Why Can’t I Be Intimate With Anybody?

My girlfriend says I’m the least romantic guy she’s ever been with. She tells me that she wishes I could be more intimate with her. I have heard this sentiment before. She isn’t the first girl in the world to tell me these things. Actually, I don’t think I’ve ever had a girlfriend that didn’t eventually have this conversation with me.

Girl: Why are you cracking jokes right now? I’m being serious.
Cody: I know you are, I’m sorry.
Girl: That’s a really dick move to laugh at me when I’m trying to be intimate with you.
Cody: I’m not laughing at you. I’m laughing because I’m uncomfortable.
Girl: Uncomfortable with what?

I never know how to answer that question.

My mom tells me that I was always the sweetest of her kids. I was never too energetic for a good cuddle, was in touch with my emotions, and had a innate ability to detect how people were feeling (something that has stayed mostly consistent with time). She tells me that I was always very gentle and sensitive, that I never had a problem wearing my heart on my sleeve. If anything, my mom tells me, she was worried that I’d grow up and be too intimate, that I would get my heart broken by the smallest slight. She was concerned that I would be too soft.

I am not the victim of any physical drama. I had a beautiful childhood. I can’t think of a single reason why it makes any sense, but it’s the universal truth in my life’s story. Why can’t I be intimate with anybody? What’s my problem?

I had a pretty early start with girls. I lost my virginity at the age of fourteen to one of my sister’s friends. To further explain just how ill-equipped I was to be having sex at that point in my life, here is one anecdote to sum that whole experience up:

To hear all my favorite rock stars and writers describe it, sex was going to be this otherworldly high that would define me for the rest of my life. I thought I was ready to experience this, to find out what exactly happened after the orgasm that was so special. I hit crescendo after about thirty seconds only to quickly discover that there was nothing after. The orgasm was it. I had to make up an excuse that the condom broke and I fell asleep in my own room just so incredibly confused. That was it? I thought.

From that point on, I detached any personal emotion from my various sexual escapades. I didn’t see how one could combine the notions of love and sex and the two have remained as two distinct, mostly unrelated things ever since. Love was everything you did outside of having sex. It was asking how their day went and taking an active interest in the response. It was taking walks or drives through town and wasting time in one another’s presence. Sex was just a fun thing to do.

Consider it a simple difference in philosophy, but it’s been a real problem in my life ever since I made the designation. It’s never an impulse for me to show my feelings through physicality. If I love you, that means I want to keep you fed and sheltered. If I love you, that means I want to protect you from the evils of the world and shoulder some of the responsibility. I show love through a deep caring that cannot be washed off or otherwise destroyed. Love is a vast network of conflicting principals.

Sex, conversely, doesn’t say or mean anything besides, “you looked good to me and why not?” It’s just not special. I have had sex with far more people that I didn’t care about than ones that I did.

This is a hard reality to swallow when you live in a society that collectively agrees that love and sex are deeply integrated and mutual. I feel like an alien sometimes, traversing the world with a different perspective that nobody else bothers to comprehend. I feel like my natural experience has damaged me and made me an incredibly difficult person to live with and love.

I find it doubly interesting that I have chosen photography as a career path and life-defining activity. I am always playing spectator, always the guy behind the scenes and away from the experience. In a way, part of me wonders if I’ve ever had a real experience of my own in over ten years. I photograph almost everything. Nothing is private. Nothing is sacred. In a way, I guess I haven’t differed from being a child all that much. I still wear my heart on my sleeve, albeit in different ways, and maybe I’ve just found things that help me to cope with that.

I cling to levity like it’s an oxygen tank in the far outer reaches of space. Whenever I’m uncomfortable, whenever I feel myself edging nearer to genuinely intimate contact, I head to my deep reserve of jokes and blow it. In a way, I think my entire family does this. I remember at my dear grandmother’s funeral, when the whole family had just lost it’s head matriarch, we crowded around the freshly poured dirt of her grave and cracked jokes at one another’s expense. I made fun of my dad’s velcro shoes. My brother made fun of my little teeth. My cousins cracked jokes at my sister’s socks. In times of crisis, the lot of us all seem to go to this place. We lighten the mood and diminish the sadness of whatever reality we find ourselves in. It’s a defense mechanism above all other things, but I also think it’s an act of love and intimacy at its most base level. To care enough to crack a joke is an expression of love. That’s super intimate to me, but I also have come to understand that it’s not universally acceptable.

Contrast that to my girlfriend’s family. They are an overtly sentimental people and would probably be aghast at the kind of things my family says to one another on a semi-regular basis. From the outside, it looks cold, uncaring and even worse than those things— it just seems inappropriate. I find that this family experience is more true to the universal understanding and that my family is just an exception to the rule. I grew up with the idea that a good joke could cure all ills.

And that leads me back to the ever-dreaded conversation of intimacy with my girlfriend, late at night with the lights off and the overhead fan spinning at a million rotations a minute. The fan is the only thing that makes noise and it blots out the lingering sadness like a happy orchestra.

“This is just so hard.” She says. And I hear it. I really do. I empathize with the frustration of her every day life and feel a thousand different things that would make more sense to say in the moment. But I don’t say those things. Instead, I head to the fruit trees and grab the lowest hanging one that I can find.

“That’s what she said.” I reply. This upsets her because it makes her smile, the exact opposite of my initial intention. This isn’t a moment to make jokes. It’s not a moment to make light of anything. I know this, and yet, there I am. There I go. I know I shouldn’t joke around and I do it anyway. It makes her feel like she can’t talk to me about anything and it makes me feel like she doesn’t understand me. The sadness pours in. Nobody laughs.

When I was a kid, I used to think that I wasn’t actually related to my family. I thought maybe they switched bassinets and nobody ever became the wiser. I’m not sure why I felt this way, but I definitely did. Then, when I started going to school, I felt that maybe I grew up in a different country than the other kids in class. My interests, my principals, the way that I walked and talked and chewed bubblegum all seemed wildly different than those people. I didn’t relate to them and I didn’t much like them either. As a young adult, I started to feel like I wasn’t even a human-being at all. I thought that maybe I actually was some kind of alien, cast off by his own society and sent hopelessly to try and blend in with this adjacent planet. Was I a Martian?

Now, as a full-blown man, I mostly just see myself as a flawed animal. My fundamental belief-systems were carved into my neurons by sheer happenstance and they are now rigid and hardened as they pulse and quiver to indicate my sense of self. If there is any kind of universal truth, if it is at all agreed upon collectively, then I am nowhere near the pulse. I float on the outer ridges somewhere, trying to make sense of the contrast and failing miserably and consistently. I have disassociated in many ways and continue that route without any sight of a turn toward somewhere else.

I long to be intimate. I watch movies where the main protagonist feels so helplessly in love that he has to express it right at that moment with a passionate kiss and a light piano instrumentation that sets the mood. I already feel these things, so why can’t I act on them in a normal manner? I want to be that guy. I want to be normal. I long to have deep, thoughtful conversations with people that don’t dissolve into digging my feet in the mud and kicking it at the person I’m talking to. I wish to never tell another joke for as long as I live. But it’s really hard. It’s really, really hard.

That’s what she said.

Fuck.