*10/11/06*
I’m almost treating this month as a foregone conclusion. It just seems to be slipping by so quickly, maybe because of the prospect of Halloween (and my 50th) looming at the end of the month. I haven’t the faintest idea how to costume the boys.
I resumed transcribing my diary onto another document (hopefully the main body is safe, just locked into another hard drive). I was just writing about the part when I gave Danny a massage, and he didn’t respond sexually, as I’d hoped. I got an interesting image of that as an analogy. The kernel of this situation, and most of the early relationship with Danny was that I was there, in my half of the circle, at the meeting point halfway, and he wasn’t there. There was a void where I would expect contact. I think that may be analogous to the real aloneness I carried inside of me emotionally. I grew up with parents who weren’t equipped emotionally to meet me there. And I think my response was to believe that I had to do the reaching, AND the reciprocation for the other person. I felt like I had to put constant input into Danny, or he would fade away. It turns out that I was in a situation that I reacted to with angst–waiting alone at a “meeting place” and not really being met, engaged. I wonder if this will continue to be a theme threading through these documents. I was very critical of myself at the time I gave the massage. I thought I was pathetic, and obviously so. I felt humiliated by the fact that I’d come to the halfway point of the relationship circle, and beyond even into his to invite him to engage with me. Without a word, it was clear the answer was ‘no’. I suppose inviting him over for a massage was me setting up for a ‘yes’ or ‘no’ answer; I’d fully expected the answer to be ‘yes’. Hadn’t everyone told me that guys couldn’t control their sexual expression if sexuality was provoked?
I think it’s important for me to know that having a gap where one would expect a place of meeting and intersection has probably been so much a part of my atmosphere that I had no way of seeing it, just living it. It came naturally to me to feel that gap, and feel like *I* had to do something about it. I suppose there were undercurrents too about experiencing that gap meaning that I was deficient in some way. Having that internalized early. The experience of waiting calmly in a gap until engagement with a partner took place was foreign to me. I think this may have been a major animating force in my life, that is repeated even today in the way I don’t feel Gary engages. A fleeting engagement “there” was enough to make me feel I was ‘in love’. Only to be crushed. Many times. I suppose a turning point was when I was angry with Rich because he was disengaging after having engaged with me. I’d been thinking of it as a moral failure from him, like he was obligated to TRY to love me. Then it dawned on me that the fact was that he wasn’t there, and a relationship with me wasn’t working for him, and therefore it couldn’t work for me either. It wasn’t about me trying to make them ‘do what they should’. I think that realization was very freeing, and indeed the next relationship I entered was the one I cemented with marriage. Only to face a different type of lack of engagement. And different kind of ways of advancing to try to do the work for both of us in engaging. The driving force for me is the fear that if I stop things will continue in an unhappy way indefinitely. As has been true with sex and our mutual experience of it. I did stop engaging it, did stop trying to agitate him to engage it with me.
1) There is for me a feeling of some sort of vitality and tension that would animate sexual feelings and expression
2) This causes me to experience him as clumsy and awkward in his approach to me, and he seems to accept this as “normal”
3) So on a deep level the connection hasn’t happened to animate lovemaking, and it’s further alienated by his approach to me.
4) My body is unresponsive. (I can ask for one thing, thinking it’ll feel good, then it doesn’t.) [I suppose that part of this depends on riding the crest of a wave, and touch being the outgrowth of the big force behind, which guides the touch and response happens as a natural outcome--and this is the part I haven’t been able to explain to Gary]
5) The above sets up an uncomfortable situation where I’m easily irritated, particularly when Gary does something I’ve repeatedly told him is uncomfortable for me–I mean, physically uncomfortable.
It’s been a while since I analyzed the mutual sexual experience between Gary and me, and I think that’s a pretty thorough description of what happens.
For me the Perfect Lover:
Someone with a robust libido, sort of always a simmering pot to animate:
Sexual tension, an undercurrent of desire that can be awakened
A strong life force, a taking in of the senses with gusto and unashamedly showing pleasure, and letting it flow out of him, and letting it guide his touch, and the MANNER of his touch
The ability to be aware enough of his senses to be able to enhance them with subtle shifts and changes.
Someone who remembers what gives more pleasure, and uses that as a springboard to enhance. Lovemaking becoming a creation, an entity almost, and each time there’s a unique creation
That’s basically what I want, and since it’s a little it more about *being* than *doing* I don’t know that this will be realized in relation with Gary. I can see a sort of overall blueprint where if I can stay with my plan of letting things go and not engaging in conflict with him that there’s a *possibility* that he may move more toward a meeting place. Perhaps if he feels more good will toward me, and that increases my good will toward him, we may get to a place where a ghost of the above dream is possible. But I think that any changes that are based on his willingness to be introspective are just not going to happen.
Well, that was a bit of a wander. Behind it is an idea: that in this next half or whatever’s left to me of this life that I finally get free of this sexual impasse, and not go content to be sex-less. To resign myself to not experiencing a full and complete expression of my sexuality. Because the last 15 years I’ve come to do just that. That does have implications:
1) give time for this path of non-engagement and see if that helps any sexual impulse that may have been buried under the blame stuff
2) I did marry him, and married him knowing that sex was a problem for us. Though I don’t think we said the words “richer or poorer…etc” that’s still the spirit of it. So it’s an ethical question: am I bound by being married to forgo sexual experience, even with someone else, when my partner and I don’t have sex, and it doesn’t look like ending the moratorium is going to happen any time soon.
I suppose the answer to that will govern my presentation in the world; how I make myself available. Does having married Gary exclude me from affairs, or does Gary’s lack of interest in pursuing it release me from the physically faithful part of my marriage promise?
AWWWW, shit. I wrote quite a lot and then realized that there was a second one of these documents. I’d written more on one, and so figured out which one needed updating, and moved it over by cutting-and-pasting. Thought I was then safe to close the document; closed the one that I hadn’t fixed, but then they BOTH closed, so I lost the changes–the several minutes of writing I’d done. I was on a bit of a roll, too, about shared assumptions. And how that long ago experience with Danny demonstrated what happens when people’s underlying agreements and assumptions seem to diverge. It had seemed so much a seduction context with Danny, yet he didn’t respond to it as such. And how that reminded me of the ambiguity of the possibility of shared assumptions with x –if some of the sexual language he uses with me is a tacit acknowledgment of attraction or if I’ve entirely created it all. I also talked about this being a situation where I can not ask him because it’s too risky in this time when I’m transitioning into being older and not quite sure if and where my own sexuality fits in. But I do wish I’d taken Jeff’s advice and asked Danny how he felt about me. I never did.
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