Compartments

Before I started dating J, I went "hunting" a lot. Often, I didn't begin the night with that as my intention; it's not like I went out and planned to spend my night looking for someone to bang. That's just what I ended up doing. (Well, along with socializing and drinking and all that other stuff one does at a party.) I noticed as much after I started going out with J, and thus had a consistent sexual partner, and thus didn't need to go looking for people to have sex with anymore. The first week or so after we started going out, I'd be at my frat, or at a party, beginning to scope people out, and then remembering - wait, I don't actually need to do this anymore. I can just hang out with people normally. What a relief!

... Or maybe not a relief. I began thinking a little more about the relationship between my sexuality and how I interact with people. If you're a long time reader, you'll remember my discussing how sex is never "just" sex to me. While I don't always attribute love to it, I do attribute many other things to it; may it be emotional connection, or attention, or a self-esteem boost. Conversely, many things lead me to think of sex; perhaps uncommon things. I must have reached a certain point where sex became just another way of getting to know someone. There have definitely been times where I've been getting to know someone new, socially or at work or anything, and I was enjoying getting to know them, and I'd randomly wonder what it would be like to have sex with them. Just a passing curiosity, you understand, I might not really want to have sex with them or even be attracted to them. I'd just wonder because maybe it would tell me something more about them.

J has remarked before that it sounds like I mix up sex and intimacy a lot, when sometimes they're actually mutually exclusive. Some close friends have also remarked that I mix up friendship and love, or friendship and sex. Friendship, romance, and sex are all kind of blurry to me. I see moving from one to another just like shifting gears, or viewing the same thing through a different lens. They're all the same matter, but just have different forms. I mean, it's not like I think that I could love or want sex with all of my friends. Sometimes the possibility just isn't there. But when it is, moving from one to another isn't really very difficult for me. I never found much of a problem with it. Many people I know have clear boundaries between each thing (friend, fuckbuddy, significant other) but I didn't really ever set those boundaries in place. So what happened was everything just kind of... spilled into each other. And so I ended up having sex with many of my closest friends; having undefined sexual/romantic relationships; hooking up with someone and then becoming friends with them; or breaking up with a boyfriend but continuing to sleep with him for a while after that.

I think that blurry view is changing now.

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(Notice that I'm not addressing love or falling in love here. That's too big for this conversation, I think. I'm merely referring to the nature of different kinds of relationships.)

Anyway, this never used to worry me, but it does now because I think I used sex to relate to people, when I'd have been better off doing something else. Honestly? There have been times when I felt more comfortable making out with someone I was just getting to know, compared to trying to approach someone at a party. I remember when I was first getting to know the Professional, I invited him to a rope bondage workshop with me. Doing that put a clear sexual overtone to whatever was going to happen between us, while, at the time, I didn't even know if I was interested in him yet. Inviting him to a rope bondage event just felt more natural to me than... something else.

There could be many reasons for that, and they're probably all correct: I'm fairly comfortable with my sexuality, whereas I'm socially anxious and don't like interacting in large group situations; if I'm "offering" sex then the person has more incentive to hang out with me (yeah, for a long while my self-esteem was just that low). I can't keep using sex as a social lubricant though, and not just because I'm dating J. It just isn't very sustainable.

My lack of boundaries also worries me because... well, let me put it this way. Having multiple friends-with-benefits and fuck-buddies, when that's all I had, didn't matter. It's quite different once you're committed to someone and you have a past life that's full of friends-with-benefits and fuck-buddies. Many of the people I slept with were also close friends of mine. They're all over the US now, but I still keep in touch with them and they're still a part of my life to some extent. It's a little awkward when I want to tell J about them or when I want to tell them about J. In a way, they're not just my close friends, they're also my "exes," even though we were never in a relationship. We were sleeping together for a sustained period of time, and there was some kind of interest expressed by both parties... that's basically enough.

So every time I mention one of those friends to J, there's a little tension there. Not too much to be unhealthy, but it's still a little awkward. I think J is mature enough not to let those things get in the way, and that I have good enough judgement to not harp on my past sexual relationships constantly for no reason (hmm. I hope). I introduced J to the Rationalist, and he reacted with the same tenseness and shiftiness at first, but after they ran into each other more often and had more conversations, they got along pretty well, which is nice.

And, of course, my "exes" have their own reactions to when I talk about J, ranging from happiness on my behalf, to defensiveness/protectiveness, to suspicion, to silence.

As J said, it's the elephant in the room: "we both fucked this girl at some point in time." With my friends who I didn't have a sexual relationship with, that tension is not there. J is friends with his ex-girlfriends as well, and I don't have a problem with that or feel jealous, but I do think of them differently than the rest of his friends.

I don't regret anything I did in the past. I did what I did, and I'm dealing with the ramifications now, and they're not awful or all that difficult to deal with. I didn't write this post because I'm stressing. These things are just probably good things to know for future use. I think I need to re-evaluate how I approach boundaries.

All part of growing up, I guess.

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