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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