Girl on the Net

I can’t quite believe I’m having to say this. Even as I pull this guy aside for a quick word, there’s a part of me that’s sitting outside my body, surveying the scene and wondering how the fuck I’ve ended up here. In the 21st century, as a grown adult with another grown adult, about to explain to him that ‘casual’ sex does not mean you get to treat me with contempt.

He didn’t mean to be a dick, but no one ever does, do they? It’s not enough to keep reminding yourself that you’re a nice person with good intentions: you have to act like it. Examine your behaviour. Ask yourself questions about your conduct. Think before you open your fucking mouth.

This is a man I’d had a bit of a thing with a few months before. He was eager, fun, chill. Had that laid-back submissive energy and a keen-but-not-pressured attitude. We’d snogged a few times, and had the odd cheeky fumble, but the first time we did it I had to put him off because I was sharing a tent with someone who would not have been pleased to find fucksweat on her sleeping bag.

The second time he and I hung out, I was far too stoned to do myself justice in bed. When I told him ‘not right now’, he suggested we just have a cuddle and a kiss on the sofa, then go to sleep. It was quite sweet, all in all.

I liked him. I fancied him. He would never have been a ‘boyfriend’ prospect for a number of important reasons, but I was excited to have the occasional fumble-and-fuck if our diaries aligned in future.

When the future came, and he had a hotel room, he asked if I wanted to stay after the party had wound down elsewhere. Which would have been super fun! I’d have gone, and I’d have enjoyed it, and I’d not have been ashamed to dive in with both feet: shagging this playful, eager man into a blissed-out paste before hopping on the night tube back to mine.

Except.

A little later that evening, before the party had ended and we could head to his hotel room, a friend pulled me aside for an urgent chat:

“Mate, please don’t fuck him,” she told me, with hints of pity in her voice. I asked why, because I’m not normally happy to be told who I should or shouldn’t fuck.

“The way he speaks about you…” she trailed off.

“The… what?”

“He told me he didn’t really fancy you, but you were so desperate for it he thought he might as well.”

And oh boy. Holy shit. Wow.

Obviously this is pretty humiliating. There’s shame here, buckets of it. Normally I wouldn’t tell you this kind of story in such detail but I want to write it because I feel so much shame. I suspect others who have been in this situation might feel that too, and sharing these things is sometimes a good way to help exorcise other people’s embarrassment: letting them know they’re not alone, and that this isn’t on them to carry. I’ll leave a gap before publication to muddy the waters on who this guy is, but at the time of writing the pain of this absolutely chokes me.

For him to disavow me like that, like a teenager at school who kissed me behind the bike sheds then told all his friends I was ugly… it triggers the absolute worst excesses of my own self-loathing. What’s more, for him to say this to a friend and her to believe him enough that she speaks to me with pity… it stung like fuck. Agony.

And here’s the thing: it wasn’t true.

This guy was keen. The thing that had attracted me to him was the way he looked at me with shining eyes and the enthusiasm of a kink newbie who really wanted to be shown what dominance looked like. Those are qualities I find sexy in a person, even if that person wouldn’t have otherwise caught my attention.

I am pretty open and honest, so I’ll tell people if I fancy them and I’m up for it. With this guy, after our initial drunk snogs and fumbles, I sent him a message telling him I’d be up for a shag if he fancied one, but if he didn’t then (ubiquitous ending to 90% of my texts) ‘no worries if not‘. I like to be direct because I think it’s much easier to say ‘no’ to a specific question, so no one has to fuck about with subtle signals and guesswork. Besides, life is short. I am not one for agonising over signals when I could just use my words to make things clear. I don’t fear rejection, especially not in a casual sex setting: I’d much rather ask ‘up for it?’ and hear a ‘no’ than piss around with uncertainty.

I’m not going to disavow my offer now out of shame, either: I don’t want to dish out to this guy any semblance of the misery he so casually handed off to me. So there you have it: I liked him, I fancied him, I told him I was up for a shag, and then I withdrew to see if he wanted to pick up my offer.

Which he did.

He just didn’t want anyone else to know.

Sometimes people comment on my blog to say things like ‘wow I wish I had a girlfriend like you!’ or ‘how do I get my wife to be more like you?!’, often within hours of actual men in my life treating me like I am worthless, shameful trash. Living in this space is a headfuck. I despise the men who ‘wish their wife was like me’, by the way, because it just makes me feel pity for their wife, who would almost certainly be deeply hurt to hear them saying this kind of thing to a stranger on the other side of the world.

I can’t help but be extremely fucked up by the duality of this life: on one hand men are drooling over their keyboards at the possibility of getting close to me, and on the other they are actively disavowing the fact that they fancied me in the first place.

It’s a potent cocktail of emotions, for sure, and as with all these negative emotions I have a tendency to swallow them down till they slosh around my veins like fucking poison.

Men make me hate myself in brand new ways every single day.

I’m working on this, so hard. It’s a lifelong project: unpacking and processing the misery that’s been dumped on me by childish men who don’t know how to behave with decency. I put in so much work to try not to let that misery curdle into bitterness. And in this instance, the best way to do that seems to be to hand the misery back.

That’s how I, a grown adult, ended up pulling another grown adult to one side in the pub so I can confront him about what our friend told me:

“Why did you say that?” I asked, as he went white.

“Oh fuck, shit I’m so sorry,” he was clearly shaken by the fact that I was willing to address the problem directly. He made some noises about just not being used to casual sex, and being unsure how to handle things when there were no feelings involved. At which point he went all soft-voice sensitive, in a way that I found extremely patronising, to ask: “and there weren’t any feelings, right?”

“Motherfucker,” I explained, “just because there are no romantic feelings, doesn’t mean that I have no feelings at all. I’m not a fucking robot, and it’s extremely hurtful to be told one thing to my face and another behind my back. It’s also, frankly, repulsive to think that if our friend hadn’t told me how you spoke about me, we could well have ended up actually having sex! I don’t want to shag a man who would treat me with such contempt. You don’t deserve to have sex until you’ve significantly grown up.”

Just kidding, I didn’t say that. Obviously.

Even if a man does something blatantly appalling, I still for some reason have an instinctive and desperate need to prevent him from feeling too uncomfortable about his behaviour. The point at which he went pale triggered some deep and powerful instinct in me to walk back my sadness and humiliation, paint on a smile and assure him that everything would be OK.

I said: “of course there were no feelings. But it’s still not nice to speak about me that way. Please don’t do it again.”

Whereupon he asked me for a hug, and… ugh… I gave it to him. I didn’t want him to leave this interaction thinking I was anything other than forgiving and accommodating and kind. I wanted to be the bigger person.

Funny, isn’t it, how trying to be the bigger person so often ends up making us feel small.