Fucking versus Making Love

I didn’t know I was having bad sex.

I thought I was having very good sex, actually.

I was an unbridled, uninhibited, sexual adventuress, unconstrained by taboo and willing to experiment, to push boundaries, to go that little bit further in pursuit of liberation and revolution. My ankles were looped around my neck and I left with bruises that lasted a week, and so, I reasoned, it must be good. Samantha Jones told me so. I got off on compliments about my oral skills and flexibility, because (urgh, this is mortifying) mostly sex had been about my ego.

The thrill of the chase; the build up; the seduction.

The validation, then.

The actual naked bit was largely incidental.

That I could do it was better that actually doing it.

(Mostly.)

Sometimes I’d orgasm and sometimes I wouldn’t. Occasionally I’d fake it. Almost always I’d keep my emotional distance, and seldom would I see him again. I’d never get attached.

But then there was him.

Intense, serious ways. Purposefulness. Deliberateness.

“I don’t mess around,” he told me. “If we do this, it’s because we mean it.”

He made my breath catch in my incredibly-interested-now throat.

He rewrote everything I thought I knew about putting that in there.

With him, sex didn’t happen to me. He didn’t fuck me so much as present a sort of invitation to do a very private dance together. No acrobatics. No toys. Most importantly - no emotional limits.

Ah.

Sex with somebody you like.

Killer. 

In fact, since then, every other sexual encounter has been revealed as a flimsier version of what sex is supposed to be. Like Diet Coke. Or frozen yogurt instead of proper gelato. I had absolutely no idea of what two bodies could do together, and now I’ve glimpsed it, the imitations aren’t enough. And while, for a multitude of reasons, a relationship with this guy just isn’t feasible – I’m not going to make a list, just trust me on this – I’m now left with a sort a hole. A big, gaping window that cannot be filled with a casual sexual encounter to satiate my appetite.

Because my appetite has changed.

My ego, she wants love, now. Not fleeting lust.

Maybe that was what she was after all along.

(It hasn’t passed me by that the two men I have professed to fall quite madly for in my single life are two men I haven’t so much as kissed.)

The reason sex with this guy was so achingly erotic is because it wasn’t about our bodies. It was more. After our first night together I had an inkling, and after our second I was totally clear: I knew what those songs, and books, and poems and Trojan wars had all been about.

It felt as though his body had been carved to fit mine. His shoulder was the perfect height for me to rest my chin on. His hand just right for the curve of my waist. More than that, he moved slowly. Took his time. Silently promised me with unrelenting gaze that this wasn’t about him, or me – it was about us.

No other moment can exist when you’re making that particular kind of magic. Dare I say it? Must I? Perhaps I am romanticising it with my writer’s mind and impractical heart: It wasn’t physical. It was… spiritual. Another plane, another level, another everything.

He made me feel safe. Like he wouldn’t leave me. That if I did him the grave honour of trusting him, of opening myself to him, he’d do the very same, and in that we’d be united as partners if only for the time it took to be together.

He wanted to be friends, after. We weren’t ever friends, I told him. But by God, you’ve rocked my world. He said, same.

A friend of mine, a fella, recently lamented his singleness to me by professing, “Laura. I just miss waking up, spooning somebody, on a Sunday morning, massive hard-on pressing up against her, and not caring that all of those weekend papers are still to be read.”

It feels like an enormous vulnerability to admit that yeah – me too.

For six months I’ve felt a growing hunger. I think that’s why, when my heart got dented by my old friend this summer, it hit me so very hard. I am ready, you see. Now I’ve pieced the parts of this particular jigsaw together I understand myself so much better. He changed me. The sex we had changed me. He taught me how to make love, and now I want more.

Thing is, you’ve gotta be in love to make love - or at least willing to fall.

And that’s the piece I just can’t seem to make fit.

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