Back to Michael, the man with the troublesome fellatio.
“I’m just not into this anymore.” He said sitting up in bed.
“What?! I don’t understand.” I asked, pulling the sheet over my shoulders.
“I’m just being honest about how I’m feeling right now.” He was starting to sound like a group therapy leader.
“But we’ve grown so comfortable together.”
“Exactly,” he sighed. He was always sighing, as if every moment was like lifting a bag of bricks. “This always happens to me. I don’t know why it happens but…” He exhaled heavy through his nose, “I think we’ve run our course together.”
Run our course? Run our course?
But after the initial shock of his melodramatic word choice, I had to admit that we’d reached a premature sexual slump. We’d gone from beach make out sessions that made the families sunning around us uncomfortable, to late night Netflix with a tub of ice cream. We’d jumped the shark, running before we learned to walk, and now all of our eggs had cracked in one basket.
He placed his hand under my chin and slowly moved my face to meet his. “I’m grateful for the time we’ve had together. Don’t feel bad.”
Now he was speaking as if someone in the room was receiving a terminal diagnosis, which brings me to the two month rule.
“This is not a relationship.”
“Then what is it?”
“I don’t know… Hanging out? I really like chilling with you but this is not a relationship.”
Whatever it is, if it’s good, the need to be up against each other in whatever fashion can consume the entire purpose of each day:
You think, “Okay all I have to do today is get through work, eat dinner and then sex.”
It becomes a major deciding factor when planning your daily routines:
“I need to go for a run today, I need to stay in shape for sex, but I don’t want to be too tired later. I also need to pick up condoms at lunch.”
You start seeing the potential for impromptu intercourse in even the most platonic of social meetings; you become sexually practical:
“I’ll make a lunch date with Sara ‘cause she lives right by him and he doesn’t work till the evening so I can grab a bite with a friend and get some without spending excess time commuting back and forth.”
But eventually things get comfortable. This usually occurs after the first two to three months. You figure out how to add him to your routine and your relationship, dare I say it, becomes just that: a series of preplanned events, predictable, reliable. The crazy sex fiend inside doesn’t disappear, she just gets less crazy and that’s when things usually go south, which brings me back to Michael and how he said this always happens.
“This isn’t your fault. I’m not saying it’s mine either,” he put his hand on my shoulder.
“Uh, alright,” I really wasn’t feeling that bad but his sympathetic overload was beginning to bring me down. “Well, maybe we need to stop doing it so often. Sex isn’t the only thing we enjoy doing together.”
Or was it?
After sexual sobriety comes the Moment of Truth: Will you still want to be together now that you don’t need to constantly rip each other’s clothes off?
Sometimes we find out that we don’t even really like each other as people. I don’t know how many times the fog has lifted and I’ve realized, “Wow this guy is an awful human being.” Great banging doesn’t guarantee a lifelong bond, or even a multiple month long bond. But when it’s good, and you do actually like each other, it’s like having a best friend and your favorite vibrator rolled into one.
Speaking of vibrators…
“I can’t even completely please you,” Michael had returned to being hard on himself for, well… not being hard.
“That’s not true.”
“Yes it is. I’m nothing compared to that Hitaki thing you use.”
“It’s called a Hitachi.”
He was right. My vibrator was and still is my best bet to a fast orgasm, but it couldn’t pull my hair, slap me around and cuddle afterwards. Yes, I had been using it during my alone time, but not nearly as much as I had when we’d first started “hanging out”. I wasn’t nearly as sex crazed as I had been in the beginning.
For me, passing the two month mark successfully comes as a relief. I don’t want to live my life seeking out my partner like some junkie with an uncontrollable fix. I want to want my man without having the constant urge to accost him in the street and drag him back to my place by the hair like some caveman. (Although that would definitely be hot.) After the first two months I have usually found a safe balance and I am usually at my highest functioning self because I know that I can have sex pretty much whenever I want to and therefore I don’t feel like I need to nearly as often.
However, I’ve never made it past the next major relationship mark: two years. Sure there’s other important times that come after two months and before your second annual celebration, but two years is truly the next test and I have always failed. By that time my fuck focus has returned, only this time I want to tear off some new guys clothes.
Which brings to mind a Beverly Clearly story… (bet you didn’t think I was going to be able to tie Ramona Children’s Chapter Books into this!)
Ramona, a precocious little scamp of a girl spends her days tormenting her older sister Beezus. One day Beezus finds Ramona in their basement. Ramona is having her fill of a big bag of apples their family picked the day before; she lifts each Red Delicious to her mouth, breaking into it with a crunch, and then tosses the apple onto a quickly growing pile. Beezus stares in perplexed horror.
“The first bite is always the best,” Ramona says shrugging her shoulders.
Beverly Clearly, you are so right.