I've been giving myself a short sabatical on men and introspection. It was a blessed relief.
But I've recently started seeing a man who is extremely HD, leading me to reflect on some of the conversations that happen here and thought it might help my thinking process on the road to SchnarchLevel6status to note it and discuss it with you guys.
So the thing is this is a fellow who has demonstrated his v HD status. There’s no doubt about it, he’d do it several times a day every day given half a chance. He’s v sexual, flirty, pursuing – all the boxes, but he keeps this respectful physical distance. For example we dated a couple of times a week for nearly three weeks before we kissed. It was weird, he was obviously into me, and he was constantly talking about how much he liked me, but he wouldn’t make the first move. Eventually I did and he was right into it.
Here’s the thing … he has this view that I know he’s always up for sex, so it’s my responsibility to let him know when I want to have it. I get the logic, but it just doesn’t feel right. I LOVE the feeling of a man taking charge of things. Don’t ask me, just do it. I spend my whole life being a strong professional woman working with traditional, conservative, men and I have to be tough and ballsy ALL the time at work. I want to feel like a woman at home – and strangely I’ve realised that for me feeling like a woman means being submissive??? What’s with that?
So, anyway, the result is that we’ll do whatever we’re doing on a date, we’ll be very superficially affectionate, he might drop a couple of light hints, but if I want to have sex it’s up to me to initiate the physical intimacy. (I’m kind of answering my own questions as I write here, I guess I could quip at one of his hints that I’m up for it as long as he initiates when we get home??)
The interesting thing for me is that having had, on reflection, an SSM I’m not sure if my views are just unhealthy. He says this way, I have total control of frequency of the sexual relationship, and isn’t that what all women want? I can’t argue with that. That’s the feminist utopia. But it still doesn’t feel right. It feels like I’m rejecting him every night I don’t initiate sex. It also makes me feel greedy if I want to have at every opportunity, like “I can’t initiate that often he’ll think I’m a sex-addict!” Know what I mean?
I guess I’ll talk to him about it and give-him-permission (?) to initiate. But that negotiation feels like I’m giving away my power to say no if he does initiate and I’m not into it. Gee, we want it all ways don’t we?
The thing I really wanted to reflect on was the feelings and reactions I had being in this relationship where the man didn’t overtly initiate sex. So obviously the first few weeks were fine (delightful in fact), but after about a month, and during a particularly stressful time with work for both of us things got weird. We work together on one project but I represent the government and he represents the non-government sector so we often have diametrically opposed views and positions. We really respect each other professionally, but we are poles apart ideologically (DanceQueen and Cyrena – I’m not quite at the finding the perfect partner stage but I’m getting there!! this is fun and interesting in the meantime) so there are times when we’ve had a heated day, things are tense, but sometimes it would be nice to reconnect in our personal relationship by being physical – thing is, even though he says he’s always up for it, how do I know if he’s up for it if we’ve just had a couple of hours of cranky debate? What if I initiate and he doesn’t want to? I hate that sort of rejection.
So we got into a pretty nasty downward spiral, me not initiating sex because I thought he was cross, him becoming more and more withdrawn and cross because we weren’t having sex, me noticing his crankyness and withdrawal and not initiating sex. We were both feeling rejected because we were just waiting for the other one to reconnect. Sounds dumb when I write it down like that, but the feeling was awful.
It ended when I was in a particularly good mood for some reason, we hadn’t been working together and I initiated. It was all it took.
