Today’s guest blog speaks to me deeply. As a filthy, experienced sex blogger I have dated quite a few people who have worried they’re too ‘vanilla‘ for my tastes. As if once you start trying kink, there’s no going back, and no sex will be good enough unless at least one of you ends up suspended from the ceiling covered in Nuttella. This week’s anonymous contributor gives a funny, sweet account of how she took the news that her boyfriend’s ex-girlfriend had more sexual experience than she did. Is ‘vanilla’ an acceptable flavour? I’ll let her give you the answer…
I am vanilla. My boyfriend’s ex is not.
I am so proud of myself for reaching a stage when I’m dating someone and I don’t ask about their exes.
I don’t ask but that doesn’t mean I won’t find out.
The way threesomes were talked about in high school was like it was going to be a weekly special. The one time I was asked to join a threesome was at a college party. My friend Kat whispered that the couple by the beer pong table “liked me”, I read this as I had done excellent crowd work. I wrote it in my comedy sketch book.
I met Dan at a friend’s wedding, I was too shy to get on the dancefloor but he was not. He found me on the outskirts of the crowd, made me laugh and I felt every inch of him as he pulled me in close. Dan, with brown curly hair and hands that span dinner plates, does something in agriculture – I wasn’t listening. He’s a gentleman, and always has his hand somewhere on my body at all times.
It was meant to be a fuck, a champagne fulled isnt-love-all-consuming fuck. And now we’re inseparable. Five months in, our heads on his pillow, and we get into the real journalism.
Has he had a threesome? He has. With his ex-girlfriend.
Cool cool cool.
More than once. But under ten. Wicked.
BDSM? Completed it. May as well hang the certificate beside the rope marks on his bedpost.
So I ask him about the final deathly hallow. Anal. He hasn’t done it! Aha! But also fucks sake? Why couldn’t the thing he hasn’t done be like ‘kissing with tongue’ or ‘pottery painting’. Anal needs planning, so I made a spreadsheet.
I was determined to get inside the head of the liberated ex and one-up her. What did the people in the threesomes look like? Was I due a haircut or a nipple piercing?
One night when we were sexting I typed:
“I want you to bend me over, slide inside me, and pull my hair.”
“Pull your hair?” he replied. I had piqued his interest.
“Yeah, if you want to?”, biting my lip as I pressed send.
“Next time” he quipped.
He flew me out to Berlin and booked us into a boutique hotel. After a few moments of pretending we were checking the windows worked, we locked the door and immediately got into each other. His hands on my jaw, my tongue in his mouth, I could feel how hard he was against my matching set of underwear.
Now I’ve been working hard at growing waist length hair (L’Oreal Dream Lengths – shampoo twice, conditioner, leave in, you’re welcome) which I had braided and unravelled for messy waves on the plane.
My hair grazed the curves out of my waist. And like clockwork, and our text conversation, he bent me over, slipped off my underwear, and slid inside me. I had missed him. We were close to finishing. As my hair tossed, he bundled it into one hand – and pulled.
When I first passed my driving test, I took my friend Georgia out in the car. While waiting at a roundabout, a texter-driver rammed us from behind (not too unlike this tbh) and our necks jerked like bobbleheads. As it happened, I begged her not to tell anyone but she had already hit post on Facebook. “Jess just tried to kill us, does anyone have a Dominos discount code xoxo”. I got the man’s details, and me and Georgia planned which House of CB dress we were gonna get with the whiplash money.
Pulling my hair during sex felt like whiplash on poppers, maybe this was another US and UK miscommunication like aluminium or baked beans. The pain in my throat swelled like dry swallowing a pill, tears fell out of my face. I lowered my body to find the bed, hid my face in my hands and sobbed. Dan turned my body to face him. Embarrassment lit up my skin.
“What is it? Are you okay? Did I pull too hard? I’m so sorry.”
My body remembered a lost one night stand I had in London, where my hair had been pulled and I hated it. The “hang” in question didn’t ask me if it was okay, and he didn’t know me except from my lazy Bumble account. I had deleted this from memory. I was so focused on being Dan’s “one”, a hot possessed fairy, a sex goddess, who had to be the one to teach him things and be on top of the podium for all of his wildest fantasies.
“We don’t have to do that. I thought from your message you wanted to, I’m sorry.”
“I did, I just wanted to try things, I want to try something new.”
“It’s been five months Jess, I love having sex with you.”
Huh? Surely this wasn’t enough?
“More than enough, you are my favourite person”.
As I sobbed, I told him about the horrible Bumble hang and my need to be the best. Comparison is the thief of joy but it’s also the thief of the boy. The boy I want is here in front of me, and instead of being engaged in the moment, I was consumed by whether you can Doordash ceiling mirrors and creating an interesting Feeld profile.
Dan put me in the shower, laid some cosy clothes on the bed, and pulled his shoes on. I got dressed, and we walked around the block talking, and eventually laughing about my conquest. One am in a new city feels dynamite. Music video vibes. Just us and this film set around us, which could be made of cardboard for all I care. My face was blotchy. He kissed it and we got back into the reception of the hotel.
Dan chatted with the lovely man on the front desk, ordered me a tea. An English tea like home to calm me down. Milk and two sugars. I wondered if he thought I was crazy. In the moment he talked to the receptionist, I was thinking about high school boyfriends, and the gossip of school. Young girls being labelled as “vanilla”.
As always, like my anal spreadsheet, my notes app, and pinterest boards, I looked at the evidence – what Dan was telling me and showing me. I initiated the hair pulls and the leather chaps, he never gave me any evidence to show they were necessary.
So we went back, not necessarily to the hot, crazy moment but the deep, non-performative one. We laughed our way back to the hotel room and I lived another day as Haagen Dazs vanilla ice cream. I will let you know what the sizing is like on the chaps.