Pure Sweetness.
Who knows? Maybe by jumping into it with him I was trying to put off the process of dealing with “aloneness” resulting from the choice to end a twenty five-year marriage. After all, our second date was the day my divorce was finalized. But then my next question is, who cares about motivation? At the time I experienced the thought, “What if I really am worthy of something nice?” This was a good thought to nurture and go with.
He was pure sweetness.
Besides, when there’s a six-foot three length of man, with a beautiful smile and a piercingly gorgeous blue-eyed scruffiness peeking longingly through your window as he knocks on your door, one would be a fool not to seize the moment.
Call him either brave or crazy, but after we chatted for a while on a gay kink app, he showed up at my house, a somewhat isolated cabin-like structure in the woods. It was a ninety-minute drive from where he lived. The sex was playful, adventuresome and fun as our earlier online flirtations had predicted. Rope? An unnecessary prop. His kisses were enough to leave me immobilized. But the real aspect which blew my mind and left me trembling was the simple physical demonstrativeness – our bodies entwined on a couch or spooned together in bed as we slept, read, talked or watched videos. If I had ever experienced such tenderness, it had been absent from my life for very long.
He helped restore my belief I have the capacity to love, to be tender, to be giving.
At fifty-something, I was initially intrigued at the challenge of capturing the attention of someone half my age. It felt like a bit of a game. An external validation of what did not materialize from within. If successful, the ego might believe ‘I still got it going on.’ But in short order of knowing him, I realized it was quite likely I was equally attracted to his mind as his body. So many sentences started with, “I just read a book about…” or “I just listened to a podcast that…” He was wickedly smart. He had an innate ability to connect seemingly unrelated concepts in logical ways that no one with an average mind would ever see. (Conversation is everything. Intelligence and eagerness for learning and exploration are such the turn ons.)
He was around for about a year. He was clear from the beginning about what he wanted; he was even more clear about what he didn’t. “I don’t need to have someone watch me brush my teeth every day.” The fact that the relationship was never intended to be exclusive prevented me from moving into an unhealthy fantasy. There was no chance I could lull myself into the notion that another being would let me off the hook from needing to meet myself and internally develop a sense of worthiness and validation.
The relationship helped me grow and be more open minded about fluidity and openness. I learned our time together was no less special with a lack of exclusivity. We each enjoyed relationships (sexual, platonic, romantic) with others. I learned it was entirely possible to be with someone, enjoy each other immensely and not give it a label.
That isn’t to say there weren’t pangs of jealousy. Nor was I completely free of longing and loneliness for this person when he wasn’t around. I had a lot going on that year. Yet whatever angst or ugliness I experienced really had nothing to do with him or his actions, and everything to do with the mishegoss in the recesses of my own mind.
It was fun, it was giving, it was playful. And then it ended. The why isn’t really all that important.
I think I initiated the discussion. I had been on a journey, a spiritual retreat of sorts, when I realized it was likely he wanted to move on but I had unwittingly manipulated a dynamic which left it next to impossible for him to do so without feeling like a complete shmuck.
Neither of us ever really expected it to be more than transient. I had become a lot less fun as I climbed into a rather dark needy space prior to embarking, with desperation, on an existential experimental spiritual search to see if I could shake off the vestiges of lifelong depression and answer the questions, “Who am I?” and “What do I want?” He had around the same time met someone that seemed to rock his world.
The finality of it ending was pretty fucking awful which really had nothing to do with him. He was gracious and sweet, willing to talk through it. The awful was the result of my grappling with the choice of how to be as I stood on a vast precipice of emptiness and loneliness.
The thing is, that chasm had been there my entire life waiting to be encountered by me in a different way than I had done so before. What I learned in the months subsequent to the relationship ending is I had a choice in how I embraced existential emptiness and loneliness.
I saw I could choose to live the way I always have:
I could tell myself the relationship changing wasn’t a natural progression. It was confirmation that there is something (fill in the blank: gross, broken, damaged, ugly, defective, unworthy, unlovable) about me that drove him way. I could convince myself I will never again experience something like the feeling of excitement upon hearing his car pull up the long driveway to my house because I am (fill in the blank: gross, broken, damaged, ugly, defective, unworthy, unlovable). I could translate, “I am no longer attracted to you,” as, “I have figured out you are” (fill in the blank: gross, broken, damaged, ugly, defective, unworthy, unlovable.) I could remind myself that in any relationship there will always be someone external to it who is less (fill in the blank: gross, broken, damaged, ugly, defective, unworthy, unlovable) ready to capture the heart of someone you love. I could live in abject fear by telling myself without having someone to distract me from feeling (fill in the blank: gross, broken, damaged, ugly, defective, unworthy, unlovable), I am nothing and will never feel okay.
Or I could choose to live differently than I always have:
He was here, he was pure sweetness. It was absolutely lovely, and I am better for it. I would like to think we left each other in better condition than we found each other. I was loving, attractive, giving, sexy and playful. I am not (fill in the blank: gross, broken, damaged, ugly, defective, unworthy, unlovable). I have the capacity to be lovable, attractive, giving, sexy and playful again. None of the sweetness we may have since found in others is a reflection of something lacking in each other.
The choice may have been simple. The embodiment of that choice beyond the intellectual understanding, especially in the beginning? Not so much.
However, my teacher guides, “You practice your destination.”
Sweetness. Love. Life.