(Part 1 of 2, I hit the character limit.) But anyway. So this is a bit of a multi-thousand-word brain dump mostly because I'm trying to work it out for myself - I should have written this yesterday (or even earlier, in the case of part of this) when the conversations were fresher in my head. I ended up spending most of the day yesterday, though, in the kitchen learning to make Sichuan food. (Side note? holy fuck it was good - I was in the kitchen for like 6 hours but for once my ambitions and my execution lined up. Anyway.) (Further side note, Artist was here for one of MiniMe's nuclear meltdowns and my less than graceful parental response over it and didn't think I was a terrible person, in the way I am always afraid I am.)
The thing is that in some ways, it's actually ok that Knight and I are not each other's *main* sexual partners - it's just that we (yes both of us) still want to work out where our compatibility in that area is. Especially me, I think, just because I don't know how to have a romantic relationship that's not also fairly intensely sexual - sex without romance? Easy. Romance without sex? ehhhhhhhhh while I know that works for many people and that's great, I'm not sure I know how it works for me. But we can both acknowledge that we probably have more baseline compatibility with our other partners, in bed, than with each other.
As I've mentioned before, here, it's not that we *never* have sex, it's just not really quite enough for me and more importantly, I think (I could live with the frequency) it's not the
kind of sex I want. I'm torn on whether those desires are realistic though - part of me says I'm asking too much, part of me says "clearly I have this kind of sex elsewhere so why shouldn't I have it here?).
There's... OK. A lot of sex therapists write about the difference between arousal and desire, and the difference between responsive desire and spontaneous desire (and I think I'd posit a 3rd form, anticipatory desire, that doesn't exactly fall into either category. Knight and I's issues lie in the gray areas between all of those, and in the nuances of their expression.
(Definition time, at least for the purposes of how I use these words here:
arousal = physical interest in / readiness for sex;
desire = the state of mentally wanting/needing sex;
spontaneous = desire for the other person just because they exist and they're sexy / you love them without any specific action on their part,
responsive = desire arising from the other person specifically taking actions to arouse you or *doing* something,
anticipatory = desire arising from the planning for a later sexual encounter or from the sort of flirtation/teasing that is explicitly not meant to lead to an immediate sexual encounter. Think being turned on now by sexting about your evening's plans, or from a bit of groping early in the evening when you're going to have sex later.) Oh, and for me sometimes sexual intensity feels correlated to amount of desire, whether or not it is to my partner - so slightly rougher-into-borderline-kinky play feels like there's more desire to it - and thus greater emotional intensity? - than mellow or sensuous type sex.
For me, when things are going the way I *like* them to, desire precedes arousal - a lot of it is anticipatory, some is responsive and specifically responsive to my partner's desire. In fact most of the time arousal actually springs more from anticipatory and responsive desire than from actual physical action, especially from my partner's desire. Like, in the right circumstances I can be already turned on and basically ready for sex before things even really get started - all the foreplay happened mentally and/or physical foreplay is about *increasing* arousal rather than creating it. Another side effect of this - or perhaps cause of it - is that I'm far more able to have sex in a mode where I'm the pursued instead of the pursuer, very much NOT the initiator. I mean, I can/do occasionally initiate sex but 1. I have to feel confident that I'm wanted back and 2. I really want there to be some switchover moment where I feel like ok, now that things have gotten started, my partner can takeover and take the lead and I can feel more like an object of desire than necessarily the person DOING the desiring.
And I *know* that that dynamic, or at least insisting on that dynamic all the time, is kind of problematic. I often blame it on being submissive, but I don't think that's really it - I think a lot of it comes from typical heteronormative programming for sure, and the rest is a baseline lack of confidence in my own sexuality and trust in
my partner's no, specifically in
Knight's desire for me - and I very much don't want to have sex (or even have a relationship) where someone else is just going through the motions. That's scared me since before Knight was even in my life, truthfully. My parents were in a sexless marriage for so many reasons, none of which I should have known about as a 12 year old but nonetheless I did... and I was always afraid that sort of thing would sneak up on me in the future and I'd miss the signs and find myself living
this song (which I remember playing over and over and over as a 9th/10th grader). Add to that a partner who I
know is a people pleaser who I can easily see going through the motions just to make me happy (and even if he sort of is that should be ok, or at least I've argued that consent that stems from wanting to please a partner rather than immediate physical desire is still consent... yet I can't seem to allow myself to be in the recipient in that same space.)
For whatever reason (we haven't talked about it as much because we've never needed to, other than talking about how astonishing the energy between us continues to be), Artist seems to live in that same space in terms of desire. He plays with the anticipatory desire games with me, seems to intrinsically understand how my responses work, and I've never ever ever doubted that he was only doing things to make me happy. Hell, because of the way our dynamic works it sort of feels like it doesn't matter whether what we're doing results in his immediate pleasure because it's so clear that he likes having a level of power over my responses, so there's a kind of desire there somehow whether or not there's immediate arousal on his part. Too much information, I suppose, but this feels relevant - a not uncommon thing between us is for us to have *just* had PIV sex and for him to then decide that, despite me being sure I can't possibly have any more orgasms, he thinks I should have a few more and I do. And we seem to be incapable of staying in a sensuous or mellow space for the entirety of an encounter, the intensity pretty much always ramps up to rougher sex than where we started. There's a feedback loop between us that's practically tantric - I swear sometimes I feel his orgasms as much as I do my own.