sex, love affairs, and loneliness

I woke up feeling like crap today and blamed it on going to bed feeling depressed last night, which I blamed on drinking too much Wild Turkey with Boy the previous night. Like most people, I have a love-hate relationship with The Booze, the love side consisting of (a) its legal status and socially accepted nature, and (b) its perfect fix with my oral fixation; and the hate side consisting of (a) its unpredictable nature concerning the morning after, and (b) the gut it seems to be producing.

My Wild Turkey evening produced the hunger hangover effect, where all I wanted to do yesterday was eat starches: cookies, pizza, pasta, apples, potatoes, and bread; and today all I want to do is continue eating. This leads me to believe that it wasn't really the Wild Turkey looking to be absorbed out of my bloodstream, but a deeper hunger that has to do with loneliness, in the physical and emotional senses.

It has now been two months since I've had sex; the last time being in the wee hours of Thursday, July 19, three days before my departure from San Francisco. And also, like most people, I have a love-hate relationship with sex, mostly consisting of (a) I love it when it's with someone I love, and (b) I hate it when when I'm not having it.

Of course, there is a whole spectrum of loves and hates in-between, including thinking I miss it, when I'm actually missing love, and this is what I think I'm missing lately.

In the past year and a half, I pretty much doubled the number of men I've slept with in my life from about 10 to about 20, in a more or less conscious effort to try and habituate myself to thought of being with other men after breaking up with my boyfriend of three years. I'm not a very good one-night-stand-er, but one of my biggest mantras in life is Fake It Till You Make It, and I figured that if I did it enough times, I would not only get over the whole association of love with sex, and be better at enjoying random sexual encounters. Then I would be a truly liberated woman.

Well, that worked and it didn't. Although I feel a lot more comfortable sexually and have learned to enjoy sex with people I don't necessarily care for, I also realized that sex isn't as big a priority for me as I assumed it would be at this time in my life, and I'd rather not have sex at all than go through the hassle of random sex that has a fifty-fifty chance of being good. I guess this shows that I'm not truly sexually liberated, because if I were, I wouldn't think that good sex is something that happens accidentally, it would be something that I would be in control of. But I'm just not, and men have much more control in bed than I do, both physically and mentally. I also hate the condom dynamic, the fact that I always have to ask for it, and more often than not, compliance with this request is accompanied by bitching or whining. I have a hard time standing up for myself in bed, and I have to admit that sometimes I let myself be coerced into having unprotected sex, because I don't like being made to feel like a whore. There's this huge mindfuck that only whores wear condoms, because decent people don't have diseases.

I could go on forever, but basically in moving to New York, I decided to put my easy-breezy days behind me and stop sleeping with people just for the sex. I've decided to earn good sex, and surprisingly it has made my dating efforts much more stress-free. Instead of wondering, "Hm, do I want to sleep with this guy?" I go home at the end of the night, and I don't wake up feeling any sense of regret. It also makes dates more fun for me, because I'm not seeing the whole evening as some kind of pre-sex farce; it's actually an event in and of itself, leading to the nothing else. I like that feeling. It's not a question of where we'll end up...because we're already there.

Today when I came out of my class, I felt a crushing loneliness and wanted nothing more than to be in my old apartment in San Francisco, crashed out on the couch with my roommate, missing the physical comfort of draping my legs over someone, leaning on someone's shoulder, kissing them on the cheek, holding their hand, etc. I missed my Love Affair intensely, and closed my eyes as I walked down 123rd Street, remembering what it was like to lie in bed with our limbs interlocked and my nose nestled in that perfect place against his neck. I missed my ex-boyfriend too, even though we broke up almost two years ago, because he was the last person who loved me.

I am a fucken love junkie. It kills me, but it's true. It kills me because I think about love more than anything. I care about love more than sex. When I'm dating someone, I care about my boyfriend more than my friends, even though my friends always outlast my boyfriends. I will do things for my boyfriends that I won't do for myself (like quit smoking). I spend more time thinking about past, potential, and imaginary love than I do engaged in my $36,000/year master's program. And it's not an exciting, passion-filled obsession. It's a boring obsession that means nothing to anyone except for me.

I mean, I just moved to The Greatest City in The World to attend a world-class school, and all I want to do is find my next great love affair. I try to fill my life with intellectual pursuits, literature, music, and my social life, but all I really want is to fall in love. And this state of affairs makes me feel extremely lonely and deeply misguided.