Shifting Gears

Wind the calendar back a few months. Mina and I were both looking for the same thing in our other relationships. We want people to have great sex with, of course, but we also wanted people we could care about. It’s a weird lesson after having some fun here and there, but it not quite feeling right, and getting stung when we did start to care about people who weren’t emotionally free. Lessons learned, we we re trying out our new thing. 

In her case, she eventually struck gold in DomC, and they now have a beautiful relationship. For my part, things had gotten off to a promising start with Dee. After I returned home, we were deep into planning our next meeting in a few weeks. She went to talk to her boyfriend about it, and suddenly I get the message “we have to talk.” 

So we talk. I learn that I am looking for someone to love, and that is not okay…and we finish the conversation with my offering to keep my distance and waiting for her to find me. I look at Mina – and tell her I’ve just been dumped. The silence last four lousy days. We started talking again, and it was a great thing. We got past our cancelled date. We nearly met up before my trip to Asia (and would have, had my itinerary not shifted at the last minute). And then…I get back from Asia, and things are distant, but we still keep in touch. I ask about meeting up, and now it is not possible till winter. I try to flirt, and suddenly the line goes silent for two days, until I finally start sending out “hello?” messages over every channel. Then I get the email apologizing for the silence…needing time to think…we need to be just friends, no sex. Dumped. Again.

I spend a lot of time going back over everything that happened, wondering if I misread signals. Trying to figure out if I pushed her somewhere she didn’t want to go. In the end, I can’t quite make sense of it, except that something changed. And I think about my rules, all my rules and how I religiously followed them, keeping people away thinking it was for the best, and deciding that this time, I could finally make an exception. I even hear the Joker taunting me: “You have all these rules and you think they’ll save you…” All this distance I force between myself and others, and all the hard-won lessons, and now I get one more, because once again I let someone get close. Granted, having someone push me away is better than my history of creating a stalker, so it IS progress, of a sort.

As the emotional smoke clears I am still left with the question of “What now?” And, for now, I’ve decided to take a simpler approach. I am going to have fun. If someone else gets attached, so be it, but I am not going to turn away things that could be good to play the high stakes game of finding someone who approaches this like Mina does. She is too rare, and life is too short. Think of it as a sexual version of Bill Simmons’s 14th gambling law: Don’t be a hero, just try to win money. I’m trying to scare anyone by being a part of their life. I’m just going to have some fun.