MsEmotional
Member
I’m struggling with a question of how much explanation/information to expect when it comes to people’s personal boundaries — particularly boundaries related to sex. The “what to do when a request is ignored” post made me think about my own situation and I am wondering what you all would do if you were me...
The long and short of it, for those who may not be familiar with my other posts over the last 8 months or so....
1. Laptop and I explored a “more than friends” physical relationship last January. It wasn’t well-defined. It seemed to be like FWB to me, but as it was ending he said he hadn’t thought of it that way and had just thought it was early and up in the air as to where it might go. It ended because during our STI risk chat he said he wanted to limit sexual contact with me (no oral, no PIV) because he wanted to pursue a relationship with another woman who was trying to limit *her* STI risk and considered me to be a higher potential risk than his other current sexual partners. I didn’t feel comfortable with that line of decision-making and told him I thought we should just go back to being platonic friends. I did suggest a one-time-only fuck since he wasn’t actually together with her yet and he seemed interested in that but then we decided to skip it.
2. Since then, he and the other girl broke up, I got pregnant, miscarried....a lot has happened. But in the last couple months we have started exploring a FWB kink-exploration type relationship.
3. A few weeks ago, I asked on here for advice about how to end things with an online guy I was flirting with. Things didn’t go well, in part because he kept asking me to justify why I didn’t want to keep talking with him and got upset when he felt my reasons were not justifiable.
So those are the Recent Events. Here we go to the present situation.
When Laptop and I were having our “we are bad at reading each other so let’s be super direct about what we want out of the decision to become physically intimate again” talk, he said he did not necessarily foresee intercourse as part of our dynamic. This seemed fine to me, but I started getting self-conscious about it later.
“Why doesn’t he want to have sex with me? Does he not find me attractive? Then why be intimate with me at all? Is it because my nether regions are unattractive? Then why does he want to go down on me?He didn’t want to have sex last time and it turned out that it wasn’t so much about his preference as much as someone else’s....is that happening again? But it’s different this time....last time oral was also off the table because of this other woman’s STI risk assessment.....so something has definitely changed. But what? Is he more afraid of getting me pregnant now? But he knows that my pregnancy likely occurred from activities other than intercourse.....”
It goes on and on like that. I believe, in my conscience, that he owes me no justification. He has said no and no is a complete sentence. My therapist said, with all our background, that I have a right to be curious and to ask him for more information about what his thoughts and feelings are about sex with me. But especially with “Recent Event #3,” I feel very strongly that it is not right for me to pry into his choices about what he does with his body.
One night when we were texting and there was a good opening, though, I explained my insecurity about it and asked him if he could tell me more about his reasons for not wanting PIV with me. He said he would “prefer to leave it at ‘that’s not something I am interested in doing right now’ but that if want to dig deeper [he supposes I am] entitled....but it is a bigger conversation and one that [he] would prefer to have in person.”
I feel conflicted though. I don’t feel comfortable asking him for more info when he has said that he would prefer to keep that private. I feel as though I have two competing paradigms in my head:
A. He has told me what he is interested in doing with me and that’s the end of the story. His reasons are his own business. He owes me no further explanation and it is inappropriate of me to ask for him to justify his choice about how he shares his body with me.
B. He may *owe* me no further explanation, but it is okay for me to acknowledge that if I am to continue to be in this situation with him, I *need* an explanation in order to feel secure about what is going on. Therefore it is up to me to ask for what I need and, gracefully bow out of this situation if he is uncomfortable sharing his reasons with me.
I think what is really making me anxious right now is the fact that he said he would rather not dig deeper into his reasons. That makes me feel like his reason must be that there is something distasteful about me that he doesn’t want to share with me because he’s afraid I will be offended or hurt.
I can think of lots of perfectly acceptable reasons why he wouldn’t want to have PIV with me. Like maybe he was freaked out by my pregnancy and feels like avoiding intercourse is at least doing his due diligence with regard to avoiding another accidental pregnancy. (Even though I am pretty sure I didn’t get pregnant from intercourse, I think it is reasonable to be appropriately cautious about PIV since that act is the typical way of getting pregnant.) Or maybe he knows that he is more likely to develop feelings if he has intercourse and he wants to keep things light and casual between us. If those were the reasons, I would be fine if he just *told* me that. But this not knowing what is going through his head but knowing that it IS something he doesn’t want to tell me is driving me kind of batty with insecurity and self-doubting.
So what should I do? Should I bring it up again the next time we see each other in person? Should I try to just let it go for a few months, hope I get past it and and broach the topic later if it is still bothering me? Should I suck it up and recognize that he’s already said he doesn’t really want to go into detail and I should accept that answer and decide if I can live with it — and if I cannot then I need to end it with him?
The long and short of it, for those who may not be familiar with my other posts over the last 8 months or so....
1. Laptop and I explored a “more than friends” physical relationship last January. It wasn’t well-defined. It seemed to be like FWB to me, but as it was ending he said he hadn’t thought of it that way and had just thought it was early and up in the air as to where it might go. It ended because during our STI risk chat he said he wanted to limit sexual contact with me (no oral, no PIV) because he wanted to pursue a relationship with another woman who was trying to limit *her* STI risk and considered me to be a higher potential risk than his other current sexual partners. I didn’t feel comfortable with that line of decision-making and told him I thought we should just go back to being platonic friends. I did suggest a one-time-only fuck since he wasn’t actually together with her yet and he seemed interested in that but then we decided to skip it.
2. Since then, he and the other girl broke up, I got pregnant, miscarried....a lot has happened. But in the last couple months we have started exploring a FWB kink-exploration type relationship.
3. A few weeks ago, I asked on here for advice about how to end things with an online guy I was flirting with. Things didn’t go well, in part because he kept asking me to justify why I didn’t want to keep talking with him and got upset when he felt my reasons were not justifiable.
So those are the Recent Events. Here we go to the present situation.
When Laptop and I were having our “we are bad at reading each other so let’s be super direct about what we want out of the decision to become physically intimate again” talk, he said he did not necessarily foresee intercourse as part of our dynamic. This seemed fine to me, but I started getting self-conscious about it later.
“Why doesn’t he want to have sex with me? Does he not find me attractive? Then why be intimate with me at all? Is it because my nether regions are unattractive? Then why does he want to go down on me?He didn’t want to have sex last time and it turned out that it wasn’t so much about his preference as much as someone else’s....is that happening again? But it’s different this time....last time oral was also off the table because of this other woman’s STI risk assessment.....so something has definitely changed. But what? Is he more afraid of getting me pregnant now? But he knows that my pregnancy likely occurred from activities other than intercourse.....”
It goes on and on like that. I believe, in my conscience, that he owes me no justification. He has said no and no is a complete sentence. My therapist said, with all our background, that I have a right to be curious and to ask him for more information about what his thoughts and feelings are about sex with me. But especially with “Recent Event #3,” I feel very strongly that it is not right for me to pry into his choices about what he does with his body.
One night when we were texting and there was a good opening, though, I explained my insecurity about it and asked him if he could tell me more about his reasons for not wanting PIV with me. He said he would “prefer to leave it at ‘that’s not something I am interested in doing right now’ but that if want to dig deeper [he supposes I am] entitled....but it is a bigger conversation and one that [he] would prefer to have in person.”
I feel conflicted though. I don’t feel comfortable asking him for more info when he has said that he would prefer to keep that private. I feel as though I have two competing paradigms in my head:
A. He has told me what he is interested in doing with me and that’s the end of the story. His reasons are his own business. He owes me no further explanation and it is inappropriate of me to ask for him to justify his choice about how he shares his body with me.
B. He may *owe* me no further explanation, but it is okay for me to acknowledge that if I am to continue to be in this situation with him, I *need* an explanation in order to feel secure about what is going on. Therefore it is up to me to ask for what I need and, gracefully bow out of this situation if he is uncomfortable sharing his reasons with me.
I think what is really making me anxious right now is the fact that he said he would rather not dig deeper into his reasons. That makes me feel like his reason must be that there is something distasteful about me that he doesn’t want to share with me because he’s afraid I will be offended or hurt.
I can think of lots of perfectly acceptable reasons why he wouldn’t want to have PIV with me. Like maybe he was freaked out by my pregnancy and feels like avoiding intercourse is at least doing his due diligence with regard to avoiding another accidental pregnancy. (Even though I am pretty sure I didn’t get pregnant from intercourse, I think it is reasonable to be appropriately cautious about PIV since that act is the typical way of getting pregnant.) Or maybe he knows that he is more likely to develop feelings if he has intercourse and he wants to keep things light and casual between us. If those were the reasons, I would be fine if he just *told* me that. But this not knowing what is going through his head but knowing that it IS something he doesn’t want to tell me is driving me kind of batty with insecurity and self-doubting.
So what should I do? Should I bring it up again the next time we see each other in person? Should I try to just let it go for a few months, hope I get past it and and broach the topic later if it is still bothering me? Should I suck it up and recognize that he’s already said he doesn’t really want to go into detail and I should accept that answer and decide if I can live with it — and if I cannot then I need to end it with him?