“I wish I could take it away,” he says. My friend who doesn’t know what to do with my sad feelings. He tells me, with sincerity: “I wish I could take some of this away for you.”

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As I explained only a couple of weeks ago, I try not to make a habit out of eagerly anticipating a message from any given man. I don’t like checking my phone constantly on the off-chance that some guy decides he wants me. Regular readers know I always introduce these posts by saying ‘this… BUT’ though, so here comes the ‘BUT’… recently I’ve found myself itching to hear from somebody in particular. Refreshing my email (yes, I use email, I am forty one years of age and I like to ramble so email is my medium: deal with it, Zoomers) hoping for any kind of contact.

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“I just need you to know,” one guy told me, before we started fucking, “that I very rarely come during penetrative sex. In fact, I can count on the fingers of one hand the number of times that’s happened.” It didn’t matter who he was fucking or where his dick happened to be, he had very rarely ever come inside. You’d hope that someone as body-positive and sex-knowledgeable as Girl on the fucking Net would instinctively have some bon mot at the ready to put him at ease and reassure him that delayed ejaculation (or an inability to ejaculate full-stop) is common, and nothing to be ashamed of. And I did but… Although my rational brain was more than happy to explain that I don’t actually need champagne fountains of jizz in order to be sexually satisfied depressingly – embarrassingly – my heart fluttered with something a little different. When he told me how few people had managed to get him to come inside them, something deep in my soul chimed in with: ‘I bet I can do it, though.’

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Maybe he’s busy. Maybe he’s tired. Maybe he’s had a terrible week and the last thing he wants to think about is dating apps. Maybe he just doesn’t fancy me.

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How do you feel? Part one of this piece talked about emotions, and the value of exploring them in detail. You’re probably best off reading that before coming back to this, because it was originally written as one piece, but here’s a brief summary: articulating your emotions is a skill – one to which we don’t always give enough time or attention. It’s often seen as something you either can do or you can’t. What’s more, some of us are given permission to do it where others are aggressively prevented from trying. This is heavily gendered, of course: men are told not only that they’re innately ‘bad’ at articulating emotions, but also that they shouldn’t be as emotional as women are. Cannot and must not. They’re allowed to show big scary feelings like anger, but punished for showing any that hint at vulnerability, and often discouraged from spending time with their feelings at all. I find this wildly unfair and, if I think on it too long, outright heartbreaking. Spending time with your feelings can help you know yourself better, and articulating your emotional needs is a very valuable skill when it comes to building relationships. Learning how to do it is a gift to yourself, as well as to those who love you.

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