Rambling Ma'am

  I once dated someone solely because we had an insane sexual chemistry. We both had children, so we hardly had any alone time, but when we were alone we wasted no time before hopping into bed together. The sex was amazing but you could imagine how little of a connection we had outside of the bedroom because of our appetite for one another. 

     Eventually we broke up, but decided to remain friends. A few years later, however, we decided to give it another go. But this time we both recognized that we needed to put sex on the back burner in order to focus on connecting on an emotional level. And we did. We fell hard and it was the most natural relationship I had ever experienced. We told each other everything, we couldn’t go a day with out talking to one another, and we waited to have sex until we both felt our relationship was strong enough to exist outside of it.

     However amazing the sex was before, it was doubled now that our feelings for one another powered our passion. We still didn’t have much time to ourselves, but when we did, we talked and held each other before (and after) and we focused more on foreplay and making the other person happy rather than finishing ourselves. It was perfect.

     But as they say, nothing gold can stay. I wasn’t aware at the time, but my boyfriend struggled with an addiction that I would never be able to compete with. In addition to alcohol, my boyfriend was addicted to sex. Well, porn to be more exact. Because he had been fixated on it since his teenage years, the thrill and fantasy of it all, he would seek new and exciting means in order to reach his climax. And I was all for experimenting in the bedroom, so it worked well for a time. But eventually the struggle between abstaining and excess became too much for him to handle.

     Because we were trying to abstain in order to give our relationship the chance to grow, he wasn’t getting his fix sexually. And as you could probably imagine, a drunk, sexually-deprived sex addict with free time can do more damage than is forgivable. One night, when he had a little too much too drink and I went went to bed early, he exchanged pictures and arranged to meet up with an ex of his. He was practically drooling over the prospect of sleeping with her. I felt disrespected and betrayed. Betrayed because I knew he loved me, betrayed because it was his idea to abstain in the first place, and betrayed because one drunken night was apparently enough to ruin everything we had worked for. 

    Out of respect of that hard work, I decided to stay and try work things out. He tried so hard to make up for what he had done, but in the end, I wasn’t able to trust him anymore. The damage had been done. 

     Looking back, I realize that both times around, sex was ultimately the reason for our breakups. The irony and crux of it all is that both breakups were due to completely opposite ends of the sexual spectrum.

     Talk about being screwed.

     When you come out on the worse end of a breakup, there are always cliche phrases your loved ones use to try to help ease the pain: If you love something, let it go; If it doesn’t come back, it was never yours to begin with. There are plenty of fish in the sea. Take it one day at a time. It’s better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all.

     But is it really? Because I’m pretty sure whoever came up with that line was high off his ass. 

   I know some will argue that even though you no longer have that person, you can learn from that relationship and grow from it. And that’s all fine and dandy. But when I enter into a relationship, I don’t go into it with the mindset that I hope to one day learn and grow from its charred remains like a fucking phoenix. I go into a relationship because I want to learn and grow with that person, not because of them.

     When we first start dating, we’re told not to go into a new relationship and assume it will be like the last. Yet we’re also told to take what we learn from previous relationships and use it in our future relations. But each relationship is unique and both of you are unique in your particular relationship. So, you could be in twenty relationships in your lifetime and still fail spectacularly at the twenty-first, because no matter how much you’ve “learned” from the previous relationships, if you two don’t match, it simply won’t work.

     So, you’re heartbroken, alone, and realizing that no matter what you do, if the other person isn’t one-hundred percent on board, your relationships are doomed to fail. At this point, it’s easy to wish that you had never met someone so you could have avoided the number they did on you. What I want to know is, why is it so wrong to feel that way? In high school, we all skipped lessons and still passed our tests, didn’t we? So why can’t we wish we had skipped these particular lessons when it comes to relationships? Do we really need to remember and learn from every single one of them in order to eventually get it right and pass? I highly doubt it. 

     At twenty-four, I might not have learned the secret of a successful relationship yet, but what I have learned from all of my failed relationships is that, more than some formula composed of a mixture of your past flops, it’s likely a mixture of timing and compatibility (with a pinch of luck) that will someday do the trick. 

     But then again, I’m still single.