Unforeseen consequences

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I think I’ve said in a previous post that I would hate it if the boy blogged about me the way I do about him. I’m pretty uncomfortable with anything that forces me to face up to the reality of the way I really come across to the world – whether that’s video footage, bad photos or overhearing what other people say about me. I daydream all the time, and the version of myself that’s in my head is a far softer, funnier, slimmer version of me than the flesh and blood reality.

But then, why would he blog about me? I’m not the only girl in his life, and his blog isn’t usually in quite the same vein as mine – it’s rare for him to write about specific people. Plus, I doubt my antics are blog-worthy – have you seen how few times I’ve actually blogged about sex since I set this up?! In fact, I tend to believe that he doesn’t really think about me at all in between the occasional evenings when we see each other.

That was perhaps an error. After all, I knew he was reading what I wrote. But: there were two things I never really considered when I set this up. The first was that the few people I mentioned it to might actually start to read it on a fairly regular basis. I only realised this when friend with the obnoxious ex-fling texted me out of the blue: ‘I read your blog post.’ 

Ah, that brings me back to what I said before. If I’d hate other people writing about me, why the hell should I expect to get away with writing about them, especially without their permission? She was upset that I’d blogged about being pissed off about her reaction to a particularly unfunny comment, rather than telling her how I felt. 

I tried to explain to her that I didn’t blog about it because it was a massive deal, or an unforgivable error on her part – I blogged about it because it was bothering me at the time, and because I thought there was a wider lesson to take from it. It was a snapshot of my feelings at a particular time, but now it’s consigned to a list of ‘Earlier Posts,’ it can be easy to overlook the fact that I’m over it by now.

Which brings me to the second thing I didn’t realise. I sort of overlooked the fact that, if you blog on a regular basis, not only about sex, but also about your emotions, likes and dislikes, it’s not that difficult for someone to get a pretty good sense of how you see the world. I’m not sure how this happened: maybe I didn’t think anyone would come back and read more than one post, or maybe I didn’t think that I’d be quite as open and honest as I have been, but anyway, that’s what’s happened, and people, the boy included, have been taking what I write here seriously.

I like to tell him he doesn’t care about me, as often as I possibly can. I like things that reinforce my view of myself, and that’s one of them. But then the other day he sent me an email, outlining the reasons why he does care, and also what he’s learnt by reading the blog, and fuck, was it an accurate character study. It turns out that it isn’t just uncomfortable to read about yourself on a blog.

There’s something disconcerting about someone getting it like that. Firstly, it makes you realise that, even if you don’t think you express your feelings particularly well in writing, you might be surprised at how vivid a picture of yourself and your relationship you’re painting. Secondly, it forced me to reassess my view of him: it’s harder to write someone off as an uncaring git when actually, they’ve been watching and assessing quietly all along. 

I can’t help but be reminded of the bit at the end of Bridget Jones, when Mark Darcy finds her diary, and all the nasty stuff she’s written about him. What was true when she wrote it has huge destructive potential at a later date. I don’t draft my blog posts, nor to I wait for my emotions to settle before I publish them. I often find it easier to write about the bad stuff than the good. Somewhere down the line it’ll probably fuck up my relationship all over again, and I’ll wish I’d never told him about the damn thing. Right now though, I’m glad I was honest about it.

#100HappyDays

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You might have heard of the #100HappyDays project. As soon as I started doing it, today, friends started popping out of the woodwork saying ‘Ooh, I read about that somewhere. It sounds cool.’ The basic premise is that, for 100 consecutive days you post a picture on Facebook, Instagram or Twitter of something that made you happy that day. If you manage to post all 100 pictures they send you a little book of them at the end, but that’s not really the point. The point is watching out for the little things that make you smile.

God knows I need it at the moment. I’ve blogged enough about depression recently, and what I intend to do to get better. When I first heard about #100HappyDays, I couldn’t really be bothered. But the bright yellow webpage made me happy (yes, seriously) and i realised that actually, I’ve always been pretty good at making sure I have those little moments of happiness in my life – I’ve just lost the ability to focus on them, that’s all.

So yeah, from now on, when I wear bright, lacy matching underwear I’ll be taking pictures (probably not that kind, though). I’ll be buying myself flowers, painting my nails, buying more books and wearing red lipstick. There’ll be photos of it all, but don’t worry if you find the whole thing a little bit too twee – they’ll be confined to my Instagram account.

If you do like the idea though, I’m curious: what are the little things that make you happy?

Going AWOL

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I’ve been thinking, since the post I wrote about depression, about long- and short-term happiness, both of which I’ve blogged about before, and which you should prioritise at any given moment. The depression thing has taken off since I last wrote – I’m now weepy all of the time, and the thought of using this blog to write about sex, love, boys, or anything that’s fun seems completely out of reach.

Yesterday, I spent the afternoon with a friend. I cried; she fed me milky tea and tried to make me feel better. Actually, she was full of great advice: find a new GP, one who understands mental illness, make sure they’re near work, so you can go often, and make sure you always see that doctor, not whoever happens to be available. With their help, try different anti-depressants, until you find the ones that work, both in terms of maximum mental health benefits and minimal side effects. Be kind to yourself. (I keep saying that, right?’)

Those are the things that I know will help me: but I also think it would help to step aside from the long-term goals for a bit and focus on creating a life which is happy and healthy, and where I make the most of the people around me and what they can offer.

It seems that inadvertently in my blog posts I’ve been putting across the message that what I definitely want from life is children with a long-term partner. In reality, I think that yes, that’s possibly what I want, but not definitely – right now I value my space and solitude way too much to want a long-term partner in my life. Plus, even if I do decide that’s what I want, it doesn’t have to happen by 30 – that’s just society’s fucked-up view of the timeline to which women should live their lives.

One of the things I do want to do this year is take back control of my life – one of my worst habits is looking at a diary that contains free weekends and either booking something in for all of them, or hyperventilating. As a result, last year I missed a shitload of stuff I would have loved to have done because I’d put stuff in place just to stop the weekends being empty – but an empty weekend isn’t going to kill me.

The other thing I desperately need to stop doing is sabotaging my relationships – questioning things; starting arguments; being negative – just because, as a therapist once told me, when those things do inevitably lead to the relationship breaking down, yes I get the satisfaction of proving to myself that my deeply-held belief – that I’m completely unlovable – is correct, but that satisfaction is pretty hollow compared to what I’ve given up in the process.

So, starting from now I’m going to stop sabotaging my life – I actually can’t remember the last time I went out and got drunk with a big group of people, but I’m going to stop feeling guilty for not doing it. I’ll see friends when I want to, and give myself peace and quiet when I need it. I’ll spend more time doing the things I love, like reading and writing, WI meetings and craft workshops, even if those activities are predominantly female and aren’t going to help me meet a man (thanks mum!). I’d like to keep having fun with the boy and not destroy the time we do have together by over-thinking the future – that one though is slightly less in my control at the moment.

So, what does that mean for the blog? Honestly, I’m not sure. Right now, I’m so low that I feel like every post is at risk of being a rehash of this one – and that’s the kind of writing that’s best kept out of the public domain, due to the fact it’ll end up boring everybody stupid.

Alison Tyler has kindly agreed to let me review her new novel, The Delicious Torment, on February 2nd, as part of her blog tour, so I’ll be back for that. Until then, I think posts might be somewhat more infrequent than they’ve been thus far. We’ll see, I guess.

Thanks for reading up till now x

It’s ok to be happy with a calm life

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Writing about depression consistently loses me Twitter followers. I don’t care – the ‘of sorts’ part of my blog name was always designed to allow me to write about other things that are important to me, and that’s exactly what I plan to do in this post. I wrote a shorter post on this earlier, but I’ve since deleted it, because I have so much more I want to say on the subject. If you don’t like it, go right ahead and unfollow.

I hate New Year, and this year was no different. I find the pressure of statements like ‘2014 is going to be so much better than last year’ almost unbearable, especially because depression always seems to catch up with me in the weeks after Christmas. This year, I should have known it was on its way. A few days after Christmas I was in a restaurant with my parents. They made a slightly critical comment and I burst into tears. The weepiness lasted the rest of the evening.

My parents are not great in this respect: they tell me repeatedly that I’m not actually depressed because my depression is always triggered by specific, upsetting events. There’s some truth in this – it often is – but part of the reason they think that is because often when I’m low I avoid telling them, partly because I know they don’t really get it. 

What really upsets me though, is knowing that depressive episodes are almost always triggered by people I care about. Sometimes it’s my friends, more often it’s the boys in my life. A couple of years back, I was pretty involved in a complicated situation with a depressed male friend and ironically, as he recovered, I succumbed to it more and more. He ended up offering to pay for me to have therapy, thinking I was resisting it because I couldn’t afford it. Nothing could have been further from the truth: I was resisting it because I couldn’t handle the stigma that came with being depressed. He was lucky I refused his offer though: to date it would have cost him more than £2k in therapy sessions.

I’m slightly more comfortable with the stigma surrounding mental illness now (good therapy will do that), but less comfortable with the way it’s treated. Therapy is risky – I did have a great therapist, but when I moved halfway across the country I had to find a new one, and I’m pretty sure that in the six sessions I saw her for she did way more harm than good. 

Anti-depressants make me even more antsy. I take them, on and off, but as soon as I start to feel better, I stop. This is a pretty irresponsible thing to do: they’re known to have side-effects, including mood swings, as part of the come down, which is why you’re supposed to reduce the dosage slowly and under a doctor’s supervision. Sheer bloody-mindedness means I never do: as soon as the depression subsides I get resentful about reliance on drugs to control my emotions, bitter about the fact that my emotional range is so curtailed and really, really fucked-off about the weight I inevitably gain when I’m taking them. And so I stop, just like that. And just as day follows night, several weeks later I’ll have a day just like today, where I get up, shower, start to cry, and have to go back to bed because everything else feels like too much of a struggle. Today, I thought I might make gingerbread. Then I thought of the mess it will inevitably make and couldn’t face it. The same goes for cooking meals. Drying my hair is too much effort. Watching TV gives me too much time to think. Basically, I just want to be asleep, but I’m not tired enough to get there. It’s on days like this that I wish anti-depressants could be given intravenously, just so their effect would be more immediate.

None of this stops me laying in to other people though: I’ll do anything, anything, to turn the self-hatred outwards for a bit, so god forbid that anyone should say or do anything that hurts or upsets me – I can rant and rave for hours because that’s what’s going on inside my head anyway. 

But as much as that’s me saying It’s not you, it’s me, I can’t help but wonder if the solution is to return to the kind of single girl independence I last had around 2007, when I was doing my finals and boys were the last thing on my mind.

I’ve mentioned in a few posts that I had more to say about this post. The way Juniper describes sitting on the harbour, wiling away the hours made me wistful as hell. I used to be that girl, the girl who could sit in a bar with a glass of wine and a book, watching the world go by and not fretting about the present, or worrying about the future. In recent years, I’ve lost the ability to do that – now I always seem to be checking my phone for messages from an AWOL boy, or worrying about the fact that I’m not doing super-exciting stuff with other people.

Depression has taken away my ability to enjoy my own company, and that’s the shittest thing of all. 

FFS, or, ‘The rise and rise of erotica for women’

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So, the plan for today was to write the second part of ‘Things I read in 2013.’ But, as often happens, something got in the way, something which matters more to me and which I think needs writing more urgently. Secretly, I like it that way – I much prefer writing posts about things that have got me riled up than calm, collected review posts (don’t worry, Part 2 will still happen at some point).

This morning I got up, and was all cosied up on the sofa in my dressing gown, watching Gary Barlow’s Big Ben Bash Live (although not live, obviously) and browsing Facebook, when I came across this article entitled ‘The rise and rise of erotica for women.’

Sounds good, yes? Sadly, like most things in the post-FSoG era, the truth is a little more complicated and a lot more disappointing. I’ll start by saying that yes, I’ve read all three FSoG novels, and sometimes I even defend them (I think EL James has mastered the romance plot. Do I think it’s erotic romance? Not particularly, no.) Plus, after FSoG was published, a lot of good things started to happen, which I thought were promising both as a reader and as an aspiring writer of erotica, not least that the UK erotic romance line Black Lace was resurrected.

Black Lace books have featured prominently in my life for years now. As a teenager, I bought them in secret and stacked them high on my bedside table, hidden by ‘real books.’ I’m pretty sure my mum knew they were there all the same. When they stopped publishing, I kept buying old titles from the only places they were still stocked – motorway service stations – and tried to avoid the curious looks of checkout staff more accustomed to selling overpriced chewing gum. I even mentioned this by way of an utterly bizarre chat up line to someone once, but hey, it worked!

So when it returned, I was understandably delighted. Except … I’ve been disappointed with nearly everything I’ve read by them since. There are exceptions, of course. I loved Kristina Lloyd’s writing the first time round, and I still do. Black Lace also own the UK rights to Alison Tyler’s Dark Secret Love, which I’ve just finished, and which I’d also highly recommend (review to follow in the coming weeks). But a lot of the other stuff has just felt gimmicky, or too much about the happy ending (no, not that kind of happy ending!), such as the Christmas anthology, Stocking Fillers (Black Lace used to do excellent anthologies – check out this one, if you’re interested).

The Contributoria article quotes Gillian Green as saying:

“Black Lace titles are erotic romances rather than a string of sex scenes held together by a thin plot. Women, it seems, still want their Mills and Boon-style happy ever after, just kinkier.”

Now, I read Mills & Boon – rarely, now, but often, in the past and I just don’t agree. I’m pretty vanilla (monogamous, Gary Barlow fan, used to enjoy the bit in Famous Five books where they all go home and have tea way more than the actual plot), but when I’m reading erotica, it’s the sex scenes that matter, more than the plot, or the ending. Of course it is – these are the books I use to get off. Someone asked me on Twitter the other day whether the ending of Kristina Lloyd’s Asking for Trouble made me cry. Er, no – because by the time I actually read the book in order I pretty much knew it inside out anyway. Which isn’t to say that Kristina writes a weak plot or a weak ending – nothing could be further from the truth. She just doesn’t write a romance plot (although she writes emotion amazingly). So why does Gillian Green think it has to be romance – why not an erotica thriller, or just a contemporary erotic novel in which the girl doesn’t end up with her guy?

Plus, the article also mentions that Black Lace “plans to publish a series of erotic memoirs.” Do these all have happy endings? Really? Because that makes me nervous. I wrote what could essentially be classed as erotic memoir for NaNoWriMo this year and Black Lace is one of the publishers I’d eventually consider submitting to. But what I wrote doesn’t have a happy ending, because I think true life rarely does. I’d be pretty gutted if, in order to find a publisher, I had to put some kind of positive spin on the ending.

My final bugbear with the article is the way it ends:

“All publishers and authors agree that stylish covers are important for sales, as well as good proofreading.”

Maybe Black Lace books do have what the industry consider to be stylish covers, I don’t know. Personally, I’m not a fan. They do, at least, finally have men on them sometimes, but when you compare them to the beautiful covers used by the US imprint, Cleis (this is my favourite), they’re pretty disappointing. When I bought Alison Tyler’s Dark Secret Love, I was disappointed to get this cover, not this one. I’m not the kind of girl who’s ashamed to be reading erotica, so please, let’s have covers that reflect the content of the book.

Still, at least there’s one positive thing to come out of this:

“Green says she is always on the lookout for broadminded editors who don’t flinch at editing explicit sex scenes.”

Maybe 2014 will be the year I get a new job …

 

Things I read in 2013: Part 1

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Lots and lots of people are writing year in review posts right about now, I know, so sorry for not being particularly original and just jumping on the bandwagon. I thought though, that seeing as this blog hasn’t even been around for a year yet, rather than looking back at the highlights of what I’ve written, it would be better to write about the best things I’ve read. Part 1 is all about blog posts; Part 2 will focus on erotica and will follow in a few days when I’m back with my books.

Because Sex blog (of sorts) was neither a blog nor a Twitter account at the start of the year, I went back to my personal Twitter account in search of good things I’d read. In January, there was apparently nothing that I enjoyed enough to warrant a retweet or a mention; and my memory doesn’t go back that far, so I guess we’ll have to assume that there really was nothing good out there. 

The same was true of February. It’s going well so far, this year in review, isn’t it?

March was better. Not only did I discover that there’s such a thing as a Naked Man Orchid, Girlonthenet also wrote about the way men smell. Just rereading the words ‘active sweat’ makes me wriggle in my chair a little bit.

April was bittersweet. Nic and Lace posted this wonderfully hot story about losing your anal virginity, which I still go back to whenever I need a quick turn on, but April was also the last time that they blogged at all, which made me sad, because I thought so much of their writing was excellent. On the love and relationships side, I really enjoyed this article in the Guardian by Ruth Wishart about deciding not to have children, and on the general life/health side, this one on keeping your shit together when you’re depressed. 

I’ll start May off by cheating a bit. Technically, this post by Kristina Lloyd, with an extract from her novel Thrill Seeker, should probably be in the 2nd part of this post, but I was so excited that she’d written something new that you’ll have to forgive me for mentioning it all over the place. I’ll come back to Thrill Seeker at the end of this post. Completely different, but equally thrilling was the fact that Allie Brosh started blogging again, after a long battle with depression – if you’re struggling to explain to family and friends what depression feels like, show them this. 

June brought Mathilda Gregory writing in the Guardian about whether werewolf erotica has literary merit, and a great post by The Pervocracy on domestic violence. Most memorably for me though, it was the first time that Alison Tyler put up a call for submissions that I actually had the guts to send something in for, and better still, it was for a great cause. 

Nothing at all for July, I’m afraid.

In August, I went to a great erotica writing masterclass with Rowan Pelling as part of the Edinburgh Festival – no posts linked to this but it was memorable because it was the first time I started to think seriously about blogging/writing. I also read this guest post for Girlonthenet by Halfabear, about sex, disability and inappropriate questions, which rang very true with me and made me realise that ‘sex blogging’ isn’t necessarily restricted to people who are great in bed or know loads about sex, and that it was fine to approach it in a slightly different way if I wanted to. 

September was the month in which I wrote my very first blog post, which was a bit of an introduction to me, but reading-wise, I really enjoyed this piece that Sommer Marsden wrote for Alison Tyler about how far you should let your significant other define you.

In October, I really caught the blogging bug and amazingly, Girlonthenet, who is, y’know, someone I idolise just a little bit, let me write a post for her all about my first time. In the same month, she wrote about how words are hotter than pictures and I discovered  Rosetintedguy and this piece on the hotness of the walk of shame, which is something I plan to write about myself this month.

Most of November was taken up with NaNoWriMo (which I won, yay!) and listening to this great Kings of Leon cover version of Robyn’s Dancing on my own, but I still managed to read loads and loads of wonderful stuff. Firstly though, this piece from the Telegraph, about flirting via text made me pretty uncomfortable – this is something I do a lot, and the thought that when someone appears to be engaged in a text conversation they could actually be giving you just 10% of their attention, struck me as the kind of train of thought that could very quickly drive you crazy. The stuff I agreed with/liked more? This piece by Mollysdailykiss on why we shouldn’t ban simulated rape porn and Rosetintedguy (again!) writing about fuck buddies, in a post which broke my heart a little bit (I can’t bear the thought of something not having a ‘proper’ ending.)

And finally, December. In a way, there are far too many posts to link to here – December was the month in which I realised that I was becoming more of a relationship blogger than a sex blogger (weird, seeing as I’m Little Miss Doesn’t Do Relationships) and added four bloggers in a similar vein to my BlogLovin feed because I was enjoying so much of what they wrote. I’ve linked to Juniper’s post on finishing her dating blog in a previous post, but it’s definitely worthy of another mention here, as is this piece by Laurie about avoiding married men not just due to moral objections, but also because they’re unlikely to be the ones who’ll give you what you’re really searching for.

So, that’s my year in blog posts. Anyone else got something they read in 2013 that they think I’d love?

OK, Cupid, we’re done

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I was talking to a friend the other day about New Year’s Resolutions. Her theory was that you should save them for Spring, because the desire for change is greater when the weather’s warmer and the whole world feels like it’s renewing itself. It’s not a bad theory, but  I’m even more in favour of an even gentler approach: that we put too much pressure on ourselves generally and resolutions should be avoided at all times. Life is pretty damn hard: be kind to yourself.

With that conversation in mind, as well as this blog post which I wrote a few weeks back, I spoke to another friend. I told her that my plan is (eventually!) to stop focusing on my short term pleasure/happiness, and instead to dedicate myself to the long game. She assumed, unsurprisingly, that by ‘the long game’ I meant finding a guy to settle down and have children with. I didn’t, actually, or at least, not entirely, I more meant that I want to find a calmer, more steady sense of contentment than the one I have now. Quite a few people have commented on my post about babies, saying that yes, it probably is best to call it quits on friends-with-benefits type relationships, and work harder at finding something more meaningful if that’s what I want in the long term. I agree, with the first part, at least, and so 2014 will be the year I stop sleeping with the boy. Honest.

‘Great,’ she said, ‘I’m sure you’ll meet someone fantastic, there are loads of great guys online.’ 

‘I’m going to stop internet dating, too.’

There was a pause. A long pause. Then she said ‘Well, I can understand why you’d want a break, but I’m sure you’ll feel more like it if you have a month off.’

‘No,’ I said, ‘I mean it. I hate it, and I’m not doing it any more.’

We went back and forth like this for a while – her trying to persuade me that I’d feel better about it after some time off; me increasingly pissed off that she just didn’t seem to get what I was saying. Sure, OKCupid and Tinder can be fun; and can be flattering, but they also exhaust me and play havoc with my already fragile mental health.

Earlier this year, I had a few weeks of back and forth flirting with a guy on OKCupid. The conversation repeatedly came back to his desire that we should meet for drinks, and then get a hotel room and fuck each other senseless. The bit that made me wary was that we couldn’t just go back to his. When I mentioned it to a friend, she said ‘He’s married.’ And so I asked him outright. And sure enough, yes, he was. His wife though, apparently, was ‘fine with it,’ so I went along with it too, enjoying the flirting and the potential for some dirty, no-strings sex like I used to have. I was nervous, sure, but I had no intention of backing out. He, however, did – the night before we were supposed to meet.

That was my last serious interaction with anyone on the site. I still have an active profile, still reply to the odd message, but not really with the intention of it going anywhere – I genuinely hate the emotional ups and downs, as well as just how hard you have to work at the communication, all, it seems, with very little return. 

So, I plan to start 2014 by deleting both my OKCupid and Tinder profiles. Meeting someone is important to me, but feeling calm and emotionally stable is so much more so. I have much more to say about this blog post by Juniper, but suffice to say for the moment that the first few months of this year will be given over to rediscovering the state of solo contentment that she describes so beautifully. Maybe, eventually, I’ll rejoin one of what I consider to be the more serious dating sites – match.com or the like, but for now, I’m giving myself a break from boys.

Will you please look at my face (or my tits) when you’re talking to me?

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I walked around all day yesterday in scorching heat, and by six o’ clock I was knackered. I was browsing through dresses in Jigsaw and as I moved from one rack to the next, the shop assistant looked at my feet and said ‘I can tell you’ve had a tiring day.’

Ah, well yes, but that’s not why I’m limping. I look like I’ve had a tiring day just as much first thing in the morning as I do last thing at night.

People’s comments are well-meant, mostly – I know this. Women comment more often than men, middle-aged women comment more often than younger ones. I get it. It’s a motherly concern for me, probably – thinking I’ve twisted my ankle or that I’ve been wearing silly shoes again and I just need a plaster. Except this is my life all the time, and those silly shoes you think I’ve been wearing? I haven’t. I never get to wear flip flops, or stilettos or pretty court shoes, and I would kill to.

You’d think, after knowing me for 29 years, my parents would get me better than the average stranger, but that’s not always the case. Last week I went out with my mum wearing wedge sandals I haven’t worn since the summer and I tripped. This is common with the disability I have and while I hate falling, I can deal with it much better if people ignore it (if you’re worried I’ve hurt myself, ‘You ok?’ is fine, but if I say yes, drop it.)

My mum can never drop it. My mum says ‘Right, they’re clearly not supporting your ankle, let me buy you some new shoes.’ It might sound like a dream; it’s not. I hate shoe shopping, a) because I can never buy the shoes I really want and b) because it takes me ages to wear new shoes in until they’re comfy. Often, when I fall, one or other of my parents will keep on and on about it until I end up crying. All I want is for them to understand and accept that tripping and falling frequently is just part of who I am – it’s not a bit I want to focus on, that’s all.

Which brings me to the point of this post. Guys my age don’t often comment on the way I walk (apart from one guy who hit on me, realised I was limping and then asked if I’d be this way for life – he nearly got punched), but I notice them looking at my feet all the time. Nothing to see there boys – all my limbs are intact and I don’t have some huge, gaping wound that’s causing me to walk this way. Why not look at the good bits instead – my tits are amazing and I did nice eyeliner today. Plus, you not looking at my feet will make me feel so much better about myself.

This would be an easy post to write if it was as simple as ‘Let’s all pretend there’s nothing wrong with my body,’ but sadly, it’s not. People give me evil looks for sitting on the very front row of seats on the bus, the one that’s meant for old and disabled people, all the time. Why do I do it? Because my balance is shit and when was the last time you saw a bus driver wait until someone sat down before he pulled away? This might make you think that you should give me your seat on public transport, but don’t. If the front seats are free, I’ll sit there because it makes my life easier, but I can stand, as long as I’m holding on to something. Offering me your seat just confuses me – you might have spotted my disability or you might just think that my rounded tummy is a sign that I’m pregnant. Either way it doesn’t make me feel good about myself.

So boys, here are my guidelines – if you like me, try to turn a blind eye to my disability (that includes surreptitious glances at my feet) except in the following two situations. If a) I’m standing at the top of something steep and uneven, looking at it with terror or b) we’re walking along a road that’s icy as fuck – in either of those cases then please feel free to offer to hold my hand.

Is it me?

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I don’t think I’m massively out of touch with the world, nor do I think I’m particularly romantic, but recently a few things have caused me to call my views on monogamy and love.

I’ve never dated in the traditional sense of the word – met someone online, through a friend, at work – and seen that blossom gradually into a relationship, so I don’t know at what point most couples discuss the subject of exclusivity. I’d imagine, and hope, that it happens once they start to like each enough that they’d rather spend time with one another than anyone else who might be on the dating horizon. That they agree to be monogamous because, y’know, they care about each other. And even then, it confuses me a bit that it requires a full conversation, or even a discussion – surely you just need to establish that you’re both similarly into each other, and that’s that?

I can see that, when it comes to discussing monogamy with someone you’ve been sleeping with on and off for several years, the situation becomes a little more complex. The fact that the existing arrangement has carried on for so long suggests that both parties find it largely satisfactory. Except, of course, if you’re having to have a conversation about a potentially different set up, it suggests one of you maybe isn’t quite as happy with the arrangement as they used to be.

When it comes to my own life, if I’m having that conversation, it means I’m really not happy with the old arrangement. I’ll avoid difficult conversations at all costs – in fact I’ve fucked someone in the Gents at his place of work in order to stall the conversation for as long as possible. The reason for this is simple: even when we’re just fucking on and off, I’m already being faithful – I have neither the desire nor the emotional capacity to handle sleeping with more than one guy at a time.

So that’s where I behave badly – if you know a conversation needs to be had, shying away from it is counterproductive and unfair on the other person, who may also have had to psych themselves up for this chat. However, I’m shying away because I don’t understand what there is to discuss. If I’ve been sleeping with you for a while, and the subject of monogamy comes up, I think only the following three paths are possible:

1) Ideally, it won’t have been me who brought the subject up in the first place. I already have feelings for you, but I haven’t said anything because I’m a complete scaredey-cat and have been doing my utmost to hide the way I feel (no, this story isn’t very ‘girlpower’). One day you realise that you have feelings for me and that these feelings are important enough to warrant us being in an exclusive relationship. It may not work out, but the mutual affection is great enough for it to be definitely worth a try.

2) I somehow find the guts/something pushes me (far more likely) into admitting that I have feelings for you and that I’m no longer happy to sleep with you if you’re also sleeping with other women. I tell you this, and you care about me enough to want to try being in an exclusive relationship with me. It may not work out, but the mutual affection is great enough for it to be definitely worth a try.

3) I somehow find the guts/something pushes me (far more likely) into admitting that I have feelings for you and that I’m no longer happy to sleep with you if you’re also sleeping with other women. I tell you this, and you say  that you’re sorry, but while you like me and enjoy the sex, you’re not interested in an actual relationship with me. Sure, I’m sad and a little bit hurt, but with time I’ll get over it and find a guy who does like me enough to want the same things I do.

Do you see why I don’t think there’s a full-on discussion in any of these scenarios? To me, monogamy is black and white – you either like me enough to give it a go, or you don’t. Yes, there’ll need to be conversations about the ins and outs of a monogamous relationship: how often we see each other, if/when we get to meet each other’s friends etc. etc., but the actual monogamy bit is much more clear cut.

Because sadly, I think that if, like me, you avoid conversations you’d rather not have, from time to time people will exploit that. I might have told a guy that I’d rather he no longer slept with other women, but if I keep putting off actually talking about it, the word can keep cropping up and yet nothing ever changes: I’m still sad and jealous as hell that he’s still fucking other people, and he too gets to carry on exactly the same way he did before.

The above situation has happened to me, and it’s made me more cynical about men than I used to be, something which in the past I wouldn’t have thought possible. Now I think they’ll all play on my unwillingness to talk about commitment, and I’ll keep fucking them nonetheless – trapped between fear of the conversation on one side and the fear of them no longer being in my life on the other.

And I do think there’s a romance side to it, too. No one wants exclusivity to become a business deal to be wrangled out with both parties trying to concede as little as they possibly can. I don’t want you to be faithful to me because you feel you have to be, I want you to be faithful because you want to be – because your feelings have developed to the point where you’re happy to give up other girls, not resentful about it.

So what do you think? Do I need to man up and tackle the issue of monogamy head on or am I right that the desire for monogamy comes from the heart, not the head, and that it doesn’t therefore need a discussion at all?

 

Books

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A few people have commented on the bit in my bio which says ‘I only fuck people who love books,’ which I guess kind of surprised me. It was intended to be tongue in cheek, but actually it is pretty accurate too. Of the guys I’ve slept with, one was a friend from my degree course who loved French literature way more than me, one was an undergrad medic (probably involves quite a lot of reading?!), and one is the boy, who loves books so much that he often ‘borrows’ mine and never returns them. In fact, it’s getting to the point where I’m considering buying this.

That leaves two. One I slept with during freshers’ week, and after we’d had sex he showed me his lecture schedule to prove that land economists ‘do have to work hard!’ Yeah, not so sure about him on the book front. The other was so fleeting that I never even knew his name, let alone his thoughts on reading material, so let’s give him the benefit of the doubt and assume he was a book lover, too.

Anyway, the point is that much as it was intended as a joke, my love of books is not. I’m spending Christmas abroad and yesterday I was looking for somewhere to have lunch. There were a few places that I could have gone to, but I picked the one with an entire wall lined with used cookbooks which you could buy if you wanted to. Because how can a place with books be bad?

One of the great things about fucking boys who love books is that they often leave their books lying around when they’re cooking, showering, or otherwise engaged, which means massive potential for discovering authors and genres that you might never have stumbled upon if, like me, you tend to stick to what you know (Yes, I’m bad – if you have any recommendations, send them my way.)

But books are also what make it easier for me to connect with people who I might otherwise be intimidated by or feel that I don’t have that much in common with. Truth be told, people who are purely sex bloggers intimidate me, erotica writers less so. Sometimes, I think it’s easy to feel completely out of your depth when surrounded by people who know so much more about a subject than you do, but somehow, the fact these people like both sex and writing makes their knowledge less scary. Sometimes I think that erotica is a bad choice of genre for me – my spacial awareness is so bad that I often have people lying on each other’s arms to the point that they’d be more likely to have cramp than an orgasm.

But the good thing about being bad at sex logistics in my writing is that it just means that I have to read more, not only to learn about style, but also to work out where everything goes (yes, seriously!). And yes, although I didn’t mean it seriously when I wrote it, from now on it’s going to be true: if you want me to fuck you, you’ll need to at least pretend to have read a book.