I’ve been living alone for exactly one year and one day. How nuts is that?
Go lisa, get your groove on! It’s your birthday!
I want to fall in love.
I’m ready to fall in love.
I couldn’t think of a good segue into this, but it’s true. I spent a lot of time with my maiden aunts recently, and I really don’t want to end up like them: bitter, desperate, clinging to the past. I want to love and be loved. I want to feel close with someone and feel their closeness. I want to rip apart the facades we put up as we approach people and feel their need for me as such as I need them.
It’s a very scary thought, thinking about allowing myself to be vulnerable — to willingly strip away all the barriers and just let it go. On the same hand, it’s also powerful feeling.
Makes me feel invincible.
I just want to be seriously and insanely in love. I learned a lot of lessons this year living alone. I learned I could do it by myself and I learned I could handle living alone without getting lonely. I learned I could love my friends and keep them close to me and I had great tolerance for my family. I learned how to let go of people who were not good for me.
I also learned that I like to take care of people. This was not something to be ashamed of, as I once thought it to be, but it’s actually a strength. The tricky part is when to know the difference between taking care of someone and mothering them to death: a problem I had with Paul. I think that because Paul was not responsive to return this in kind, I started to regret doing it. That regret became resentment. But when I’m with my mom and I help her, and I worry about her, I realise that I genuinely like doing this for her. She appreciates me, she’s proud of me, and she loves me. This is a step with my mother I never in a million years I thought I would see, but it happened. It did. I’m glad that our relationship is taking such leaps and bounds and that I no longer feel the resentment i used to feel towards her. There is always some strain, but it’s over ridiculously minute shit that it’s not even worth the bother anymore.
The year was spent in a lot of retrospection, a lot of people watching and a lot of getting to know who and what I am. It’s very tough to learn who
and what you are, but one of the biggest lessons I learned this year:
Don’t let the career goals overtake personal goals.
Very important is this one. Ironically (or shamefully enough), I was watching Charmed and one of the minor characters said to Phoebe something about how her generation of women were so focused on being independent and career orientated that they forgot about their personal relationships. Here were all these women in their 40s/50s who had no one to celebrate lifes things with them. I got choked up about that one. Really. No lie. I really don’t want to be like my aunts. Ages 60, 59 and 46. All bitter and desperate. Every single one of them. Two of them had the gall to tell me that I was too old to have babies at the age of 31. Can you believe this shit? Too damn old to have babies. I do want kids, someday. Just not right this second.
Love.
It’s a powerful word. Is there anyone in mind I’m thinking of as I write this? If I say yes, then someone will think I’m going too far, pushing boundaries we never really explored before. If I say no, then I could be lying. So I’ll say maybe. I’m not saying I’m in love with someone NOW, I am saying that if it happens, I won’t push it away, like I have so many times before.
Patrick and I were talking about sex the other night and he asked me, “When was the last time you had great sex?” I replied, “If I was being a bitch, 1992 or 1993.” “Damn,” he said, “That’s cold.” Even though we were on the phone, I nodded almost violently. One part of me felt like it was the truth, the other part of me felt like it was a lie. I HAVE had good sex since then, but, there was something always missing.
Things I didn’t think about then, that I realise now. Parts of me that wish that I could turn back the clock to repair those moments, be more attentive to my ex-lovers, instead of being hateful or mean as I was wont to do. Communicate more to them my own needs instead of expecting them to take charge and know what I want. Many mistakes were made on both sides. I do not put the blame solely on them, however, they do have their faults.
So then this leads me to thinking about sex, and what my sexual needs are. I think a lot of it has to do that I often find myself at odds with how I want to feel as compared to as how I really feel. I don’t have a problem being assertive towards someone, I have a problem when the person EXPECTS it always to be me to lead the way. I don’t have a problem being kinky, I do have a problem when it’s always that way. I don’t have a problem with lack foreplay, but I do have a problem if that is all I want and the person isn’t willing to do even that. I do believe in the tit-for-tat love life: If I go down on you, you return the favour. I just don’t get why so many guys are hung up on simply not returning the favour.
Sensuality, that’s a big. A huge one. In my early twenties, I thought it was all about hard, head banging against the wall kind of sex. Instant gratification now. Damned their needs, mine had to be taken care of first. But then I was so about control during the sexual relationship, my needs never really got met. Orgasms? Hrm. Good question. One person has been able to give me clitoral orgasms other than myself, one other gave me vaginal orgasms. A minute percentage of my lovers, isn’t that sickening? The irony about the one person who gave me vaginal orgasms, is that I didn’t really particularly care for him. We were dating, we were even living together, but it was a bad relationship and bad times. He also had a fetish for getting fucked up the ass with a dildo, so much so, he preferred that to actually having intercourse with me.
But I digress.
I realised I’m not a casual sex kind of person. If I’m going to sleep with you, it has to mean something. It has to denote something. A beginning of something, hopefully not an end. I can’t just sleep with random men to fulfil my needs because part of my needs is that I have to be attracted both physically AND mentally. I’ve said this nine hundred times before: you want to get into my pants, engage my mind. Yet no one listens. This is why I prefer being talked dirty to or having dirty stories read to me in bed rather than seeing porn — I’m not a visual person to get turned on sexually. This is one of the reasons why I’ve always been a big fan of phone sex.
I need all my senses on fire.
I also realised I’m not a dating kind of person. This means, I can’t just casually date someone. I’ve tried that and it doesn’t work. I want to crawl under the skin and get to know them and what makes them tick. That’s the challenge. I need to have their attention on me and my attention on them. It’s fearful isn’t? Almost intimidating, but, this works for me. I need to meet someone and know that if we are “talking” that they are talking to me and no one else. Monogamous from the start. It’s not that I’m jealous or insecure, it’s just that it takes so much damned energy to get to know someone, to spread it out over several someones just seems ridiculous to me.
It’s been said that men are logical creatures, romance goes out the window a lot of the times. In conversations with my brother and his friend tonight seem to mark that as being true. My brother said he never saw me as the getting married type, and while I can see where he is coming from to say that, I feel that he is wrong. I just don’t think I’m the type for a
“conventional” marriage. Not in the white picket fence, 2.5 kids and 3 dogs way. That is not me. Is marriage? Yes, it is.
My dating experiences this year were minute, at best. But they were powerful. I was able to find a lot about what I wanted from these few experiences. Will I jump back in the dating ring again? Not in the tractional sense, no.
I’m braver, stronger and more assured now. Something I could not say a year ago. Not even six months ago. I’m not willing to be with someone for the sake of being someone and I’m not willing to be with someone if they do not feel the same as I do. I’m not willing to risk my life with someone who isn’t willing to risk themselves for me. Because it will never work out.
A lot has changed over the this past year, internally, with me. I was able to face a lot of fears, take risks romantically and pull out when it wasn’t working. I was able to look at someone I loved for 15 years and tell him I was not going to sleep with him even when it was offered. Can you imagine, how incredibly hard and painful that was to do that? But I knew he wasn’t going to fuck me because it was “me,” he was going to fuck me because I was available pussy. I cried and cried and cried. When the end came, and he wanted to do the friendship with benefits routine, I told him on the phone I couldn’t do this. I couldn’t be this person who randomly was available for quick and easy sex, because it would be, to me, just meaningless and empty sex.
I hung up on him. Never heard from him again. Never slept with him either. The only saving grace to my ego is that all he has to remember me is one of my internationally known blow jobs, ones that he remembered after all these years. He received two from me recently. Frightening isn’t it when your memory is reduced to a blow job?
Regardless of how that relationship worked out, it was needed, no matter what my friends said. I had to see him and confront him and gamble. I learned by my interaction with him just what kind of woman I was. I liked who I have became, that I was willing to risk it all for love and to walk away with no regrets when I wasn’t the person for him. That will be something I want to teach my children, to take risks. Take that chance. You never know what could happen.
I want to be with someone who is a risk taker, who is willing to gamble. Who isn’t afraid of being with me and knowing that being with me is not something entirely simple. I want someone who has goals, dreams and energy. Who, sexually, isn’t afraid of being sensual/passionate one night and slutty the next.
I always argued that I was a simple person, and I still think that is true. I just think my simplicity is different because I have so many layers. I used to think they were barriers or walls, Throw up so many, become defensive when accosted on something, toss it away and walk away being called a cold-hearted bitch. But, in retrospect, that isn’t true. We are often scared of what we do not understand, and I think much of the bad juju I got from exes is that they could not understand me and or they were frustrated when they thought they could “read me” and it was wrong. Or I did something that was different from previous interaction with me. But that, my dears, is part of my charm.
I do not feel like the bitter old lady that I often portray, I feel brave and hopeful. More hopeful than I had in years. I was able to get rid of a lot of demons this year, ones that I never knew existed and I’m able to be more up front about what I want and what I want.
Yeah.
PS: Masturbation lately has been in overtime. Self-realization has kicked my libido into over gear even more so and it’s driving me bat shit. Marathon masturbation sessions lasting over an hour have been common in this house. I’m telling you, I feel mightily sorry for the next guy I date because he is NOT going to know what has hit him.
x0x0xx