sidelined
by rantywoman
Hopefully I won’t remain on the sexual sidelines for long, as I’ve already got a few flirtations going, and an old fling has started calling (someone I didn’t want to take up with again, so I’ll have to decide how to handle that– afraid of going back to a problematic situation I fled six years ago). I’m not actively searching for a partner but am coming across some potential candidates nonetheless. I certainly can relate, however, to this sentiment:
http://planktonlife.wordpress.com/2013/05/13/not-dead-but-not-so-as-youd-notice/
On the whole, I tend to steer clear of the subject of sex. Well, here, anyway for fear of being bombarded by fucking weirdo trolls. And even though I completely agree with James Salter – America’s neglected genius, according to the big profile of the writer in yesterday’s Observer – that the sexual life is “the real game of the grownup world”. In Saturday’s Guardian review of his new novel, All That Is, it said that “the cycle of meeting, flirting and fucking forms the book’s basic dramatic unit.”
Well, certainly it forms MY basic dramatic unit, and everybody else’s, even if some don’t see it quite that way, or aren’t so quick to admit it.
Times in my life there have been longish periods without sex, but of course during those periods it never occurs to one that anyone else on the planet is experiencing or has ever experienced a fallow period. You see the world as a place where everyone else is at it like dogs. Then it suddenly happens again, and you think, phew! Back in the land of (grownup) living. You feel part of the adult human race again, where you rightly belong. Not in some throwback virginal space that infantilises you, somehow, so that whenever you go to a fucking movie or read a sex scene in a novel or see some couple eating each other’s faces on the pavement, you feel like a child again, cut off from the mysterious world of grown-ups.
“Everybody else’s”? Er…no, not everybody. See, there are some of us who happen to be these freaks (in society’s eyes) called “virgins.” And in my case, my “fallow period” has lasted my entire 45 years (and not by choice). Just goes to show how those who are lucky enough to experience things like dating, relationships, marriage, and (especially, it seems) sex take those experiences for granted and just assume that EVERYBODY is as lucky as they are. Again…no; some of us (like yours truly) have never experienced ANY of those things. We definitely do feel “cut off” though.
Thanks for writing, there was at least one comment on her blog post to the same effect.