I am torn, like a shirt-sleeve and a bit of skin on a thorny rosebush, between the desire to refuse my needs and my needs, never far behind, between what I think I should want and what my heart yearns for. The more I try to protect my fragile core, the more shallow and meaningless my horizontal interactions feel to me. When I am “interacting,,” I am quite elated. My brief interludes are adrenaline-charged, heady, dangerous. Sharing intimate parts of myself with strangers is in many ways out of character for me. I am passive, people find me timid, skittish, which I really am in some ways. I am at times physically incapable of taking small steps but I can eagerly throw my entire body off of a cliff. A job interview fills me with panic bordering on sheer terror, yet it is unusual to be physically harmed in the course of a job interview. Less so in the bed of a stranger. I guess I’m not very frightened of hurting physically. So far no one has harmed me.

(double-dipped once, the victim of a slyly misplaced condom on another occasion….this shit happens even when you don’t sleep with strangers. So far I am unharmed.)

When I analyze my own attitude towards relationships with men, because even these “non-relationships” do constitute relationships, superficial, skin-deep but human relations nonetheless…I find it amusing how little I have really changed in my approach. In my pre-marital sex-life, I had rules of conduct that I never broke. They are similar to the rules I have set for myself now and maybe it is somewhere in this protocol that I cannot seem to find a very gratifying situation.

My number-one rule has always been, “Don’t have sex with a friend,” which I don’t, because I think it is much harder to find a good friend than a sexual partner. Maybe this is the root of my problem. Maybe this has led me to failing madly in my romantic (and not so romantic) endeavors. Because really, what I am trying to protect myself from is exactly what I am craving. Trying to avoid being hurt is probably just as painful as loving someone with all your heart and then being hurt in the end. Maybe even more so, at least when you love someone, you are blessed for a fleeting moment with the most beautiful, noble emotions.

Although my quest for sexual fulfillment for the last few months has been cheap and impersonal, although my new partners have little to do with who I really am, somehow I want to know more about them. I want to go deeper, know what makes them tick. I want to know their favorite books, what they like to eat on a cold winter night, how they take their coffee in the morning. The path I have chosen closes that door automatically…I am not an idiot, I realize this, but for today, I find this path to be incredibly depressing. Empty and cold.

My blog was getting a lot more traffic when I was in a sexual desert. Hmmm.