Touch and Go

Sexuality isn’t just about who you are attracted to, it is about how you express that attraction sexually and interpersonally. I think one of the biggest problems in my life has come from thinking that my sexuality is supposed to be a certain way when that way doesn’t work for me at all. 

The monogamous narrative is that our sexuality is supposed to be with one person for the rest of our lives, and if you really love them you will want that. If you don’t want that you are a bad person. The heterosexual narrative says that person needs to be the opposite sex; which further limits the already restrictive norm. 

Because this was the ideology I consumed, it never occurred to me that anything else was possible. I remember seeing men on TV who had misteresses and I always thought I would prefer to be the misteress than the wife, which had its own shame. 

Misteresses:

are evil bloodsucking moneygrabbing whores with no hearts.  

are sad sacks with low self esteem who settle for relationship crumbs.

always die in the stories. 

make everyone miserable. 

can’t get a man of their own

are immoral women involved with immoral men.

are at the bottom of the relationship food chain. 

“…That’s when those louses go back to their spouses. Diamonds are a girl’s best friend.”

The mistress life was fraught with peril, so I only had one option: hetmono. If I could have adventures with my husband, that might make life tolerable and exciting istead of deadening and awful.

Even still, I avoided relationships until I was twenty eight and I didn’t marry him until I was thirty. 

Six years into my second hetmono relationship, I cracked. I told Tyler I was gay. I told Tyler I needed to be with a woman or I would die. I said I was suffocating. I said maybe we could be polyamorous. But at the same time I just wanted to be alone. I wanted Tyler to find someone else while I took a sabatical (I don’t even know what that is, but it sounded like what I needed). I wanted space. 

Since life is bonkers and unpredictable sometimes, I ended up having a sexually intimate (male) partner first, purely by accident I swear. But that relationship opened me up to the idea that I didn’t have to have a long, solid relationship. I didn’t have to do homosexuality or even polyamory the monogamous way. What if my sexuality is more sporadic and on a moment by moment basis?

Maybe my problem with marriage is the pressure to be romantically and sexually available for my partner all the time. I don’t work that way. I connect and then I disconnect and do my own thing. I roam around. I experience other people and other things. Then I return and I’m ready to reconnect again. This may be hard on partners who want a more constant kind of romance. I chose constant partners because I thought that was the right way. Now that I know better, I can choose more compatible partners for myself, or I can just communicate my relationship needs and see if that works for others, rather than trying to fit myself into their sexuality box.