Episode 11: My Giant love affair. Aka I once had a girlfriend. Part 1/5
Episode 11: My Giant love affair. Aka I once had a girlfriend. Part 1/5
My theme music for this post - The Hollow by a perfect circle.
[media=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CjMU60FZETY&pp=ygUbdGhlIGhvbGxvdyBhIHBlcmZlY3QgY2lyY2xl]
This short story is an open eulogy for my dead romance, an acknowledgement that I wasted roughly 6 years of my life pursuing a pernicious but sexually satisfying relationship that was not only unhealthy and beneath my standards (if I had enough self-esteem to know and hold on to said standards) but that was also a dead-end, as neither I nor she were really willing to change, instead allowing a relationship of co-dependency, and passively enabling a sex addiction.
So I mentioned my girlfriend(now ex) briefly in the last two episodes [ ep 10 part 2 & ep 9]
But I’m going to give it its own post now, even though she definitely doesn’t deserve recognition, I write this simply because it’s a milestone on my life’s downhill slope that I need to mention for my own sake and it’s a necessary prelude to my next post.
After finding each other through an online datesite, I first met Desire in person on a Saturday evening, at the house that was her student commune, in a city about 65km away from where I stayed back in 2013, she wasn’t a student of any university but was just living with students as the cost of rent was budget-friendly, as at the time that I met her, she had recently lost her job about two months prior and had nothing going on job-wise at that point.
Desire was a natural redhead with a plump figure, at that stage her hair was dyed emo-black, and she had a very warm personality and we got along very well from the get-go, our relationship started with sparks, like sex on the 1st date, she told me that she was bipolar and admitted sheepishly that she was a nymphomaniac, I had met her at the point in her life where she was going through a manic hypersexual high-tide and I was just in time to catch that wave, I was determined to ride it for as long as possible.
My body the surfboard, all the kickboxing classes over the last two years had left it in good shape and an especially able tool for sexual activity, I was like an alcoholic at an open-bar, I had been so thirsty for so long and I relished the time I got to spend with her, almost every weekend, as long as my finances would allow.
I was fulfilling some of my deepest wishes too, to have what I felt other guys had and took for granted, for example, before I met Desire: where I stayed, I would see two guys visit their girlfriends at the next door complex every Saturday afternoon, every weekend I would see two cars pull up outside and guys would go in and spend the day and night visiting their gf’s, leaving later that night or the next day, no doubt enjoying some good sex – I was so jealous, I wanted that too, to be that guy having someone to visit and enjoy their company. And now here i was doing the same thing with Desire, it felt great.
I was used to everything in my life being hard-earned, and I pushed through the doubts of “why does the effort of making dates happen always have to be on me?” the upside was that I now had a girl that liked me and who was DTF.
Desire came from a tough background, with little-to-no parental support growing up, she grew up at the coast and her mother later emigrated when Desire was still in HS, her divorced father was estranged from her life, leaving her and her older sister in the care of their grandmother, who passed away after Desire finished HS, leaving them to fend for themselves, the sister married up and moved to the city, and Desire followed soon afterwards, and needing her sister’s support to find work and a place to stay.
Initially driving all the way out to see Desire was worth the adventure but, as the months went on I realized that I was over-compensating from my side, as Desire still couldn’t find work or the ability to contribute spending money for our date nights, she would often claim poverty and the job market for the reason she couldn’t meet me halfway on pretty much everything (except sex)
(I secretly started to resent that I had to be the one who had to carry the costs for her and that she could never find a way to come to my place I always had to drive to hers, and I started to hold the notion, that if it wasn’t for the good sex she provided, I wouldn’t have put up with bank rolling anything.)
It was all on me. I was starting to believe that she didn’t really want to try, whenever I brought It up, she would always say that she was trying to find work or she’d blame her bipolar, that she couldn’t medicate because of her financial situation.
I told my parents that I had a steady-girlfriend now, but after giving them more details - like what the arrangement was for me to be able to actually see her, what she was doing for work etc. - my parents became concerned and doubted if this relationship was a good thing for me, worried that I was being taken advantage of.
My dad especially didn’t like the fact that Desire didn’t have a stable income or seem to show much motivation to find something. His face basically said “my boy all you have found here is a leech, this girl is going to drain you in more ways than one”
And he wasn’t wrong, as initially I couldn’t see what a black-hole Desire would later become, because I was too close to the epicentre of it all, I couldn't see how I was forming a co-dependent bond, based on my addiction to sex and my mentality of being a giver and people-pleaser, how Desire would eventually gas-light me into undermining myself and keep the relationship going for her, for “us”
I did bring up the ‘balance of power’ issue a few times with Desire, especially in months where money was a bit tight, but our conversation never really ended up with a solid resolution for either of us to really try and overcome her situation to be able to try and meet each other half way – it was always a resignation of, “things are going to change, just wait and see, things are going to change” - but they didn’t change in ways I would have liked. She was too lost in her wish to cling to a "stronger one" who could fix her life for her, and i was too addicted to the idea of having someone who could keep up with my need to satisfy my deep seated hunger for love.
And by continuing to wear the boyfriend label, deep down I knew that I wasn’t being 100% honest with Desire about how I felt about our future either, or the future that she imagined for us as a more serious couple.
On the one hand, in keeping the status quo, I knew this type of relationship was not ideal for me and might even end up being unhealthy for my self-esteem but on the other hand I craved sex and now I had access to an almost unlimited supply, it's like the stereotypical battle of the conscience, the angel on one shoulder and devil on the other.
I didn’t want her to cut off my supply of pink meth that she provided, she was my dealer, the gate-keeper of the velvet doorway, to a heaven I could visit every weekend getting lost in the bliss of sexual union, the rosy pink afterglow a cloud of euphoria hiding the landscape of my sad loneliness and little trees of resentment that had started growing..
I was her addict and her enabler, giving her the hope that she could achieve hypergamy one day (if we dated long enough), just like her sister had done before they both left the coast for the city.
And so a toxic and unhealthy power dynamic started to form between us and our relationship became pseudo-transactional, me feeling like an ATM was the un-sexiest feeling ever ( but that’s what I was!) and likewise her feeling like just an option, dependent on if I had the ability to see her or not ( had money to make it happen), was equally un-sexy.
And we started to dance around-and-between this issue, between my “trees of resentment” lighting little fires to distract ourselves here and there and gas-lighting each other along the way, avoiding the core issue we both didn’t really want to face: the idea of her having to be dependent on me for this to always “work” and me not being okay with that, and what that meant for “us” and of course the more obvious reality(we didn’t want to admit) that our relationship would end if there was no sex.
Normally sex would be an adjunct or foot note to a fun day out with her or my “weekend holiday” trip of seeing her and planning and paying for things for us to see and do.
But eventually going to see her, in order to have sex, became the holiday itself. [ continues in part 2 ]
My theme music for this post - The Hollow by a perfect circle.
[media=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CjMU60FZETY&pp=ygUbdGhlIGhvbGxvdyBhIHBlcmZlY3QgY2lyY2xl]
This short story is an open eulogy for my dead romance, an acknowledgement that I wasted roughly 6 years of my life pursuing a pernicious but sexually satisfying relationship that was not only unhealthy and beneath my standards (if I had enough self-esteem to know and hold on to said standards) but that was also a dead-end, as neither I nor she were really willing to change, instead allowing a relationship of co-dependency, and passively enabling a sex addiction.
So I mentioned my girlfriend(now ex) briefly in the last two episodes [ ep 10 part 2 & ep 9]
But I’m going to give it its own post now, even though she definitely doesn’t deserve recognition, I write this simply because it’s a milestone on my life’s downhill slope that I need to mention for my own sake and it’s a necessary prelude to my next post.
After finding each other through an online datesite, I first met Desire in person on a Saturday evening, at the house that was her student commune, in a city about 65km away from where I stayed back in 2013, she wasn’t a student of any university but was just living with students as the cost of rent was budget-friendly, as at the time that I met her, she had recently lost her job about two months prior and had nothing going on job-wise at that point.
Desire was a natural redhead with a plump figure, at that stage her hair was dyed emo-black, and she had a very warm personality and we got along very well from the get-go, our relationship started with sparks, like sex on the 1st date, she told me that she was bipolar and admitted sheepishly that she was a nymphomaniac, I had met her at the point in her life where she was going through a manic hypersexual high-tide and I was just in time to catch that wave, I was determined to ride it for as long as possible.
My body the surfboard, all the kickboxing classes over the last two years had left it in good shape and an especially able tool for sexual activity, I was like an alcoholic at an open-bar, I had been so thirsty for so long and I relished the time I got to spend with her, almost every weekend, as long as my finances would allow.
I was fulfilling some of my deepest wishes too, to have what I felt other guys had and took for granted, for example, before I met Desire: where I stayed, I would see two guys visit their girlfriends at the next door complex every Saturday afternoon, every weekend I would see two cars pull up outside and guys would go in and spend the day and night visiting their gf’s, leaving later that night or the next day, no doubt enjoying some good sex – I was so jealous, I wanted that too, to be that guy having someone to visit and enjoy their company. And now here i was doing the same thing with Desire, it felt great.
I was used to everything in my life being hard-earned, and I pushed through the doubts of “why does the effort of making dates happen always have to be on me?” the upside was that I now had a girl that liked me and who was DTF.
Desire came from a tough background, with little-to-no parental support growing up, she grew up at the coast and her mother later emigrated when Desire was still in HS, her divorced father was estranged from her life, leaving her and her older sister in the care of their grandmother, who passed away after Desire finished HS, leaving them to fend for themselves, the sister married up and moved to the city, and Desire followed soon afterwards, and needing her sister’s support to find work and a place to stay.
Initially driving all the way out to see Desire was worth the adventure but, as the months went on I realized that I was over-compensating from my side, as Desire still couldn’t find work or the ability to contribute spending money for our date nights, she would often claim poverty and the job market for the reason she couldn’t meet me halfway on pretty much everything (except sex)
(I secretly started to resent that I had to be the one who had to carry the costs for her and that she could never find a way to come to my place I always had to drive to hers, and I started to hold the notion, that if it wasn’t for the good sex she provided, I wouldn’t have put up with bank rolling anything.)
It was all on me. I was starting to believe that she didn’t really want to try, whenever I brought It up, she would always say that she was trying to find work or she’d blame her bipolar, that she couldn’t medicate because of her financial situation.
I told my parents that I had a steady-girlfriend now, but after giving them more details - like what the arrangement was for me to be able to actually see her, what she was doing for work etc. - my parents became concerned and doubted if this relationship was a good thing for me, worried that I was being taken advantage of.
My dad especially didn’t like the fact that Desire didn’t have a stable income or seem to show much motivation to find something. His face basically said “my boy all you have found here is a leech, this girl is going to drain you in more ways than one”
And he wasn’t wrong, as initially I couldn’t see what a black-hole Desire would later become, because I was too close to the epicentre of it all, I couldn't see how I was forming a co-dependent bond, based on my addiction to sex and my mentality of being a giver and people-pleaser, how Desire would eventually gas-light me into undermining myself and keep the relationship going for her, for “us”
I did bring up the ‘balance of power’ issue a few times with Desire, especially in months where money was a bit tight, but our conversation never really ended up with a solid resolution for either of us to really try and overcome her situation to be able to try and meet each other half way – it was always a resignation of, “things are going to change, just wait and see, things are going to change” - but they didn’t change in ways I would have liked. She was too lost in her wish to cling to a "stronger one" who could fix her life for her, and i was too addicted to the idea of having someone who could keep up with my need to satisfy my deep seated hunger for love.
And by continuing to wear the boyfriend label, deep down I knew that I wasn’t being 100% honest with Desire about how I felt about our future either, or the future that she imagined for us as a more serious couple.
On the one hand, in keeping the status quo, I knew this type of relationship was not ideal for me and might even end up being unhealthy for my self-esteem but on the other hand I craved sex and now I had access to an almost unlimited supply, it's like the stereotypical battle of the conscience, the angel on one shoulder and devil on the other.
I didn’t want her to cut off my supply of pink meth that she provided, she was my dealer, the gate-keeper of the velvet doorway, to a heaven I could visit every weekend getting lost in the bliss of sexual union, the rosy pink afterglow a cloud of euphoria hiding the landscape of my sad loneliness and little trees of resentment that had started growing..
I was her addict and her enabler, giving her the hope that she could achieve hypergamy one day (if we dated long enough), just like her sister had done before they both left the coast for the city.
And so a toxic and unhealthy power dynamic started to form between us and our relationship became pseudo-transactional, me feeling like an ATM was the un-sexiest feeling ever ( but that’s what I was!) and likewise her feeling like just an option, dependent on if I had the ability to see her or not ( had money to make it happen), was equally un-sexy.
And we started to dance around-and-between this issue, between my “trees of resentment” lighting little fires to distract ourselves here and there and gas-lighting each other along the way, avoiding the core issue we both didn’t really want to face: the idea of her having to be dependent on me for this to always “work” and me not being okay with that, and what that meant for “us” and of course the more obvious reality(we didn’t want to admit) that our relationship would end if there was no sex.
Normally sex would be an adjunct or foot note to a fun day out with her or my “weekend holiday” trip of seeing her and planning and paying for things for us to see and do.
But eventually going to see her, in order to have sex, became the holiday itself. [ continues in part 2 ]
