Before I start, I wanted to say that this series has been a great way to reflect on the various ways men and women are different, as well as how those differences really impact how we go through the world.  After this post, I want to take a bit of time away from this series as a means to collect myself and to try new regularized topics to write about, I will come back intermittently to post about these topics, but after a year I am ready to try something new. Thank you for following along with this, I have enjoyed it.

As I started, so shall I end.  With sex and relationships.

I’ve spent a long time asking women my age about their relationship experiences, what it is like to be with a guy, and for what they tell me, I’m surprised a lot of them keep wanting to be in one. Stories I’ve heard, go into great detail about the enormous breaches of personal trust and faith in the partners they were with.  Stories of being forced or compelled to do things they didn’t want to do, harassed or abused, or even worse.  The stories were not all doom and gloom, but the sheer regularity of these negative experiences among people I have talked to is disheartening.  With each stories told to me the list of things that haunted me.  Haunt me, telling me of what I could be, but compelling me to go out to heal and not to hurt.  I don’t shy away from these stories, and I am supremely grateful for those who have shared their experiences with me, it keeps me aware of how bad it could be. In the end what bothers me how people can people can think so little of others, or feel entitled to something that should be shared. The bar for relationships a lot of women is a lot lower than it should be.  Women aren’t perfect, women are just people, and should at least be treated with the decency of an ordinary person, and sometimes they fight to get that much.

It makes me fear my own missteps, vivid things I may have done better. Progress is all about learning from my mistakes, to be better but with people and keep moving forward. Through it all, I’ve got scars on my heart from it, scars that seem to be growing and I don’t know what to do.

I think I’m afraid of sex, that powerful act that like a void, never seems to be satiated completely.  I think I always have been.  I can give you every excuse in the book for this fear, my religious upbringing, my less than stellar early life experiences with girls, or just the world of cold videos of porn on the internet but each of these would just seem to be a contributor or symptom of a much bigger issue.

Expression.

My experiences have taught me to that care is to give, and what else is there to give but myself.  I gave up pieces of myself to appease people early on.  Destroyed bits of my heart and soul to be okay with it.  I remember in high school, among the many strange things that happened to me was a girl. I had liked her at some point, and she had liked me, but the only thing was that our timing or wanting to be with each other ended up being off.  In liking me, she wanted express that in some way, so she ended up sending naked pictures of herself to me.  This is where curiosity kills, this might sound weird, but the curious part of me wanted to know more, but my heart and soul weren’t in it resisting me, telling me to stop this, that doing this was hurting me and wasn’t right.  She knew that I didn’t want a relationship because I told her that I wasn’t interested but she kept on with it (though I should have been more active to stop it). I didn’t though, not directly because I had always been told this was a good thing and that I should savor it and enjoy it even though it killed me inside. At the end of it all, in some strange way, it felt like someone was at least expressing that they wanted me to be that person in my life which felt good and started me down this road.

The experience sticks with me because it was the first of a lot of experiences that felt just not right for me. I may go into detail another time but for now, the point is I’ve had my fair share of good bad experiences, and it’s what I learned though that matters. In some way, I think most guys see similarly to me, that sex and sexual things are a form of intimacy and expression.  It is about power, desire, and in the best of times love.  The little voice in our head whispering that the only way to feel the connection is through that expression of two bodies of self. That the negation of advances recounts itself as a rejection of this expression and a rejection of expression means a rejection of self.
This type of thinking is ridiculous, but when feeling and desire is only expressed through such limited avenues, how else is that to come off.

This is why I am so afraid of sex because to me, its a giving of myself, leaving myself open and yet it can so quickly be given and taken from you. It can become from meaningful to meaningless swiftly and easily. Why would I want to do that to myself, to satiate if not only temporarily the urges that my body afflicts upon me? Used as a mechanism to fill the void of lonely disregard of heart, a cry for help and a stopgap for meaning.  Each time disregarded, carves away at our heart so that less and less of it comes back to us.  I want something more because I know more is out there.  I want to be open to the love of a different kind and nature. Expression of which can comes in different types and forms still foreign and mysterious to me. I don’t want it to be only about sex, there should always be more to it.

We keep coming back to relationships though, after each of our experiences to try again.  I don’t know why, I don’t understand it and I know I won’t go for a while but we keep trying out there, hoping and working for change.  The world of girls and guys is different in a lot of ways but this one is the same, we want a better future and we are, if not slowly, moving towards it together. I hope it will be one we can be proud of.