“The other people I want to have sex with, it’s based on ignorance. I don’t know what I would find if I entered that territory. When I want to have sex with you, I know what I’m asking for. I want you–I love you.”
I was talking to my spouse–we were in bed.
“Wanting to have sex with you is based on reality,” I continued. “Wanting to have sex with other people is based on dreams.”
cuddle buddy
Recently we let our good friend into bed with us as a cuddle buddy. We don’t have sex with her. But big feelings are stirred up, to invite another person into a space where we’ve been just the two of us for 12 years, having intense transformative experiences including power play, pain play, and thousands of orgasms.
“Probably what I want with those people is totally impossible. Probably once I got there, I might not even enjoy what I found there. People store a lot of trauma along with sex,” I said.
I pondered how what I search for is so often not what I find. Many people store trauma with their sexual needs and activities. How do we work on that? Mostly I don’t think people work on it at all. It just gets shoved at the next person we do it with.
“Thank you for being real,” I told my spouse. “Thank you for being real with me. You’re the best.”
fantasy vs reality
Fantasy can be helpful to masturbate to. I can want anything. Fantasy I can get intense energy out of with no risk of STIs, pregnancy, inappropriate entanglement with people who would mess up my life.
My fantasies are hot. They are not real. But the inner life is important to me to the point of sacred, and that’s confusing.
How real is the unreal? How important is dream life? Feels similar to religion. God could be real, or just an idea to play with. Is God literally looking down at us from the sky, chuckling at our exploits, watching us like her weird ant farm? I hope not.
There are many ways to conceive of God. Does it matter, this layer of meaning to put over mundane life? The sacred does keep me going, and reality is a big deal. I would much rather that God is holding me somehow. I believe she is.
dream
As a kid I learned how in some cultures, if you had a sex dream about someone, it was a sin. You had broken a rule and maybe committed adultery, depending. It was necessary to apologize, confess, receive punishment.
Yes, dream was considered real somehow. That always stuck in my head because like many devout autistic Christian children, being good was an obsession. If even thinking a sketch thought is wrong, and I can dream wrong dreams despite the fact that dreams are totally outside of my control–wow, I’m screwed.
What is dream life to you? There’s a range from thinking they’re meaningless nonsense, to finding help and meaning there. My dream life nourishes me.
how it would really be
Rereading this post draft days later, I find the Nest who wrote the first part pessimistic. Yes, the transition to sex town from friend village can be difficult. Suddenly a whole new trauma trove is unlocked.
But it’s worth it sometimes, right? Intimacy can be a lot of work. But it’s worth it. Another person is another world. I’m honored to be let in at all. It’s beautiful.
All bodies and lives and sexualities are holy ground. Or so it feels that way to me, this morning.
I like to work on my sexual trauma by making art about it, bdsm, talking about it in therapy, talking about it with friends and my spouse, writing about it. Not everyone is up for the healing conversation. But thank you, reader, for witnessing me.
