a whole litany of other annoying voices (Am I getting what I want? Am I giving too much? Am I a good enough girlfriend? Is she going to stay with me? Does she still love me? Is she being honest or appeasing me? Is it better to be honest or avoid the fight). Neither is better or more productive than the other. They are just different voices.

2)   I am a control freak. Control. Freak.

3)   I don’t like to compromise my work for romance. Even though it feels warm in the moment it makes me sleepy.

4)   One day, I would like to be a mom.

5)   Being honest is the only way to keep sensation alive.

6)   Fantasizing about what I want in the future does not keep something salient in the present.

Last week I had sex with a man, he is someone that has been a friend and a lover for months. I have always been fond of him. But I kept him at a distance. We would have an intimate exchange and then not talk for a month or so and then come back and have another. It wasn’t serious, and it felt clean and uncomplicated.

Of course, though, things change. Everything changes. And last time our sex felt different. I felt open and like I showed a part of myself I had been locking away from him, and like he accepted me there and received it. It was beautiful. And now I find myself checking my phone for texts from him or keeping tabs on what he is up to.

I am in a relationship with a woman, and since we have been together the part of myself that craves others seems to have subsided. But this thing has opened, and out pours this hungry ghost. It feels like the part of me that wants to eat after I am full. It is the part of me that wants your attention and approval all of the time. I feel myself crack like that and then I want it again and again, like the sex becomes a drug, a short cut, to get me to that raw and intimate place.

However clean I keep my sexual relationships there is always this moment of pouring out, of real intimacy that arises. Sometimes the first, sometimes the 50^th, but it happens. How do I keep it clean even after it gets messy? How do I not vomit my hungry ghost on him? How do I keep it from going to that place in my brain that calls this feeling love? Maybe it is; and why does that have to mean anything anyway?

These are my questions. I am going to talk to him, talk to my girlfriend, and see how it all works out. And, dear reader (if you are indeed with my after my months of silence) I will report back to you from the trenches of love and relating maybe with some answers and certainly with more questions.