Sex, Jealousy, The Origin of Everything

I'm working on a novella about a nymphomaniac and nearly every scene is a sex scene of some sorts - so I'm thinking about how I've never had what you'd call a conventional relationship.

When I was 19 it took me months until I could hold my boyfriend's hand and I abhorred the touch of others. We held each other, just hugging, for hours outside of a Baptist church, and it felt like an epiphany, relearning how human beings can connect with each other. Later he told me polyamory was the only reasonable relationship model and I cried because I always romanticized love as twin souls, two people against all earth, joined in an union that was indomitable. As you can imagine I have codependent and obsessive tendencies, and I agreed because it meant losing him. He told me how gorgeous the woman at the local IWW (Industrial Workers of the World) in Fort Worth was (I was in Oklahoma at the time) and I imagined them sitting on a ragged couch somewhere kissing, sharing a space I couldn't come in-between.

Later it was me who filled up spaces that he couldn't join - and after he left he confessed he just wanted to be poly because he thought it was cool, but at the time I felt boundless. I had never felt so free even though I knew what I was doing at the time was unsustainable.

I think the polyamory community is often full of lonely hypocrites, ugly people who desire others to fill endless holes. Whether or not we want to admit it, we're all in competition with one another - is she a better partner for my partner? Is she smarter, prettier, more compassionate? Do their neuroses fit together in ways that mine don't? Are they going to leave me for her? Am I good enough? Compersion is not the natural state of a human being, jealousy is. And time and time again I have been the "other woman," caught in a state of flux, pinned as an object of ire with another woman's vampiric butterfly teeth. And yes, I too have felt like I could never compare to the goddesses that have come before me, the models and myths that were not me, could never be me. I too have stayed up at night sick and hating myself for the way that I seem to have no inner structure - how I seemed to fall apart if someone wasn't holding me together.

I'm thinking about how I had my first foursome before I even lost my virginity at age 21 - and by the time I did lose it I can't even remember who it was exactly because at the time I had 3 boyfriends. I'm thinking about how I haven't kissed anyone besides my boyfriend in nearly a year when before I could hardly leave the house without finding someone to set my sights on. I enjoyed a lovely kind of self-destruction that involved the stripping of other people's skins. I often felt like a conqueror - for once I had power and I could see the visceral shift in the eyes of someone who realized you were more than they thought, the eyes of someone who wants to tear you apart and own you in an animal way.

I don't get as much out of that anymore. I know I'm worthy of love and I don't need to fuck someone to prove to myself that I'm attractive anymore. Yeah, I'm a slut at heart, but I want to build a structure of me that doesn't include the validation of others at its center. I don't have a desperate desire to find someone who enjoys my weird brand of dark-folk country music, for instance, because, well, I am ultimately the one enjoying it. I am at the center of me. I used to think I needed to share things I liked to feel complete. I don't anymore. After all, all I ever have is me.

Ultimately and completely I am alone even in company because I exist as a separate consciousness. I don't feel like I require validation of my existence or my thoughts as much anymore, which translates into wanting to be around people in general not being as much of a desire.

I am not monogamous, but I don't feel polyamorous either. I don't have the emotional investment to deal with more than one person except for transient moments. Really, you could say I am someone who is sick of dealing with rules. I want total freedom to decide for me what I want my life to be like (And spoiler alert, you have total freedom too. Maybe you just don't realize it.) and nobody else gets to decide for me "Strip clubs are okay, webcams are not." Or "You can kiss, but don't get naked." I had one partner who would pick and choose my dalliances. It's not monogamy that bothers me, it's the whole fucking structure that someone else gets to decide for me what MY boundaries are. Trust doesn't come from creating boundaries - it comes from disseminating them.

If a man decides to pick up a lady and meet her for coffee and that lady isn't me - does that mean he is less of a man? Does that mean he is disloyal, unfit to raise my children, a jerk, a liar? It doesn't have to. All it has to mean is that he has a life outside of me and the truth is he will always have a life I'm not privy to and that isn't just okay, that's a fundamental law of nature.

The control of your partner is a fear that you have made their responsibility. Do you realize how fucked up that is? Controlling your man and making him use location apps and forbidding certain websites may make him stay with you for lack of options - or he may leave because you're controlling. Ultimately you can't control anyone else. Nobody does what they don't want to, ever. That's the law of consciousness and will. It's terrifying, the lack of control, but if you ever want to be happy, you just have to learn to be okay with that.

Sex makes people weird and silly, and we're all vying for resources, scraping together a semblance of identity out of a biology that's determined to make us want to fuck as much as possible. Dogs will fuck in the front yard in full view of neighbors and traffic. We have our rituals, and usually require privacy. I've never met a person who didn't have some kind of neurotic tic, some kind of blinder, some kind of crazy motion born out of a memory buried deep into the back of their brain. I guess I'm so fascinated because people are so different when they're kissing - all the lines of them seem to melt into a fuzzy gelatinous substance and their being seems to pool and intermingle with the rest of existence. They are less of a being, and more of a "thing", an animal stripped. Surprise - we are all a part of this world, these chemicals, and cannot be separated from them, even when we put on suits and lipsticks and strut around like we live inside invisible boxes.

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