Sexual Intimacy is a Foreign Language to Me
My “sexual orientation” is a mystery to me. Possible defining qualities include that I often feel jealous of masculine-projecting people and physiologically drawn toward femme-projecting people but have never discounted the likelihood of me encountering (or eventually feeling significantly prone to) the opposite. I infrequently attempt to actively discourage advances from either demographic. Both my Tinder and OKCupid profiles are set to “looking for everyone.”
I never received formal training (or anything like an in-person version of Cosmo) in flirting, physical intimacy, or heteronormative sex politics except the types of etiquette I learned from people 10-50 years older than myself. My father self-identifies as “touchy-feely” and aggressively hugs or gently touches people without their consent, but I have to remind my mother it’s okay to seek verbal or physically intimate interactions: she will stand near me for minutes at a time talking about nonsequitur, relatively banal information and will wait for me to initiate (and later confess all she wanted was) a hug, instead of asking for one. I was home-schooled until sixth grade and was the subject of ridicule rather than nurturing strong friendships with other pubescent children.
I feel averse to demanding anything of anyone. Before making physical contact with a person, I maintain an extreme emotional distance, and feel, but don’t convey, almost debilitating anxiety. However, once I make physical contact with someone I am attracted to or feel kinship with, I become over-attentively physical and painfully aware of it. Once the specific instance of physical interaction ends, I reset, like a stopwatch programmed to magnetically incline itself toward the nearest watch-like object after a fixed amount of time, then suddenly change polarity and revert to zero.
My first girlfriend had to undress me and shove my erection inside her before I understood that she wanted sex. I felt surprised and afraid. I spent three hours talking with my second girlfriend about our mutual sex history before we almost contractually agreed that beginning a relationship was requisite to sex. I asked my most recent partner, at each intimacy interval (though there were no signs of resistance), if the form of touch I was interested in initiating was okay.
This behavior seems atypical, to me, based on my mimetic awareness of how intimacy “works.” Do people ask before cuddling? Or “go for it” tentatively and withdraw when/if the physical proposition is rejected? With people who are less careful about seeking consent as a requisite to intimacy, is there a place one could ethically “draw the line” before that person was infringing on the other’s boundaries (even before the person communicated “no”)? Or does it depend on the person? These are the kinds of questions I have anxiety attacks asking myself when anywhere in the vicinity of someone to whom I feel attracted.
I don’t consider myself in any way “moral.” I’ve cheated while in monogamous relationships. I’ve been egregiously incautious with other people’s bodies and emotions. I’ve been emotionally manipulative toward people I knew were vulnerable with the goal of being intimate with them. I’ve been physically intimate with people I knew specific mutual friends—or friend groups (who were in some cases, at the time, closer to me)—would feel extremely negative about, at no one’s expense but the friendships themselves. I’ve actively avoided apologizing for being insensitive out of stubbornness and apathy.
I become extremely depressed when I become aware people are or have been treating me these ways. However, I feel unable to hold those people accountable for anything. I don’t think there’s anything resembling penance for shitty actions taken at others’ expense. “Forgiveness” is, in my view, something a person has to choose after encountering emotional trauma. I do, based on my experiences with feeling hurt by other people’s actions, want to behave differently in the future to prevent similar feelings in others, but (similarly with regard to my lack of training in intimacy) I’m not sure there are moral guidelines for how to less “nihilistically” navigate future scenarios except to be as openly communicative as possible.
It seems apt to me that sex is seen as a type of currency among people who have better intuition or training (or just experience) than I do in specific forms of intimacy and affective identity-projection. People who seem confident mutually viewing social cues and nonverbal gestures as concrete steps to physicality use forms of expression that seems bafflingly abstract to me. I feel incapable of seeing any aspect of my relationship with other people as anything but a series of ever-changing, fluid, nonreproducible movements toward or away from them, until one of us dies.
Stephen Michael McDowell (b. 1988) has been featured in over 100 Beach Sloth reviews.
