This cat has clearly chosen the "shit" option. I respect that.
This is one of my mother’s favorite sayings. Along with “Life isn’t fair” and “If you wear too much lipstick your lips will fall off” (hey – they can’t all be gems) I heard this a lot growing up. It means, in short, be decisive. When faced with too many options, I get anxious and completely indecisive. But what do you do with someone who, when faced with only 1 option, still can’t pull the trigger?
I met Mr. Indecisive off of OK Cupid earlier this year. He came at me pretty hard with the whole “hey sexy” thing, but I was fairly certain, based on the type of humor in his profile, that he was being ironic/funny. We had a pretty fantastic first date. I took him to my favorite bar downtown and we furiously made out while 90’s hip-hop played in the background (like you are so in control of yourself that you don’t automatically make out with whoever you’re with when Hypnotize comes on). Fast-forward a few hours and we’re doing pretty much everything you can do while horizontal and in an alley doorway. Date 2 and we’re off to the races and it’s GOOD. Great technique and as ironic as it seems now – totally decisive. In the bedroom this man was so take-charge. Outside of the bedroom – eh, not so much.
What followed was a 2 month exercise in frustration and futility. We were in contact every day, either by text or IM or the occasional phone call. We saw each other once or twice a week. Sounds promising, right? Wrong. Although he was the one to initiate most of the contact, I was the one that had to set up all the dates/times we would get together. And by get together I mean bang. Only twice in the 2 months we dated did we see the outside of his bedroom, and one of those times was the bar/alley on our first date. Getting him to go out to dinner with me that one time was no easy task. It was like negotiating with someone in another language, without the benefit of a translator. I may have even come out and said “we are going to dinner before we fuck” or something like that. When I invited him out to watch me perform at a bar just 3 blocks from his house, he “cancelled” at the last-minute due to illness (he later confessed that he wasn’t really sick). Any and all attempts that I made to move this thing outside of those 4 walls was summarily shut down.
Well at least her robot cuddles!
Despite a few flashes of jealousy and ham-handed attempts at tenderness, it was pretty clear that this thing was just about sex for him. I didn’t mind that too terribly, because the sex freaking rocked the casbah. But there was something really robotic about this dude. I wondered if he had feelings. Was I fucking the terminator? Was he agoraphobic? Either way, the orgasms were plentiful, he seemed to be all about my pleasure even if it meant he didn’t get off, and he was always down for the last-minute booty call (hell – if parking was easier in his neighborhood, I might still be fucking him).
But after 2 months of playing cruise ship director and setting everything up EVERY SINGLE TIME, I started getting bored. Dear reader, you know how much I delight in the pleasures of the flesh, but even a depraved sex maniac such as myself likes to get out into the world every once in a while and see a movie, eat a meal, look at some art, make fun of strangers in the street, etc. etc. Add in the fact that he was so closed off I wasn’t sure he had human emotion and his outright admission that he was “emotionally unavailable” and I was ready to bail. For as awesome as the dicking was, I like my casual sex with a side of humanity. I decided to release him back into the wild.
I did something that I had never, ever attempted with a man – I was honest. Shocking, I know. But when the words “This just isn’t enough for me” left my lips something very strange happened. Like when the Grinch’s heart grew 2 (or was it 3) sizes, this dude turned into Mr. Emo. We then had full-on, emotionally connected yet still dirty (come on, I still like what I like) sex. I left feeling a bit confused. Who the hell did I just fuck and where did he keep the robot in that tiny apartment? But still, I was happy with my decision to end it and sincerely hoped that I had made a good friend for life. After all, I already had a new victim…er…man in my sight.
Truth be told, I never really stopped dating other dudes while we were seeing each other so I was able to fill up all my new free time with no problem. And as friends do, he started asking me about how my love life was going. But as friends usually don’t do, he got crazy jealous and demanded I stop talking about my love life. I then got accused of being insensitive to his feelings. WTF?
The next week or two he spent texting me, IM’ing me, calling me to talk about things, to see if we could start over, to give him another chance. I’ll be honest – I was conflicted. The only reason I let him go was because he seemed so uninterested in getting to know me, so closed-off. And the whole never-leave-the-house thing. Now here he was, being all sensitive and shit and talking about his feelings and about how much he wanted to be with me. And I couldn’t stop thinking about the sex. The awesome, awesome, sex. So I made him a deal. I told him I’d give him another chance and that we could start at square one and go out on dates and see what happens. One little caveat – no sex. No, it’s wasn’t meant to be a shit test. I wasn’t sure that I felt anything for him beyond sex either, so I wanted to take that out of the equation. Plus I didn’t trust that this change of heart was sincere. The timing was pretty suspect, no?
Well as soon as I said “no sex” and agreed to give him another chance, we have landed right where we started. Me as cruise ship director. Well guess what? The Love Boat has left the dock and no matter how fast he swims, he’ll never catch it. Wait – is that delicious 23-year old I see in the Karaoke Lounge? Hold my drink for me, I’m going in…
The Reluctant Monogamist 