So I'm posting now. I'm so sorry that I left some of you wondering whether I was okay. I said I was going to post once a month, and I have definitely not done that.
That said -- I am okay. I am more than okay. The reason that you haven't heard from me is that I entered a doctoral program. My business held steady with its part-time obligations, and I took on a second part-time job. So... if I'm not working, or doing business stuff, I'm reading or writing papers or attending classes. And if I'm not doing any of those things, I'm trying to get some quality time with Gerard or even one of my friends.
Gerard and I are doing really well. I can't say that we *never* fight anymore, but we have really made major strides. Fighting is not an issue for us anymore. Commitment is also not an issue for us anymore. We are both here, we know we love each other, and we know we want to spend the rest of our lives together and have a baby and all that mushy stuff. I'm thrilled, actually, that we went through so many hard times together. I think we needed to learn what it would look like between us if it got bad. So we know that we could go there again, if life gets really stressful or something -- as it surely will at some points. So anyway, the point is that we couldn't be happier with each other.
I am still occasionally dating women, which Gerard still heartily encourages. I hooked up with my best friend a few months ago, while Gerard watched, which was pretty awesome. If I wasn't so busy I would totally have written about it here. Maybe she will write about it on her blog some day (some of you know where that is). I also have a date tomorrow night with a woman who came across my online dating-women profile. I am quite excited for that.
The last thing that I wanted to mention, since I have so often written about it here, is my health. I seem to have turned a corner with my GI troubles. Gerard has started making me green smoothies every morning, and they have pretty much obliterated my typical digestion disturbance pattern. I'm also starting to go off the anti-depressants that I started taking around this time last year, though I'm keeping some meds on hand for insomnia. And I still have that stupid eczema (how does that thing just start one day all of a sudden when I never had it for the first 30 years of my life?), but that's more of an annoyance than a health concern.
So in other words, all is well. I'm really happy to be busy, and I'm loving school. I'm loving my business, and I'm loving the security that the part-time job gives me. I'm madly in love with Gerard, and I'm madly in love with life.
xx
Showing posts with label love. Show all posts
Showing posts with label love. Show all posts
Friday, February 10, 2012
Tuesday, April 19, 2011
a reality
Gerard and I think that what we're going through is probably not uncommon. Probably lots of couples go through this, but probably most of them don't try to write sex blogs!
I used to write about us fighting a lot. Well, we don't do that anymore. We got over the strain of learning to live together, of being scared of committing to each other. We still have arguments, but they are much less frequent and much less escalated. Considering the amount of stress that we're under and the close quarters in which we're both living and working, I think we're doing awesome.
Yeah, we're not having any problem in the companionship area. We love each other. We're talking more often about our plan to eventually get married and have a baby, and we're both getting a little bit less freaked out by that every time we discuss it. We support each other, we work together, we nurture each other... we spend more time together than probably either of us would prefer, but we're making the most of that (in most ways, anyway). I can say this unequivocally: We're happy.
We're also affectionate. We hug a lot. We snuggle. We touch each other. Gerard likes to spank me a little bit every day. We say that we love each other. He sings me songs; I tell him why I think he's special. We have no shortage of affection.
But what we do have a shortage of is SEX. Sometimes I can't believe that we once had the most amazing sex I'd ever had in my entire life. Yesterday my best friend told me this story about the mind-bending sex she had with her lover, and I couldn't even imagine what that might feel like. It's been more than three weeks since the last time that I had Gerard inside of me, and sometimes I feel like I'm going to go crazy.
Turns out that he's sexually frustrated too. He wants to have sex too. But somehow we're not doing it. I feel like I initiate with some regularity... but it doesn't work that well when I do. We both like it when he's the aggressor. We have better sex when he's the one doing the pursuing, and I'm capitulating to his desires (at least, that's the story we tell ourselves-- and it works!). But he's not feeling it. He says he just doesn't feel turned on.
I think some of the problem is intimacy. Intimacy is scary. Before he moved in, we always had the distance between our apartments to keep things from getting more intimate than we were ready for. Then he moved in, and we had fighting to keep us from getting too intimate. But now... now we're here together all the time and we're not fighting. We're more intimate than we've ever been. Maybe regular sex would just be more closeness than either of us can handle right now.
But, presumably, we could both work on our intimacy issues and eventually it wouldn't feel so scary anymore, and we'd start having that crazy-perfect sex that was once one of our defining features. That's the theory that I'm trying to believe in.
In the meanwhile, we have to come up with strategies to help us improve. Gerard likes it when I explore with girls, so I hit Craig's List last night. He also asked me to touch him in certain ways more frequently. I gave him some feedback about the way that he touches me too. And we're just going to try to be more open to each other.
Because, I'd like to say... having a little intrigue with other people occasionally is fun and titillating, but what I really want-- what I want more than anything else-- is Gerard. It all starts and ends with him.
Anyway, when I started this blog I said I was going to write about the reality of a long-term relationship between two people who know they're sensitive and damaged. You readers saw us overcome our fighting and my depression... so now we've got a new problem. And here I am being embarrassingly honest about it.
I hope you see us get through this one as well.
I used to write about us fighting a lot. Well, we don't do that anymore. We got over the strain of learning to live together, of being scared of committing to each other. We still have arguments, but they are much less frequent and much less escalated. Considering the amount of stress that we're under and the close quarters in which we're both living and working, I think we're doing awesome.
Yeah, we're not having any problem in the companionship area. We love each other. We're talking more often about our plan to eventually get married and have a baby, and we're both getting a little bit less freaked out by that every time we discuss it. We support each other, we work together, we nurture each other... we spend more time together than probably either of us would prefer, but we're making the most of that (in most ways, anyway). I can say this unequivocally: We're happy.
We're also affectionate. We hug a lot. We snuggle. We touch each other. Gerard likes to spank me a little bit every day. We say that we love each other. He sings me songs; I tell him why I think he's special. We have no shortage of affection.
But what we do have a shortage of is SEX. Sometimes I can't believe that we once had the most amazing sex I'd ever had in my entire life. Yesterday my best friend told me this story about the mind-bending sex she had with her lover, and I couldn't even imagine what that might feel like. It's been more than three weeks since the last time that I had Gerard inside of me, and sometimes I feel like I'm going to go crazy.
Turns out that he's sexually frustrated too. He wants to have sex too. But somehow we're not doing it. I feel like I initiate with some regularity... but it doesn't work that well when I do. We both like it when he's the aggressor. We have better sex when he's the one doing the pursuing, and I'm capitulating to his desires (at least, that's the story we tell ourselves-- and it works!). But he's not feeling it. He says he just doesn't feel turned on.
I think some of the problem is intimacy. Intimacy is scary. Before he moved in, we always had the distance between our apartments to keep things from getting more intimate than we were ready for. Then he moved in, and we had fighting to keep us from getting too intimate. But now... now we're here together all the time and we're not fighting. We're more intimate than we've ever been. Maybe regular sex would just be more closeness than either of us can handle right now.
But, presumably, we could both work on our intimacy issues and eventually it wouldn't feel so scary anymore, and we'd start having that crazy-perfect sex that was once one of our defining features. That's the theory that I'm trying to believe in.
In the meanwhile, we have to come up with strategies to help us improve. Gerard likes it when I explore with girls, so I hit Craig's List last night. He also asked me to touch him in certain ways more frequently. I gave him some feedback about the way that he touches me too. And we're just going to try to be more open to each other.
Because, I'd like to say... having a little intrigue with other people occasionally is fun and titillating, but what I really want-- what I want more than anything else-- is Gerard. It all starts and ends with him.
Anyway, when I started this blog I said I was going to write about the reality of a long-term relationship between two people who know they're sensitive and damaged. You readers saw us overcome our fighting and my depression... so now we've got a new problem. And here I am being embarrassingly honest about it.
I hope you see us get through this one as well.
Friday, March 11, 2011
histories
It's weird for me to think that Gerard and I have been together for almost two and a half years now. We've definitely passed the point of "significant life investment." In fact, I feel us moving to more and more official, grounded commitment. It's scary for both of us, but it's feeling less scary lately. And I've finally realized that, for Gerard and I, this is a pretty fucking big deal.
We both have big histories, relationship-wise. In a way, it's kind of odd that neither of us has already been married, because we're both romantics, and we both place a high value on love relationships and falling in love. We've both had passionate love affairs in our past... long relationships and big commitments... major life steps taken while holding the hand of another (at-the-time) treasured person.
We've both lived with other partners in the past. I've lived with two other men, Gerard has shared an address with three other women, plus several who traveled around with him for various periods of time while he was living in a camper van in Australia. We've both thought, in the past, that we had met the person we were going to make the lifetime go with. I've been engaged twice, and Gerard bought a condo with his most recent ex before me.
That's our respective relationship histories, of course. We also each have pretty extensive sexual histories. My history includes several threesomes with married couples and male friends of boyfriends, plus a couple encounters with girls. Most significantly, I spent a year and a half living as the submissive pet of a dominant couple, which led me to all kinds of crazy sexual adventures. Gerard's history isn't so kinky, but he eclipses me with his sheer quantity of past escapades. It seems that his sweet, unassuming charm has never failed him with getting a woman into bed, whether that meant a quickie in the restroom at a wedding reception or a week in the back of his camper van. In a way, Gerard feels to me like a mythical kind of man, the kind that I never thought I'd actually know personally-- like a character in a Hugh Grant film or something. But then again, maybe I too have some kind of crazy archetype that could be assigned to me based on my sexual history.
When we first got together, I think we were both taken aback by the other. Gerard didn't imagine that a girl like me would be satisfied being with one man... I didn't imagine that life with me could ever measure up to the romantic globe-skipping he'd done with all those flings of the past. But we still each respected what the other brought to the table, and saw the ways that our pasts molded us into a person that the other could fall in love with. And gradually we realized that we were looking for the same thing: a stable, passionate love relationship with one permanent partner. Our histories didn't change that-- it just showed how much we were both willing, throughout our pasts, to explore and forage for new experiences on our paths of self- and other-discovery.
And now, after two and a half years together and nine months living together, the histories aren't so important anymore. Maybe some of that is feeling the weight of our history, and what we have created together. I mean, it's not all that much in terms of time... but the amount of investment we've made in each other in these two and a half years makes it feel like more. The histories are still important... we each keep those volumes on our shelf, and we revere them-- but now we're fully invested in the the life's work that we're going to write together. We're writing it every day, and every day the words flow with more ease and sincerity and promise.
We both have big histories, relationship-wise. In a way, it's kind of odd that neither of us has already been married, because we're both romantics, and we both place a high value on love relationships and falling in love. We've both had passionate love affairs in our past... long relationships and big commitments... major life steps taken while holding the hand of another (at-the-time) treasured person.
We've both lived with other partners in the past. I've lived with two other men, Gerard has shared an address with three other women, plus several who traveled around with him for various periods of time while he was living in a camper van in Australia. We've both thought, in the past, that we had met the person we were going to make the lifetime go with. I've been engaged twice, and Gerard bought a condo with his most recent ex before me.
That's our respective relationship histories, of course. We also each have pretty extensive sexual histories. My history includes several threesomes with married couples and male friends of boyfriends, plus a couple encounters with girls. Most significantly, I spent a year and a half living as the submissive pet of a dominant couple, which led me to all kinds of crazy sexual adventures. Gerard's history isn't so kinky, but he eclipses me with his sheer quantity of past escapades. It seems that his sweet, unassuming charm has never failed him with getting a woman into bed, whether that meant a quickie in the restroom at a wedding reception or a week in the back of his camper van. In a way, Gerard feels to me like a mythical kind of man, the kind that I never thought I'd actually know personally-- like a character in a Hugh Grant film or something. But then again, maybe I too have some kind of crazy archetype that could be assigned to me based on my sexual history.
When we first got together, I think we were both taken aback by the other. Gerard didn't imagine that a girl like me would be satisfied being with one man... I didn't imagine that life with me could ever measure up to the romantic globe-skipping he'd done with all those flings of the past. But we still each respected what the other brought to the table, and saw the ways that our pasts molded us into a person that the other could fall in love with. And gradually we realized that we were looking for the same thing: a stable, passionate love relationship with one permanent partner. Our histories didn't change that-- it just showed how much we were both willing, throughout our pasts, to explore and forage for new experiences on our paths of self- and other-discovery.
And now, after two and a half years together and nine months living together, the histories aren't so important anymore. Maybe some of that is feeling the weight of our history, and what we have created together. I mean, it's not all that much in terms of time... but the amount of investment we've made in each other in these two and a half years makes it feel like more. The histories are still important... we each keep those volumes on our shelf, and we revere them-- but now we're fully invested in the the life's work that we're going to write together. We're writing it every day, and every day the words flow with more ease and sincerity and promise.
Friday, March 4, 2011
sunny days
It's gotten to that time of year right before Daylight Savings Time begins, when the mornings are really sunny. In our cold climate, it's still really cold-- but the birds are starting to sing in the mornings, and the sunshine is bringing people outside. Gerard and I live in a first-floor apartment with our bedroom windows looking out on the street, and we often hear little strollers or scooters going by in the early hours of sunshine, adorable under-5-year-olds emitting cute comments to their parents or nannies. I'm getting out of bed earlier now, sometimes earlier than Gerard, and writing in my journal or prepping breakfast for both of us. And it's so weird to realize what a change this is.
Without getting into details about why, I would like to share that I'm a VERY educated consumer when it comes to the topic of mental health. And I've always avoided psychopharmacology because... well, even though I know I've always been sort of anxious, I always felt like I knew what the problem was stemming from, and I wanted to work it out psychically instead of using meds.
I already mentioned all this in a previous post-- but basically the stressors of unemployment were too much, I was feeling unbelievably miserable without pause, and I knew it was time. And now that I'm feeling so much better, I'm shocked by the change. Gerard has stopped commenting about how different I seem, but I've slowly been considering his perspective, as he's expressed it over the course of many months. Especially since we moved in together last summer, he's often said that he thinks of me as a pessimistic person. And that always felt so strange, because I've always considered myself to be pretty sunny.
Here's the thing, though. My life has been very clearly the opposite of sunny for a while. I've been pretty slammed for the past several years, and just trying to pull myself out of it. And so it sort of makes sense that I became someone who seemed kind of dark, and that I presented myself that way when Gerard and I met and for most of our relationship so far.
Four years ago, I was engaged and had been living with a man for three years. The wedding was six months away (invitations already printed) when suddenly one day he went into a rage and threw me out of the house, asking for the ring back, canceling everything. One month later my mother was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. I got a new job and moved to a city near my parents, and four months later I was fired after I tried to stop some unethical behavior in the department I was responsible for. Two weeks after that, my mom was pronounced terminal and brought home on hospice. For a little over a month, I took care of her at her home, until she finally died. She was only 56 years old.
Then I spent a year grieving heavily. For that entire first year, I was constantly sick with all kinds of crazy ailments, and I was an emotional wreck. I started working very part-time about a month and a half after my mother died, and then slowly added more working time to my week as I could. I met Gerard while I was trying to stabilize myself... understand my grieving and also continue to put my life together in some way. And I continued to do that during the first year of our relationship. There were all the anniversaries, there was the trauma of my father starting a new relationship... but I was getting through those things. I felt like I was starting to move towards being firmly planted as of this time last year. And then I lost my job (a job I loved). It just brought back all the waves of loss. And then Gerard moved in, and we had all this adjusting to do... well. It's been a difficult four years.
I know I haven't been sunny during this whole time. How could I have been, honestly? I shouldn't be surprised. But starting to feel sunny now makes me realize the difference. And I don't mind if it's drug-induced, because I need a reminder of the person that I'm able to be. I need Gerard to see that the girl he fell in love with isn't always so dark. It makes him feel more secure about us, and more loved, and that's better for me too! With these boosts, I think I can make my dreams happen, and then I can go off of the meds and enter a world without crises waiting around every corner. And that will be a welcome change.
Without getting into details about why, I would like to share that I'm a VERY educated consumer when it comes to the topic of mental health. And I've always avoided psychopharmacology because... well, even though I know I've always been sort of anxious, I always felt like I knew what the problem was stemming from, and I wanted to work it out psychically instead of using meds.
I already mentioned all this in a previous post-- but basically the stressors of unemployment were too much, I was feeling unbelievably miserable without pause, and I knew it was time. And now that I'm feeling so much better, I'm shocked by the change. Gerard has stopped commenting about how different I seem, but I've slowly been considering his perspective, as he's expressed it over the course of many months. Especially since we moved in together last summer, he's often said that he thinks of me as a pessimistic person. And that always felt so strange, because I've always considered myself to be pretty sunny.
Here's the thing, though. My life has been very clearly the opposite of sunny for a while. I've been pretty slammed for the past several years, and just trying to pull myself out of it. And so it sort of makes sense that I became someone who seemed kind of dark, and that I presented myself that way when Gerard and I met and for most of our relationship so far.
Four years ago, I was engaged and had been living with a man for three years. The wedding was six months away (invitations already printed) when suddenly one day he went into a rage and threw me out of the house, asking for the ring back, canceling everything. One month later my mother was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. I got a new job and moved to a city near my parents, and four months later I was fired after I tried to stop some unethical behavior in the department I was responsible for. Two weeks after that, my mom was pronounced terminal and brought home on hospice. For a little over a month, I took care of her at her home, until she finally died. She was only 56 years old.
Then I spent a year grieving heavily. For that entire first year, I was constantly sick with all kinds of crazy ailments, and I was an emotional wreck. I started working very part-time about a month and a half after my mother died, and then slowly added more working time to my week as I could. I met Gerard while I was trying to stabilize myself... understand my grieving and also continue to put my life together in some way. And I continued to do that during the first year of our relationship. There were all the anniversaries, there was the trauma of my father starting a new relationship... but I was getting through those things. I felt like I was starting to move towards being firmly planted as of this time last year. And then I lost my job (a job I loved). It just brought back all the waves of loss. And then Gerard moved in, and we had all this adjusting to do... well. It's been a difficult four years.
I know I haven't been sunny during this whole time. How could I have been, honestly? I shouldn't be surprised. But starting to feel sunny now makes me realize the difference. And I don't mind if it's drug-induced, because I need a reminder of the person that I'm able to be. I need Gerard to see that the girl he fell in love with isn't always so dark. It makes him feel more secure about us, and more loved, and that's better for me too! With these boosts, I think I can make my dreams happen, and then I can go off of the meds and enter a world without crises waiting around every corner. And that will be a welcome change.
Saturday, January 22, 2011
silly songs
One of the things that I have always loved about Gerard is the way that he loves to sing. He won't readily admit that he loves to sing-- he's spent enough time around professional musicians that he has no desire to flaunt his untrained voice. But he does love to sing, and I know that he does because he sings all the time.
I come from a musical family and have studied music for most of my life, so I was delighted when I was first exposed to Gerard's penchant for song. Early in our relationship, he would often sing to me in the mornings, while we were lying together in bed after a sweet sleep or early morning lovemaking. He'd usually choose old jazz standards, or songs from Broadway musicals. It was enchanting.
I have an absurd memory for lyrics, and Gerard not so much. Over time this has developed into a dynamic wherein Gerard begins a song with the correct lyrics and then gradually devolves into some crazy bastardization of the original rhymes, and then looks at me between his giggles for whatever the correction might be.
Other times, he'll look up the lyrics to a song on the computer, and then sing his way through the whole song. Usually once he's done he'll turn the monitor towards me and say, "Now you do it. Can you play your guitar too?" He loves to hear me sing and play, and sometimes will happily take care of all the dinner dishes by himself if I'm serenading him with my voice, the guitar, or the piano while he does so. Of course, it's more fun for me when he's singing along rather than just listening.
Most entertaining of all is what seems to be Gerard's favorite type of singing: he improvises spontaneous song parodies. (For those of you not familiar with this idiom, it involves taking the tune and lyrical structure of a well-known song and changing the words to something else entirely.) Sometimes he sings these to the dog, with words usually focused on the themes of the dog being hungry and Gerard coming to feed her. But most of the time he sings the song parodies to me. The subject matter of these song parodies is typically related to how much Gerard loves me, and eventually that tends to turn into, or at least mention, how much he loves my bottom.
Here's an example (to the tune of "Down in the Valley"):
I love my Aureeeeeeeeeeeelia
I love her so
I love her bottom
I want her to know
Another recent song (performed while pinning me down to the bed) used some villain-like melody that I didn't recognize and went as follows:
I'm a scoundrel who steals body parts in the middle of the night
And I'll take your left arm, your breast, and your bottom to do with what I like!
As I write this, I'm struck by how odd it feels to be telling this story. It sounds like the sort of thing that you'd watch in a dopey sitcom. And yet it brings endless delight and giggles to our life. I imagine that one day Gerard will be making up cute little songs for our child, and that that child will grow up with an appreciation for music and the creative use of words and rhymes. What could be nicer?
I come from a musical family and have studied music for most of my life, so I was delighted when I was first exposed to Gerard's penchant for song. Early in our relationship, he would often sing to me in the mornings, while we were lying together in bed after a sweet sleep or early morning lovemaking. He'd usually choose old jazz standards, or songs from Broadway musicals. It was enchanting.
I have an absurd memory for lyrics, and Gerard not so much. Over time this has developed into a dynamic wherein Gerard begins a song with the correct lyrics and then gradually devolves into some crazy bastardization of the original rhymes, and then looks at me between his giggles for whatever the correction might be.
Other times, he'll look up the lyrics to a song on the computer, and then sing his way through the whole song. Usually once he's done he'll turn the monitor towards me and say, "Now you do it. Can you play your guitar too?" He loves to hear me sing and play, and sometimes will happily take care of all the dinner dishes by himself if I'm serenading him with my voice, the guitar, or the piano while he does so. Of course, it's more fun for me when he's singing along rather than just listening.
Most entertaining of all is what seems to be Gerard's favorite type of singing: he improvises spontaneous song parodies. (For those of you not familiar with this idiom, it involves taking the tune and lyrical structure of a well-known song and changing the words to something else entirely.) Sometimes he sings these to the dog, with words usually focused on the themes of the dog being hungry and Gerard coming to feed her. But most of the time he sings the song parodies to me. The subject matter of these song parodies is typically related to how much Gerard loves me, and eventually that tends to turn into, or at least mention, how much he loves my bottom.
Here's an example (to the tune of "Down in the Valley"):
I love my Aureeeeeeeeeeeelia
I love her so
I love her bottom
I want her to know
Another recent song (performed while pinning me down to the bed) used some villain-like melody that I didn't recognize and went as follows:
I'm a scoundrel who steals body parts in the middle of the night
And I'll take your left arm, your breast, and your bottom to do with what I like!
As I write this, I'm struck by how odd it feels to be telling this story. It sounds like the sort of thing that you'd watch in a dopey sitcom. And yet it brings endless delight and giggles to our life. I imagine that one day Gerard will be making up cute little songs for our child, and that that child will grow up with an appreciation for music and the creative use of words and rhymes. What could be nicer?
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