I never had a boyfriend until now that I am 25 years old. A couple of months ago I met a guy and we fell in love. He was my first date, my first kiss, my first everything. He knows this and doesn’t care about any of that.
The problem is that I am so used to doing things on my own. I always go places alone, I read alone, I go for walks alone, I do everything alone. And I am so not use to being kissed and hugged and cuddled and having someone who misses me and wants to be with me.
He wants to massage my feet, rub my back, he wants to go shopping with me, to cook with me, he tells me I’m sexy and beautiful and I just feel so lost. Everything about his presence from his voice to his height feels intoxicating to me.
I love him and I try to do things for him all the time because I always felt the need to love someone. I just never thought someone would love me back and be so sweet and attentive as he is.
Whenever he tries to do something for me I get extremely uncomfortable because in my mind I’m not used to it and I feel like I don’t deserve it. Around his many friends who constantly fawn all over him I often feel that I’m not attractive enough for him.
How can I tell him this? Would he understand? How can I become more comfortable being taken care of? I realize how lucky I am. After a lifetime fed on fairy tale endings I feel like I finally found the one, but am terrified I will drive him away. I feel like Eve having bit into the fruit of knowledge and now dread the impending ejection from heaven.
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By the time I figured out she was a virgin, she for sure wasn’t. I slowly realized my mistake as she crawled in from beneath the stall during my morning constitutional and literally scared the crap outta me. “I’ve been looking for you” she said as I screamed.
She must have gotten my real name off my coffee cup the night we met. Admittedly her looks were below my usual standards, however she looked real cute when she at the slightest provocation exploded talking non stop about the novel she was writing at the time, at the coffee shop it seems both of us frequent for midnight scones. I asked to see her book collection as an excuse to get inside her, and before long was skipping out the window before anyone could see me riding this moped through the glass. Her purse contained $3.41 in loose change, some foundation, a diva cup, a moleskin notebook completely filled with inane gibberish and a cliff bar. As a blueberry aficionado I can confidently say a cream swirl accents a sweet tang well.
Anyways I was just about to call the cops on this super clingy black hole, however I had to stop when she started to demonstrate the suction of one on me. The words literally could not have left my mouth from the force. For the rest of the day my coworkers kept asking about the massive raise I must have gotten written all over my face and I could not resist confirming. I had discovered god that day, and as any good apostle, would not shut the hell up about it.
God is a manic pixie dream girl as far as I could gather from our irregularly frequent and frequently irregular meetings thereafter. She still weirds me out on occasion, whenever she demonstrates a general instability that on one hand demands ritualistic picnics or kisses in a storm to satisfy, flights of fancy or unfounded proclamations but also translates into close bedroom encounters of a third kind. Always included in my prayers for nightly enlightenment is how much I would love for this current arrangement to continue for as long as possible. But in reality I was giving the relationship 6 months to live at best and a very uncomfortable end that while can be prolonged with modern conveyances, would only cause additional grief for all those involved. God knows we all hate break ups, but I’m doing what I can to be nice here.
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Nora Ephron! I blame you for incepting in me faked orgasms via your part in When Prissy Met Doofus. I mean I guess things started off innocently enough. I really really liked him. He really really liked me. He was doing everything right and I wanted to show my appreciation.
I don’t really know what was wrong with me. Whether I was stressed out about my first time, covering for not knowing what I was doing, I just felt that in the moment, it would have been awkward for me to just continue to lie there blank faced as he finished. I immediately felt terrible for having done so, and would have apologized on the spot if it weren’t for embarrassment.
Sex has been fun, though somehow I think I expected a little more raw passion than what I’ve been getting. And I had purchased so many bodices to be ripped off. Not to say it isn’t highly pleasurable but his sense of obligation can grate as much as his fingernails which is why faking is easier on everyone involved. Faking lets me skip to the good part where he holds me close and I get to talk about whatever fills my mind instead of my behind.
Perhaps I’m just joshing myself thinking I could avoid the issue by not thinking about it. But I just can’t stop acting now, especially now that I’ve seen the look of satisfaction on his face to see me ecstasized.
The only downside is that I’m now being dishonest with my current life partner and the wrongness of it is eating me alive. How can I tell him this? Would he understand? How can I be more honest with him? I don’t want to keep manipulating him to get what I want, but I can’t think of what else to do.
I wish I could say the rest of our relationship is built on a solid bridge of trust, but that’s a lie as well. Perhaps it is too much to ask for one man to be an endless fount of new stories and jokes, but I’m a little tired of feigning laughter and interest as he recycles his. I nearly chewed off the end my tongue once when he repeated an opinion of mine back to me as his own.
Well no one said relationships were easy.
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I consider myself a relatively straight shooter. I tell people exactly what I think of them. I like to think this strategy has served me well in life. No complications, no trickery, what you see is what you get and people seem to like that about me.
We fought for the first time today. There were no survivors. I took flak for seeing other women. She took hits for consistent dishonesty. We did not have make up sex. We would not have sex again.
I told her she’s a lot more into me than I am in her. I told her I thought of her as a fun diversion, someone I could unplug with. I forgot to mention how she’s the funnest person I know, how endlessly entertaining she is to be around.
It wouldn’t have worked out anyways. Like for anyone around her, she is always giving out compliments. To be appreciated feels great, but I just don’t have the same amount of respect for myself as she seems to have for me.
I liked her well enough as a best friend I could sleep with but didn’t see how she would want to stick with me for long. All I could offer her was a good step stone relationship for her path ahead.
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Don’t worry. My anger won’t last long. A 25 year old child of mediocre accomplishment who’s incapable of true intimacy, who lies and cheats, has no one whom he is close to, who is frail, insecure, pathetic, tortured, who’s dissatisfied with all aspects of his life and lacks a single trace of integrity or decency whatsoever.
And then a woman comes along and tries to love him, encourage his dreams, invite him to be her partner in life and he repays her love with lies, secrecy, a handful of shitty chocolates, an unceremonious breakup based on his own inability to get close to someone who has her shit together and with whom he could have a real partnership, and tops it off by having an affair this entire time. And projects onto his girlfriend that she was the untrustworthy one.
This is who you are: a sneaky, devious monster who goes from girl to girl, draining their lifeblood. So I don’t have to humiliate you. Your entire life is one big humiliation. And no matter how much you meditate, introspect or go to therapy, this will never change. This is who you are. Drop the mic. I’m done with you.
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And this is why I try not to have feelings.