Sometimes you have to face hard truths by stating the painful facts baldly. I am 33, I have never been kissed, and the only guy who ever wanted to hold hands with me was killing time while he tried to find someone hot enough to date. I know this because that’s what he told my housemate when he hit on her.

To the best of my knowledge, no one who has seen me in person has ever been attracted to me. I’m not catcalled or harassed. The only relationships I’ve had have been online. The only boyfriend who met me offline would not do more than give me a hug. I have met potential partners from the Internet, only to watch the interest in their eyes die when they see me.

I often feel like the only woman on the face of the planet who no one is attracted to. And I am ashamed — in part because this is something no one ever talks about.

I often feel like the only woman on the face of the planet who no one is attracted to.
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We turn virginity into a punchline — a sign of misplaced religious conviction, physical grotesqueness, or social ineptitude. We try to escape the reality that sex is a choice that some are never offered, and ignore the fact that trumpeting sexual freedom also has the power to wound deeply. The sexually inexperienced (especially those with no choice in the matter) feel a strong urge to hide this fact, in order to let people assume a common level of sexual history. It’s a lot easier than trying to explain the truth, and it hurts less, too.

I’ve sat through countless conversations with groups of women, praying that the conversation wouldn’t turn to sex, cringing inwardly when it inevitably did, and trying to laugh with the others until the topic changed and I could relax again, my secret safe. For now.

When I was growing up, the conversation was always about how to say “no,” how to not be pressured into sex, how to turn down a date honestly and fairly. My educators, ministers, and youth group leaders never told me what to do when I wasn’t pressured, when I wasn’t asked out on dates. Teenage me was practically quivering with excitement over my first chance to say “no,” because even “no” contained the possibility that I could choose to say “yes.” But the question never came.

I thought that, perhaps, things would get better in college. Surely, the smart guys would at least be attracted to my intellect. Instead, while I made friends with lots of great guys who I’m still close with, I was never once asked on a date. No one ever tried to cop a feel at an event or in the movie theater. There was never the hint of a hookup. Perhaps, if my upbringing hadn’t been so conservative, or if I’d had a few dates in high school, I would have had the courage to ask someone out for myself instead of waiting, but that was unthinkable to me.

I was so confused. This wasn’t how the movies went. This wasn’t how the novels ended. Most of my friends got married right out of college, and those that didn’t at least had dates. I sat down to take inventory: Why wasn’t anyone interested? Was it my appearance? I’ve always been on the large side of curvy, but I knew plenty of girls my size and larger who had found happy relationships. Was it my face? I’ve never been pretty, but again, I knew women who were objectively less “pretty” than me who had found love. Was it my personality? I’m shy and reserved (unless you bring up Star Wars or Dune, then good luck getting me to shut up), but I’m comfortable talking to friends. I was part of several active social groups, and enjoyed spending time with friends. I couldn’t find a persuasive reason why no one was interested in me. And in the decade or so since college, as the disinterest has persisted, I still haven’t.

I was so confused. This wasn’t how the movies went. This wasn’t how the novels ended.
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Over the past few years, I’ve made a certain amount of peace with being single. It took some time, especially since I could find very little to help me. The books I found on being single were almost exclusively geared toward “being single until you get married because of course you will.” The singles activities at my church were rare, and everyone in them was a good 40 years older than me. I eventually realized that I could not rely on a guide to help me; I had to find out what the single life meant for me. I had to build a life of my own, instead of waiting to find my “other half.”

It’s not my preferred choice, but I’m not going to fling myself at someone out of desperation. This sense of acceptance comes and goes. There are days when I’m tempted to run outside and proposition the first man I can find. But most days, I just accept that this is my reality right now, and change will not happen quickly or easily. Regardless, the frustration lingers: I would have liked it to be a real choice, not a matter of mere acceptance.

I’ve tried talking about my story a few times. I’ve pushed back when people assume that certain levels of romantic history are universal; when people make offhand remarks that assume that, given my age, I’ve had several intimate relationships, I correct them. I try to remind people that “virgin” is not an insult, and that sex isn’t the guarantor of adulthood. The rare times I’ve brought up this pain, I’ve been told that I simply didn’t notice guys who were interested, or that I just needed to “be myself” and admirers would miraculously appear.

That’s what hurts the worst: the absolute refusal of others to believe me when I talk about my experience. The insistence that I don’t know my own life. The appropriation of my narrative to turn it into a more palatable story for the comfort of others. I’ve tried to understand why my story makes others uncomfortable. It’s possible that it’s because it introduces an element of uncertainty into all relationships: What if a lot of it comes down to luck? If there’s no real reason behind my lack of relationships, maybe it’s just a coincidence, an accident of chance. And that means they found their partners due to chance as well, and their lives might have been like mine if a few things had gone differently. And so they rationalize and explain my story; if it’s due to something I’m not doing, then they are safe in their relationships. They didn’t make my mistakes.

Female friends try to assure me that I am attractive, but have no explanation for why men don’t seem to agree. They don’t understand why I rebuff their compliments, assuming that I’m only operating from a foundation of low self-esteem, when in actuality I’m just trying to keep my grip on reality. If it were true that I were attractive, then at some point, someone would have acted on said attraction. No one has, and my narrative accounts for the truth better than their perspective does.

That’s what hurts the worst: the absolute refusal of others to believe me when I talk about my experience.
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And yet, my friends seem to think my rejection of their narrative is a personal rebuff; I spend my energy protecting their feelings from the truth of mine. I laugh away the pain that runs deep so they won’t feel sorry for me. I go to their bridal showers, their weddings, and I’m genuinely happy for them. I enjoy dinners at their houses, trying not to be jealous of the cookware that they received when they married. No one throws showers for single women; all my cookware comes from the thrift store or the cheap aisle at the grocery store.

I wish I could talk more about others who have shared this experience. But the truth is, I don’t know of any others within my personal circles. I have many single friends, but all of them have had their share of admirers. According to CDC research conducted a few years ago, 2% of women age 25–44 (and 3% of men in the same age range) have never had vaginal sex. Surely some of these millions of virgins include those like me, who want physical intimacy but have never been offered it.

But we hide our stories, afraid of being judged, laughed at, or worse, pitied. We miss out on the support of others with similar stories.

The question I find myself facing now is whether or not to keep trying. As L.M. Montgomery wrote in The Blue Castle, “Yes, I’m ‘still young’ — but that’s so different from young.” The reality is that if no one has wanted more than a hug from me by now, that’s not likely to change as I age. I don’t want to be single forever. I would very much like to be kissed at least once. Do I keep trying to find someone, or do I accept my situation for what it is, and direct my energies elsewhere? Will other people let me accept being unwillingly single, or will they keep pushing me to believe that I am somehow secretly attractive, in the face of all experiential evidence that suggests otherwise?

I may never stop wanting my story to change, but I will keep fighting to tell it my way. I intend to cling to the truth, even when it’s a painful one. I hope others with more normative experiences will start to understand, and find ways to include women like me in discussions about sex and love, without resorting to alienating comments about what “all women” experience.

We’re all women, we all have our stories, and we all want the chance to tell them with dignity and truth.

Most people I knew were quite invested in my happiness. So much so, that I lived in fear of disappointing them.

I wasn’t trying to lie — not to outright deceive, anyway. I liked to think I was getting straight to the point. People were always asking questions that I already knew they didn’t want the real answers to. They wanted to be reassured and sent on their way. Like when my mom gave me the rest of her finely smoked bacon before she and my dad went on vacation. It was a way of thanking me for a ride to the airport. Though if they had ever looked in my refrigerator, they would have known I was trying to cut down on my meat consumption. If they paid attention to how I lived, they’d have asked for a ride a week in advance.

“So how was the bacon?” my mom asked a week later. They had dusted my backseat in a light layer of sand. I told her that it was great. It was fantastic. I knew it was, she had told me so herself. Its quality had not diminished because I left it on my counter overnight and did not want to eat afterwards. It wasn’t not great because I threw it away.

“Okay, good.” My mom nodded and we said nothing more about it.

“Well, that’s on you,” my ex-girlfriend, August, might say. She was the kind of woman who was always showing up for friends who sometimes got so worked up that they had to take space and not talk for months. She liked to encourage me to take some space myself or take up more space or create space — the space around me wasn’t right.

One night, August and I got drinks with some new friends of hers and when I dropped her off at home I said, “That was fun, thanks.”

“Was it?” she asked.

“Yeah, it was fun,” I said again. I meant it. We all sat around a cozy booth in a bar I liked and laughed and drank cheap beer and drew pictures of our young queer selves. I was charming and understanding and funny — because I knew that was what August had invited me there to be — and we really were an excellent team in that particular department. I enjoyed being those people together. But now with her pouting out the window, I wasn’t so sure.

“I don’t know anything about you. I tell you everything about me and you never tell me anything. Why is that?” she asked.

I watched her head shake and I tried to imagine that several months ago, we had not sat in this same car, in this exact driveway, her head faced away from me in the exact same posture, while I cried because she was breaking my heart and she had asked me to stop because I was making her uncomfortable. That this kind of pressure on her was exactly why we were breaking up.

So, now, as we sat again in her driveway and she wondered aloud why I was not open and forthcoming with her, I told her what I thought a person without my painful memory of that driveway conversation might find helpful. “We have different ways of being friends,” I said. Which wasn’t a lie, it was absolutely true. But it wasn’t everything I was thinking right then, and I knew I was not taking up the requisite amount of space.

“Okay,” she said. “I’m not mad or anything, I just want to know about you.”

“I know,” I said. “I really care about you.”

“I don’t just care about you, I love you a lot.” August said this with more than a hint of exasperation. She leaned over to give me one of those car hugs, where you hang half of your body over someone else and then pat each other. I felt simultaneously stupid and comforted by this because it was sharing myself with another person, but also more of a redistribution of weight than anything else.

I went home after that. I put on my t-shirt that featured a Mt. Rushmore configuration of adorable kittens. I watched Friday Night Lights and lusted after Tim Riggins and Tammy Taylor until that got boring. Then I tried to read an old New Yorker article about Jeb Bush and charter schools, but fell asleep instead. I woke up a little while later and the lights were still on. I considered that maybe in another version of my life, there could be a person who would know to turn the light off for me, and how nice it would be to let them do that.

“So what did you do last night?” my co-worker Ben asked me the next day. He popped his little head over the top of the wall between our cubicles.

“Nothing,” I said. I didn’t feel like explaining that I’d spent the evening working toward a productive friendship with my ex-girlfriend. So many of my friends tended to scoff at that idea. But then, most of my friends had an incredibly easy time finding people to turn their lights on and off for them, so I didn’t think we were operating with the same value system.

Ben seemed to notice that I was just standing there too long, fingers hovering over my keyboard. “Must have been some crazy nothing,” he said. “Mama’s a little slo-ho this morning.”

I sighed. “Mama did have some beers last night and then she didn’t sleep all that well.”

Ben shook his head. “Taking a page from Daddy, I see. Well the aspirin’s on my desk if you need it.”

This was the kind of lie that I didn’t feel terrible about because Ben knew I was not telling him everything and he didn’t mind. Ben also just wanted to get straight to the point.

“Okay,” he continued. “If you had to be stuck on a raft in the middle of the ocean with me or Allan, who would you choose?” He paused to adjust his glasses. “And remember that I’ll feel bad if you choose Allan, but that I would also understand because he is more handsome than me and I’d choose him because I’d hope he’d hold my head to his perfectly hairy chest and then fuck me.”

“Oh my god,” I said. “Don’t worry, I like you better than Allan. If I were going to die on this raft, I’d want it to be with you.”

“Awww, thanks,” he said and reached his hand down from his giraffe height to pat my shoulder.

“But,” I added, “if there was any chance of a rescue — any at all — I’d better be with Allan, because Daddy would definitely do something stupid and get us killed.”

“It’s like I can’t even argue with that, because you’re so right,” Ben said. His voice betrayed his unreasonable gratefulness to me. “You’re so wise,” he murmured, and I heard him descend into his desk chair.

These were the kinds of truths that my friends applauded me for dispensing. I didn’t know what to do with the fact that I felt no ownership, no special relationship to these types of “truths” — that they were no more or less real to me than the greatness of the bacon or mine and August’s friendship. Everything was tenuous. Reality did not exist. There were just other peoples’ versions of reality that you could acknowledge and learn your way around and eventually find a reasonable place to stand within. That was what I meant when I said that I liked to get straight to the point. I wanted to find a good place to stand in other peoples’ lives, where I liked the scenery and felt that I was wearing appropriate shoes.

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Everything was tenuous. Reality did not exist.
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In Ben’s case, he was far too logical to ever let me die in a raft. But we both carried the hope that his manic hysteria — which was the trademark of his nighttime alter-ego, Blackout Ben — would claim a greater part of his life and lead to his satisfaction one day. It was a familiar sentiment. I, too, hoped one day to become bold and satisfied. And so I pretended that we were. That was the short, sandy beach where our realities overlapped, and it was enough to make us feel united in the world.

There were other cases that weren’t as easy, but which I’d learned to navigate, all the same.

“Would you consider me to be high maintenance?” Goldie, my first love and now an exquisitely costumed drag king, texted me one evening. As if our relationship had not been born out of a shared obsession with Goldie. As if the question, itself, were not the answer. It was 10:30 pm in California, too late in New York City for unloaded banter.

“Ferraris are high maintenance,” I texted Goldie back. “They also feature high performance.”

“Thank you, that’s right,” came their prompt reply, and I heard nothing else for a week.

This was all well and good, though sometimes I lost track of the points I was trying to get to. With Goldie, it seemed that for more than a decade, the point had been to efficiently remind each other that we knew each other — that this prevented us from being entirely alone in the world. But it did occur to me that getting straight to the point left certain territories of our lives — namely the more recently developed, somewhat more mature portions — perfect mysteries to each other.

And it wasn’t just with Goldie. There were large swaths of my life that nobody knew about. This was absurd because I had so many people in my life and they all knew so much about me. Still, there were nights when I went out walking, just to let the sharp prick of the stars make me feel lonely.

Sometimes I went into a dark dive bar alone and ordered a whiskey soda. I drank it very slowly and closed my eyes to really listen to the music. I made up dishwashing challenges for myself. I stood in front of the mirror after I got dressed and told myself, “Girl, I don’t know what’s up with that thing your pants are doing, but damn, you look cute today.” I played the keyboard with my headphones on and recorded catchy tunes that got stuck in my head. My voice was so deep in the morning, so high and bright at night. I drank coffee on my tiny deck and imagined that the whoosh of the train passing by was the sound of the ocean. There was so much delicate beauty in my life.

And everybody had ruined it, just by being there. Though there was an exception.

“I’m worried about your particular happiness because nobody else knows how fragile it is,” was Sophie’s conclusion. This observation was not unlike one of the “truths” that I would dispense myself. This made Sophie the lone fixture on the lawn of my life. It didn’t matter where she stood, it was always reasonable and did not require shoes — that was my highest level of friendship. We both lived for the moments when the movie we were watching on Netflix paused to buffer and rendered an otherwise flawlessly beautiful woman, horrifying. We believed success was living in the eye of a storm — in absolute calm, but at the center of everything.

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‘I’m worried about your particular happiness because nobody else knows how fragile it is.’
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There was no direct point to get to with Sophie and so I never pretended anything. We wrote long meandering letters addressing every detail and turn of thought in preparing for and executing routine errands, like getting gas or going to the grocery store. When she came to visit me in the first apartment I’d ever lived in alone, she said, “It feels exactly like you, like home.”

I couldn’t have agreed more. But I understood that this sentiment was not even remotely available to anyone else. I had to consider that the series of direct points to which I’d been intent on adhering, had led me astray. Because I was 30 years old, and while I didn’t expect to fall into deranged love anymore, while I didn’t presume I’d be moved on a daily basis, I did hope that one day I would find others to contribute to the delicate beauty in my life. At least one person for whom the conflation of me and home would be natural. Which is to say, I still believed in an uncynical kind of romance. And if this wasn’t happening through my active social life, then maybe my writing would take me there. Either way, it hinged on my ability to share my most private of property.

So the only reasonable action, I supposed, was to leave the gate open, if you will. To let people wander where they would and give them the chance to try to find a good place to stand. I began with August, who, as a poet and my ex-girlfriend, was already familiar with the landscape. Even if she couldn’t contribute to the delicate beauty herself, I knew she would facilitate my own contributions.

“Let’s rent a cabin,” she emailed me one afternoon. I figured since she was the expert on space, I’d follow her advice. I chose a little place in Mendocino, in California, surrounded by trees and nothing else. I imagined I would reconfigure my space into a little donut, the hole of which would contain the final touches on the novel I’d been wrestling with for three years. Why not? Everything was tenuous. Reality did not exist. If we declared ourselves good friends, we were. If my novel sounded finished, it was. Afterward, in some other reality, these things would not be more or less true, but August would be there to remind me that I wanted them to be.

She and I had dinner together one evening in a beautiful restaurant with a high wood beam ceiling and low, warm candlelight. It reminded me of a cabin. “I can’t wait to get away and just disappear into my book,” I told her.

“What if you could do that all the time?” she asked me. “You’ve been wanting to quit your job since I met you. You might want to get started on that sometime.”

“I might,” I said. Then, instead of going home and putting on my kitten shirt and looking for life advice from Friday Night Lights, I said to her, “I might also need to admit that if I haven’t quit yet, I lack the will and gumption to be a real writer. I fear I may not want it enough. Or maybe I fear that I do.”

August pushed the last of our chocolate torte at me and shrugged. “You might, you might not. Don’t you think just doing it is better than all of this navel-gazing? I, for one, believe in you.” She said this like it was no big deal, but in that moment, we’d finally found appropriate places to stand, and it nearly brought me to tears.

I had to admit that I was feeling emotional. Assessing the value of my life and its collection of lies and truths seemed urgent because I’d suddenly gotten accepted into a writing residency in Vermont. It was not an altogether life-changing situation. However, if I were getting straight to the point with myself, I had really wanted it to be. I’d applied to the program knowing it would make a graceful way to leave my job. If I were going to brashly dispense my own “truth,” the entire purpose of all of my private property — each delicate beauty — was to have a rich and endless abyss from which to pull threads for my writing. And the purpose of my writing was to create public pieces of my own private property, where myself and maybe others could feel that they’d come home.

Which wasn’t happening. Or at least it wasn’t happening at any rate that could propel me into the eye of any storm.

“I have to agree with August,” Sophie sighed. She didn’t like having to agree with anyone who had ever made me cry in a driveway. But she and I saved all of our letters so that when we became famous writers one day, the journey there would be preserved for any curious bystanders. There was no question about the point of our lives and yet, it had never seemed obvious how to get directly to it.

For the first time, I allowed myself to go around and ask for advice — not for validation, but for actual answers. “What do you think?” I asked everyone: the glitter-faced women with whom I sat around in Dolores Park on Pride, old friends who liked to make bread and cookies, new friends who liked tiki bars, my sunglass-clad art friends in LA and New York, my aunt who gave me the best gifts I had ever received. “Is it crazy and selfish to quit my job and run away with my writing? Am I just ungrateful? Will we all die alone anyway?”

“Hmmm,” they said. I think it was safe to say that everyone had been aware of my private property for some time and had wanted to look in without being intrusive. Now that my proverbial gate was unlatched, they all hesitated briefly. My internal landscape was more cluttered and hilly, less sunny than they’d imagined. Not everyone appreciated my brand of delicate beauty. Eventually, however, they offered me a collective, “You know, why not?”

When I asked Sophie what I should be doing with my life she said, “The hard part is that you’ve yet to fall into serious decline and so it could start at any time. But that’s okay because you already have such a beautiful life. You can always make that again.”

Sophie was leaving her job in a month. There was a new life stage ahead of her, in which her boyfriend was going to attempt to become a lawyer in New York City and they were likely going to become a family — the kind that included children and a home, maybe even a legal contract. It didn’t change the point of Sophie’s life now, but I didn’t see how it couldn’t eventually have an effect on where we would stand. I told her as much, of course.

She had answered my phone call while riding her bicycle and I heard the click of her chain and the rush of her breathing while she considered this. “I don’t know who I’ll become yet, but if all else fails, I think I’d like the option to be happy,” she said. “Wouldn’t you?”

“Well, maybe,” I replied.

I was generally all-in or all-out. I wasn’t sure I knew how to maintain a back-up plan like that. I saw friends most nights of the week, felt fleetingly alive and then went home to put on my kitten shirt and then watch TV or write or cry or read until I fell asleep with the light on. There was a certain beauty in that. It both was and was not comfortable. It both was and was not happiness. It did keep my mind and my heart in constant motion, but it wasn’t bold and it wasn’t satisfying.

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It both was and was not comfortable. It both was and was not happiness.
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I understood, then, why my parents wanted me to have their high-quality bacon in the first place. And why — when I told my dad that I was going to Vermont and quitting my job, too — he looked crazed and said to me, “Do you want to be poor and helpless at 50, is that what you want? What you’re supposed to do is support yourself and maybe have a good time doing it!”

“You can’t be like Elizabeth,” my mom added sternly. Elizabeth, her massage therapist, who unequivocally gave the best massages my mom had ever received. Elizabeth, who purportedly couldn’t get her cavity drilled because she had no dental insurance.

My parents wanted my reality to be like theirs. Everyone who loved me did, too. Most people I knew and even some I didn’t, were quite invested in my happiness. So much so, that I lived in fear of disappointing them.

It was so much easier to construct half-truths and direct points that we could use to skirt around the real issue. Happiness, theirs or mine, was not the point of my life, exactly. It sounded melodramatic and inflammatory when spoken aloud. It sounded a lot like a lie.

Because I was well-known for my pool floatie collection, for colorful nights out, my love for pizza, personalized gifts and peaceful weekend getaways. I was incredibly fun. My private property, however, was something else. It was my place for exploring my unproductive tangles and knots. It was where I kept all of the people I was and might become and knew and resented and loved and missed and would lose — I hung around with lovely ghosts who left me with the same perfect ache as a loose tooth.

Together we wallowed and navel-gazed, were wistful and nostalgic, occasionally hopeful and forever incomplete. That was where my writing and I wanted to bask. It was life at its most gorgeous. And maybe that was selfish and irresponsible. I’m not saying there wasn’t more to do with a person’s life — with mine specifically. I certainly wasn’t sure who could be expected to find a good place to stand, let alone a home in that. But this was my reality and I didn’t have to keep it a secret. It was no more or less valuable than anyone else’s. If the point was to keep company for my fluttering heart and its garden of sweet misery, there was no reason to make it private.

“It’s like, what is happiness, even?” Ben had asked me on one of the quiet, dull days in our office. “It’s basically just a social construction.” He’d meant it as a joke, but it wasn’t really. It was what August and Sophie had been telling me the whole time. I was allowed to make the people in my life acknowledge my private property, to spend as much time as I wanted wrapped up in its nuances — that was one version of what it meant to be bold and satisfied.

And I could live there if I wanted.

Men always want me to share more. From my first boyfriend on. Craig slurred at me in a dorm room hallway that I’d never really let him in, never talked about my feelings or had a single serious talk with him throughout our senior year of high school.

I shook his grip from my arm.

“But you didn’t either?” It was a question how I said it, and stepped back against the damp wall. We’d been broken up for months, the way I’d expected us to when high school – and what I saw as our role for each other—was over. I was less drunk than him (always) and couldn’t quite follow his logic.

But, then, it wasn’t actually a logic I could cross into: at its heart was the belief that I should open myself to him, and fully. My thoughts along with my legs. And because I hadn’t, he explained to me, I was “super fucked up,” around relationships. He teetered and slumped to the floor.

“You never even gave me a chance to know you,” he looked up, his lush eyelashes in full effect. I was fucked up because I didn’t open: instantly, easily, for him. We’d known each other since we were 12, but he felt he’d never gotten enough of me. He wrenched up his face and twisted toward the floor, and so, across the narrow hallway from him, I sunk down too.

“I’m sorry?” I said, hoping that would end it, but regretted it as soon as I spoke.

In The Body in Pain, her classic text describing the philosophical and spiritual features of pain, Elaine Scarry addresses biblical depictions of the inside and outside of the body, and the dynamics of the divine that operate between. Scarry observes that when a person in the Bible resists God, or belief in God, “…the withholding of the body…necessitates God’s forceful shattering of the reluctant human surface and repossession of the interior.”

I can’t help but see here a masculine God, one that refuses any scenario in which a person refuses to fully give themselves over. As Craig did, pulling at me in that dorm hallway for something he felt he wasn’t getting.

It wasn’t actually a logic I could cross into: at its heart was the belief that I should open myself to him, and fully.
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It’s not fair, though, to make this only about men.

“He just wouldn’t open up to me,” Cara sighs. “We spent a whole weekend together and I barely feel like I know him.” I’ll readily admit it’s not always the case that the one prying open is gendered masculine: the penetrating gaze of women and queer people all around me bores towards the deepest darkest secrets of the people we want to know.

“I want him to let me in.”

“She’s hiding herself from me.”

“I want more of you. All of you.”

As if there was only one way in to where we’re trying to go, and the tunnel is to blame for not being open.

One weekend camping with friends in the Sierras, we laugh the whole time and I feel closer to them than I have to anyone in a while. My eyes tear and my throat is sore from laughing about our sad and weird experiences learning sex at summer camp from older kids, the stupid things we’ve said while trying to be cool. We are academics, therapists, entrepreneurs and artists—adult people whose intelligence (emotional and otherwise) I respect. But in this weekend I get a break, mostly, from speaking this intelligence. And in these conversations that I’ve sometimes termed more surface, I feel something more like closeness. More like trust.

“Yes, because we’re trusting each other to know we’re not stupid,” Ellie says from her perch on the granite boulder. “We don’t have to spend the whole time proving we’re smart or emotionally articulate, or have good politics, or have worked through our childhood shit…” She trails off and scratches the back of her leg, reaching awkwardly around to where a patch of calf got ravaged by mosquitos. I look away instinctively, not wanting to witness her weird body position. But then I look back.

“…the pose of awkwardness is very dangerous, because at this post-feminist moment one should be a top, one should win, etc,” writes Eileen Myles in “Long and Social.” Myles is speaking here about the ways in which their own work is “a bad recording” of lived experience, as opposed to the careful curation of a memoir. They term this position of “bad recording” dangerous for women expected to be getting things “right,” topping the narrative, so to speak. Myles points here also to the precarity of power by noting their refusal to top. This choice to maintain an awkward pose (a crouch, perhaps) leaves their narrative-body vulnerable to risk. The awkward narrative allows for others to also enter and also make claims upon the truth. The awkward body leaves the story open, incomplete.  

I want to see this awkward body – in part because I have it. I’ve been managing chronic illness and pain these last few years, and lately doctors have focused on a problem with my hormones. The OB-GYN says too much estrogen in my body is forming the cysts on my ovaries, and the herbalist says my diet has too many estrogen-heavy foods, that I need to eat less of everything on the list she hands me.

“It’s important not to feel defeated if the diet changes don’t fix everything right away,” she tells me. “You are managing a chronic condition.”

I’m still trying to understand what exactly this means: how to explain that I’m incapacitated by endometriosis pain one month, but the next am out late and energized every night. I’ve been turning to sick, crip and disability theory to try to better understand – even though of course I know these are not all the same. What I’m trying to understand between them is how to manage a condition that is largely invisible much of the time, how to manage something intentionally or inadvertently pushed out of view.

But: “…disabilities are not exactly ‘visible’ or ‘invisible’ but intermittently apparent,” writes theorist Margaret Price in “The Bodymind Problem and the Possibilities of Pain,” “…a better metaphor than vision for some kinds of disability might be apparition.” I latch immediately onto this, the way “apparition” flickers and returns at unpredictable times – often frightening those present when it appears.

The idea of chronic illness as apparition also feels soothing after years of trying to bore down into the core of how to fix this, how to find one thing I can do that will eliminate my symptoms – and failing, failing to nail it down. Sometimes I feel better but I don’t know why. I get up from bed, then later fall over, over and over, never over. I stumble on my words when anyone asks how I am and I try to explain.

“Clumsiness might provide us with a queer ethics,” writes Sara Ahmed in Living a Feminist Life. “Such an ethics attends to the bumpiness of living with difference, so often experienced as difference in time; being too slow or too fast, out of time.”

The apparition of chronic illness is also “clumsy.” Because my body moves clumsily in pain, but also because it is out of time, unpredictable, inconsistent. It does not respond well when asked to be consistent or reliable. (“Sick time is always escaping the institutional technologies invented to contain it,” writes Anne Boyer.) It does not respond well when asked to be fully seen and understood. And it does not respond well to normative relations, queering the sense of my relationship to others in care, in attraction, and attractiveness: always incomplete and refusing the happy ending.

The idea of chronic illness as apparition also feels soothing after years of trying to bore down into the core of how to fix this, how to find one thing I can do that will eliminate my symptoms – and failing, failing to nail it down
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This is why I began with my teenage boyfriend. Because what’s awkward and clumsy if not one’s first relationship, one’s first times attempting sex? Especially in a relationship where I was primarily attracted to the idea of sex, the performance of relationship and its accompanying teenage drama: not to any kinds of hot sex we were actually having. I didn’t have the knowledge or communication skills at the time to re-direct or explain this, and so remained stilted in what I told him, how our bodies moved together, and the way, ultimately, we broke up. I guess we should stop dating now, I bumbled on his porch steps the week before we left for college, and bolted away across his lawn into the night.

He remained angry at me for years for this breakup, and for refusing to “let him in” on what I had been thinking, wanting, needing. Things I didn’t exactly know myself at the time. And I’ve come to understand the ableism beyond the misogyny in his anger, the insistence that a body and mind should even be available to seamlessly open.

But also I am grateful now for the clumsiness that surrounded us then, my hormonal body ineptly attempting to work alongside another. I remember us in basements pretending to listen to Dark Side of the Moon on a couch we couldn’t figure out how to arrange ourselves upon. Our limbs not knowing where to go against one another, yes, but also the emotional inelegance, how I rarely knew where to look or what to say.

“I considered how one cannot continuously manage one’s emotive surface and, mostly, that this lack of control is something to be grateful for,” writes Caryl Pagel. So I am grateful to my teenage self, the self that stuck her ass in boys’ laps while dancing and didn’t know what it meant, genuinely shocked later by their desire. I am grateful to the awkward teenage self who avoided intimacy wherever possible, terrified of risk and then on occasion spilling it all, with Smirnoff Ice.

And not just me but him, her, them, us: crouching underneath bathroom stalls because we’d locked ourselves in and didn’t know where else to go but the sticky floor. The sense that we did not need to blast one another open in any masculine-, female-, God-like or therapist-way, because, really, we already were shattered (a la Scarry) open, slithering on the floor and around in our hormones. Our unpredictable bodies our first hint that we might be that way—forever.

This is how I’ve found myself embracing the clumsy, as a body half performed and half messy, half closed and half open. A person allowed to open only sometimes, a body willfully aware of change and potentially shifting states. To be clumsy is not to be fragile: it is to know that one is breakable, and to live (speak, interact) knowing this.

Clumsy might come in any gender, but because they’re the ones I use, I’ll use she pronouns here. She’s been a beacon to me when I’m in pain, and a beacon to me when I try to explain my illness. She lets me shrug: “it’s hard to know how I’ll feel next week.” She lets me refuse to talk about it when I don’t want to. She performs gender as she is available: she lets me spend half an hour on my eyeliner and then say fuck it, and smear it off.

She wants to be seen, but at the same time refuses to be seen completely: a position I’d want, for any person—the understanding that a public presentation doesn’t necessarily mean she wants to be taken, opened or entered entirely. Or that she’ll be available in this same way tomorrow. Her hormones, her blood, her gender, her feelings, her laughter: none of it demands to be shattered or unwrapped for consumption.

I summon the spirit of clumsy from my teenage self, picking nervously at the pimples alongside her mouth as she tries to end the conversation with Craig on the porch. She doesn’t know how to break up with someone gracefully. Her legs are half-shaven and bumpy, and her shorts are the wrong thing to wear in this late summer chill. She blurts and runs. She’ll learn more later about what people want to hear. But for now she doesn’t know what to say, and I love her for it.

My first time sleeping with another woman was a one night stand. I met her in Dublin’s most iconic gay bar, The George, and I was completely infatuated. She carried herself with the most intoxicating confidence, dressed in an ’80s-style two-piece denim outfit and a striped button-up shirt. She came alone, while I had arrived with a large group of friends. This didn’t matter—she seemed to know everybody in the bar. She was what my older queer friends would have described as a real “power lesbian.”

Before we made our way home together, she asked me twice if I was “Sure I liked women” because I “looked straight.” There was nothing stereotypically “gay-looking” about me. I reassured her that while I did find men attractive, I liked women too. “Oh, you’re… Bisexual,” she remarked in a sardonic tone, rolling her eyes.

When we slept together, afterwards she lay next to me and sarcastically asked “So, are you still bisexual then?” as if my one night encounter with her would have affected who else I could potentially be attracted to. It reminded me of how homophobic straight men often tell lesbians “You just haven’t found the right man yet.” Noticing how uncomfortable her question had made me, she quickly laughed it off as a silly drunken joke, and we drifted off to sleep.

I Convinced Myself I Wasn’t a Lesbian
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Looking back now, I regret sleeping with someone who was so patronizing. But from my experience, gay people being dismissive of bisexuality is a lot more common than one might expect.

I was always most nervous about telling the straight people in my life about the girls I was dating. I presumed, naturally, that my LGBTQ+ friends would be the most understanding and accepting of my bisexuality. But when I told one of my best friends (a gay man in his twenties) that I had begun dating girls, he laughed and said “Oh my god, no! I hate the idea of you sleeping with a woman.” He insinuated that I must have been in a somewhat confused mental state, following my breakup with my ex-boyfriend a few months prior to coming out.

Conversely, my heterosexual mother handled it better than any gay person in my life. I casually slipped into conversation that I had gone on a date with a girl and her response was astonishingly simple and ideal: “Cool, was she nice?” There was no taxing or upsetting conversation. Nothing to explain or defend. I told myself that the gay people in my life had only reacted this way because they were used to me exclusively dating men for so long, that they were adjusting to my coming out just as straight people were. But it was far from being all in my head.

He insinuated that I must have been in a somewhat confused mental state, following my breakup with my ex-boyfriend a few months prior to coming out.
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In September 2013, a prominent lesbian YouTuber, Arielle Scarcella, published a video entitled “What Lesbians Think About Bisexuals.” She asked several gay women to describe bisexuals in one word. The first woman answered with “Greedy.” Other responses included “Confused,” “Messy,” and “Rare- it’s a rare unicorn kind of thing.”

She then asked them to imagine themselves in the following fictional situation: “You’re at a lesbian party. You look across the room and see the hottest girl at the party. You walk up to her, and it turns out she’s bisexual. What’s the first thought that pops into your head?”

“That’s so unfortunate,” one of the women replied, implying that bisexuality is a major deterrent for lesbians. Sometimes, even women who sexually identify as lesbian are judged for sleeping with men prior to coming out. “Gold star” lesbians—women who have never had sex with a man—are held in high esteem within the lesbian community.

This is because unfortunately, society is still wired to think that sexuality is a limited thing, when truthfully it’s incredibly fluid and for many, it takes time to “figure it out.” Therefore, implying that bisexuality is a “phase” and that monosexuality is mandatory only makes things more confusing for someone who might be figuring it out, or who otherwise would be perfectly content identifying as bisexual.

On Finding Pride While Having Faith
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A study conducted by the intimate toy website Adam & Eve found that out of 1,000 people over the age of 18-years-old, 47% of respondents had no intention of ever dating a bisexual person, 19% were undecided, and only 35% were open to it.

While the study did not ask participants to state their sexual orientation, it’s clear that bi-erasure and biphobia exists within the LGBTQ+ community and not just outside of it. Why is it that some lesbians and gay men tend to exclude bisexual people from their dating pool?

According to a study published in the journal Psychology of Sexual Orientation and Gender Diversity, this could be linked to the fact that people generally perceive bisexuals as being more attracted to men than they are to women. Bisexual women in particular are perceived as only sleeping with women for “fun” or to arouse heterosexual men, who often fetishize sex between women. The research shows that lesbian women had a more negative attitude toward bisexual women than bisexual men or gay men.

It is often implied that coming out as bisexual is a stepping-stone for coming out as gay. While some people have come out as bisexual before coming out as gay (for instance, Elton John), using bisexuality to test the homophobic waters is unfair to both people who identify as bisexual and to homosexuals. It’s a symptom of a larger problem, a clear indication of cultural homophobia—it implies that being bisexual is somehow more acceptable than being gay, a “safer” way to identify even if it’s not the truth. Yet bisexuality is not widely understood or accepted either, and using bisexuality as a stop-gap identity only furthers the assumption that bisexuals are lying about who we are. We are considered too promiscuous, incapable of fidelity, or too “risky” to date in case we’re merely going through some sort of experimental phase.

Using bisexuality as a stop-gap identity only furthers the assumption that bisexuals are lying about who we are.
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These generalizations and misconceptions are both entirely unfounded and downright tiring. Society expects us to confine our attractions to one gender, but would shun us for limiting our attractions and having a “type” when it comes to race, or height, or hair color, etc. In reality it comes down to a fear of rejection. Lesbians fear being rejected for a man, and straight men fear being rejected for a woman. The idea that we are fickle and neglectful is ridiculous and there is no research to support it. Many bisexuals are happy to be in and even seek out committed monogamous relationships. Not to mention, rejection can occur in any relationship, regardless of the sexuality of the couple. Therefore, the fear of being rejected for the opposite sex while dating a bisexual person is entirely irrational.

Reducing a full human being to this handful of derogatory adjectives is unacceptable. We are all gloriously unique, no matter where we fall on the spectrum. When the legitimacy of bisexuality is questioned and challenged in such a way, it prevents or delays many bisexual people from coming out. Some of the comments from bisexual people on Scarcella’s video included “This broke my heart” and “This actually made me cry because I’m bi.”

What’s even worse is that bisexual people are actually more likely to suffer from depression, anxiety, or suicidal ideation than lesbian, gay, or heterosexual people. Ethan Mereish, one of the lead authors of an American University Study on the specific stressors bisexual people encounter, said that “Bisexual people face double discrimination in multiple settings—bisexual people are often invisible, rejected, invalidated, [and] stigmatised in the heterosexual community as well as the traditional LGBTQ communities.”

Part of the disdain for bisexuality among some of the lesbian and gay community no doubt comes from the fact that bisexuals benefit from straight-passing privilege. Prior to coming out as bisexual, I was in a long-term monogamous relationship with a man, and I decided not to address my bisexuality at all because of the relationship.

Admittedly, things are a whole lot easier when you are dating someone of the opposite sex. There is never a need to be acutely aware of who might be looking at you when you hold hands or kiss in public. There are no intrusive questions at social gatherings about who plays what role in the relationship, or how sex works between you, or whether you know this one particular “other lesbian” who lives in the same very large city as you (all of which I have subsequently experienced since beginning to date women).

Straight-passing relationships are simply more convenient, and there is no real “need” to come out. Except the fact that you are concealing an important part of your own identity and constantly feel as though you aren’t being truly honest with your partner.

Is My Friend Still Bisexual? A Handy Guide
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On numerous occasions, my ex directly asked me about my sexuality. I had the opportunity to come out to him, but I didn’t feel ready. I was afraid that dating a bisexual person would be something that a straight man might also be against. Of course, I was wrong to think that. When I reflect on the relationship now, I believe he would have accepted me for who I am. Regardless, I have come to be proud of my sexuality and I know that there are plenty of people who are welcoming of bisexuals in their dating pool.

I don’t personally know any bisexual person who would claim that we are more harshly judged or discriminated against than gay couples. This is not the Oppression Olympics. Much of the LGBTQ+ community faces unfortunate and unnecessary discrimination.

Rather than debating about who has it worse, let’s acknowledge that it can feel terribly stifling and painful to be unable to speak or act openly about your sexual identity. Let’s do better for the bisexual community. Let’s increase bi-visibility in books and television, and decrease biphobia by educating ourselves on misconceptions about bisexuality, and become the best possible allies we can be. Now is the time for action and solidarity. We need  allyship year-round, not just during Pride month.

Last Saturday morning my friend and I were having a WhatsApp debrief on the sex we’d had the night before. As we shared our favorite flashbacks, I was surprised to see a picture pop up in our chat. Of me. And another friend.

“Oh! There are pictures?!” I said.

“Hope you don’t mind!” he replied. Flanked by a smiley face emoji.

Now. I like taking sexy pictures and I like having them taken. I enjoy sending and receiving them, both in anticipation and in retrospect. So no, in many ways, I didn’t mind. But what made him assume I’d be cool with this digital documentation? We had talked about our work and he knew I wrote about sex for a living.

Was it possible he’d taken that to mean I was down for anything?

“I didn’t know you’d taken photos,” I tapped back. “In the future I’d rather you didn’t do that without checking.”

“Of course, sorry,” came the response. “I can delete them if you want.”

“No, it’s OK,” I said. The pictures weren’t really the problem (plus, I liked having them). It was more important to me to set the boundary and have him acknowledge it.

“Overall, I had a really good time,” I added. “Yes,” agreed my friend. “Thanks for being so game!”

Game? I suddenly felt like my response was being read as acquiescence.

This wasn’t the first time my general open mindedness had been used against me. “I thought you were sex-positive?!” one partner had leveled at me when I expressed disinterest in a particular kink. I’d like to tell you I brushed it (and him) off, but I admit it—he made me doubt myself.

For me, sex positivity is about consent and communication. It means being open and informed; it has never meant an obligation to experiment or push boundaries. As far as I’m concerned, the decision not to have sex is just as sex positive as the decision to have sex, as long as it’s done consensually and without judgement or shame.

But not everyone interprets it that way.

The term “sex positive” is attributed to Austrian psychoanalyst Willhem Reich, who hypothesized an alternative society to the prohibitive, “sex negative” culture that dominated early 20th century Europe. In the 1980s, sex positivity came to prominence as a response to the anti-porn campaigns led in the U.S. by Andrea Dworkin and the radical feminist Women Against Pornography group.

The rad-fems argued that, amongst other things, “intercourse is the pure, sterile, formal expression of men’s contempt for women,” which prompted writer Ellen Willis to question whether the message of feminism at the time was really any different to that of the right-wing abstinence movement.

In her 1981 essay “Lust Horizons: Is the women’s movement pro-sex?” she argued that instead of viewing porn as inherently misogynistic, women could use it to learn about their own sexual desires. After all, she wrote, “the purpose of women’s liberation is to liberate women, not defend our superior capacity for abstinence.”

What she termed “pro-sex” was the beginning of the sex positive movement, which cultural anthropologist Gayle Rubin described as “an exciting, innovative, and articulate defense of sexual pleasure and erotic justice.”

These days the definition is broader, but also more heavily debated. The International Society for Sexual Medicine defines sex positivity as “having positive attitudes about sex, feeling comfortable with one’s own sexual identity and the sexual behaviors of others.”

Others see participation as a crucial part. Author and activist Allena Gabosch talks about sex positivity as “an attitude […] that regards all consensual sexual activities as fundamentally healthy and pleasurable, and encourages sexual pleasure and experimentation.”

Meanwhile in mainstream media, sex positivity is focused on “improving” and “spicing up” our sex lives.

For people who find sex difficult, dysfunctional, or who are opting out altogether, this message is at best alienating and at worst dehumanizing.

Ginger, an asexual, trans non-binary person who contacted me via Twitter, said: “Most people who use ‘sex positive’ use it to mean ‘sex is a Good Thing.’ This can leave ace people feeling isolated or excluded.”

Dr. Meg-John Barker—academic, activist, and writer specializing in sex and relationships—agrees there is too much emphasis placed on the relationship between plentiful sex and good health:

“People feel pressured to have sex they don’t want and to do sex acts they aren’t really into. That’s a problem for both consent and pleasure because forcing yourself to do something you don’t really want to do is an excellent way of turning you off sex completely.”

Laura, who blogs about low sex drive on her website Sexponential, found that much sex-positive advice is centered around increasing the frequency of sex, something she found counterproductive.

“I was advised to try scheduling sex. But the day would come and I just felt this dread. I felt so much pressure to perform. People see me as an ‘empowered woman’ so they just assumed I was having an amazing sex life. I didn’t feel like I had anyone I could talk to.”

This feeling was echoed by the founders of The Vaginismus Network, a community to support and connect women who have vaginismus, a condition that causes pain during vaginal penetration.

“You feel resentful when people are talking about their amazing sex lives. I used to go to the bar to get drinks or I’d go to the toilet to excuse myself,” co-founder Kat said. “It’s great to be able to talk about having sex and not be shocked. But if someone says actually I hate sex and it’s painful, that shouldn’t shock you either. That shouldn’t be shameful.”

Sex positivity is an attitude that regards all consensual sexual activities as fundamentally healthy and pleasurable.
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Even in sex-positive subcultures, where mainstream ideas of heterosexual, monogamous, vanilla sex are rejected, other kinds of sex often take their place and the pressure to participate can be just as strong.

“Often in queer, poly, and kink communities their approaches seem to be that their sex is good because it is a radical act,” said Ginger.

This is what Rubin referred to as the “hierarchical valuation of sex acts.” But, wrote Rubin, “it is just as objectionable to insist that everyone should be lesbian, non-monogamous, or kinky, as to believe that everyone should be heterosexual, married, or vanilla.”

While researching this piece I was stunned by the stories I heard from my own sex-positive communities. One friend told me about a club where by entering you consented to whatever happened inside. Another told me about declining to have sex with someone at a kinky party only to be told, “you can’t reject me, we don’t do that here.” Yet another talked of being shamed for having a gender preference and told to be “open to different experiences.”

In queer feminist zine FUCKED, one anonymous author explains:

 “Party spaces are never sexually appealing to me. I resent not having the option to opt out of these things and still feel safe, feel like a part of the community.”

Barker says this is not uncommon. “These kinds of spaces can be particularly bad because sex positivity can give people implicit permission to be creepy and non-consensual, suggesting that everybody in those spaces should be ‘up for it.’”

The pressure to be or be seen as sex positive is almost as damaging as the sex-negative messages it is supposed to challenge. So what can we do about it?

“It’s really important that we develop a culture where it is just as acceptable not to feel sexual as it is to feel sexual,” says Barker. This idea is explored in their latest book, co-authored with sex educator Justin Hancock: Enjoy Sex: How, when and IF you want to.

“We’re all supposed to love sex, to be really experimental, and to have incredible orgasms,” they write. “In this book we’re trying to get away from the sex-negative and sex-positive messages to find a kinder way in which we can all approach sex and enjoy it if we want to.”

Sarah Beilfuss is co-founder of London-based sex-positive women’s community Scarlet Ladies. She decided to temporarily abstain from sex after she was raped. She hasn’t had sex with a partner for over a year and sees this as in keeping with sex-positive values.

“People assume sex positive means you have lots of sex. I see it as being empowered to do what you want and need and for me that was going abstinent. In Scarlet Ladies there are several women who’ve taken a step back from sex. Being sex positive should mean that you have your boundaries firmly in place, know what you want, and are comfortable saying no as well as yes.”

Setting boundaries isn’t always easy, but if it fosters better consent and communication, what can I say? I’m game.

The goodbyes have overturned the horizon and lay bare their seed on fertile ground; there is a pale face receding, framed by a curtained windowpane. He’ll rise, forgetting, but as he slides the curtains open and hears the tinny metal slide of the rings suspending them, he will be flooded with misery, a desire to lay back down in bed.

The light filters through the trees—strange blocks of shadows dance on the wall. Some leaves are bright, mantis-green, backlit by the sun—others are fern-green, muted and shadowed. They tremble on their branches; the burgundy maple tree in the background reminds him of rust or blood. He turns and fingers the sheets where they used to lay, obsessed for many weeks with one another’s bodies.

Her period was intense—thick and streaming out of her. She was afraid of taking anything with hormones, so the copper IUD had rendered one day of every month a kind of horror scene, but in truth he thrilled at the intimacy of it, even as he was repulsed by it. It was hot to the touch, he could almost see steam rise from the rivulets running down her legs. He thinks of a dead rabbit sighing its life into the sky.

The stains of her blood trace their bodies and he can’t bear to throw them out. He decides that the next time he brings someone home he’ll say he’d cut his foot—or his hand. If he decides in the moment it will sound more true.

How do you imagine the future? I often conceive of it in vignettes like this. Although conceive is the wrong word because in truth they come to me—the visions are full-bodied, screaming or sashaying into my consciousness—I don’t have the sensation of creating them.

But why are the imaginings so cruel? Why do I imagine his dread at my recent departure when that departure is not coming. That kind of sadness—those sickening final goodbyes that coat your days in thick grey ash—is currently coiled sleeping, docile as a sun-drunk cat.

I remember reading that you often dream of horrible things so you can psychologically prepare for the very worst things if and when they happen. Like circuit training for your nervous system.

I recently wrote about another one of my morbid fantasies, which involves my brother’s tweed coat and my mother’s grave. My mother was disturbed; she told me she didn’t like experiencing the “shadow of her own death.” I said I understood. But I also knew I’d keep imagining it.

Sometimes the casket is open. Sometimes I sing Celine Dion, choke-laughing at how saccharine and awful the lyrics are, but goddamn they feel good to belt out on the highway. Sometimes my father is crying, unshaven. Rattled and terrified. Sometimes it’s spring and the brightness of the daffodils silhouetted against the late March frost is spectacular; I pick as many as I can hold; I fill her whole casket with them.

It’s one of the hardest days I’ll ever have and I think my mind is trying to help me pre-cope with my own inevitable unraveling. Perhaps if I imagine it 100 different ways, one of them will be close to the truth and when the daffodils rear their rippled yellow heads, I won’t scream into the snow; I will have been here before.

I’ve also been thinking a lot about the dialogue between imagining and forgetting. In truth, both feel predicated on possibility. Imagining lances all kinds of psychological blisters. Adults happily pretend they can forge the future. Self-help books insist that the Universe sees your pining and just might bend to your will.

So go ahead, conjure that piano, that Porsche, that perky-titted blonde; try things on! Change the furniture, the rage, the loss; try pesto instead of that alfredo sauce. Imagine the world being kinder, more just.

Imagine a world that feels less like purgatory—filled with indiscriminate killings, venomous spiders, leaking sphincters, inexplicable rashes, impossible cruelties to children and the environment—and more like a fraught family reunion! We’re all gathered here together for a few days…sort of by our own will! We should all do our best to take care of one another while we’re here and have a good time before heading our separate ways again.

But isn’t forgetting also a kind of imagining?

I’ve been reading a lot about amnesia recently. The Mayo Clinic breaks it down into three types: The first is retrograde amnesia (difficulty remembering the past, things that were once so familiar), and the second is anterograde, which is difficulty learning new information. These two are caused, of course, by a delectable variety of absolutely terrible things from brain swelling and alcohol abuse to seizures and tumors—you get the idea, the human body is nothing if not fragile as a paper mache egg…but the kind of amnesia I’m interested in is the more rare, dissociative, or psychogenic amnesia, induced by trauma.

The brain protects itself from remembering something awful. And in this void, in this once-was-pain space, we find another kind of imagining. A place where that thing never happened. You can imagine a life that isn’t marred by the inky edges of darkness; violence, death, depression. The mind, knowing what it does to your poor heart, to your central nervous system, to your bowels which run with ice when you remember—tidily blurs those edges until the memory is gauze.

It helps you imagine a better past. It is, of course, often not much more than a fleeting parlor trick—the memories course back and crush you—but it’s a lovely respite.

Isn’t forgetting a kind of imagining?
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My fascinating if mildly morbid research started because I couldn’t remember having sex with my ex boyfriend. I realize this is a trivial thing in many ways, but it started to eat at me. It was a small, but potent and disconcerting void. It was as though someone had come in with kindergarten scissors and started sloppily snipping those memories away. Like that very sad, very wonderful movie Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.

Did I bring the scissors? Did I wear a stocking on my head—my features mashed against the silk mesh—and start lopping out our love making?

…and then I realized I was relieved. In part. It is both the cruelest and most lovely of gifts. To forget his face and hands and feet. It’s like losing time—the minutes that made hours which made days and weeks—simply vanished.

I started looking at the few photographs I had of his naked body. I’ve always wondered if post break-up one is even allowed to do that…but I suppose if you remember their body in your mind it’s tantamount to the same thing, but I didn’t anymore. So was it a violation?

I started to scroll—that eerily familiar sensation of thumb-sliding, a gesture once awkward and unimaginable now ubiquitous—and stare at his limbs, trying to conjure what once felt like an extension of my own body.

I suppose my mind is willfully forgetting so I can move on. His whole body is a scar that’s blistered and ran and is just a bumpy ridge I run my fingers over in the dark; I can’t really feel or see it, there’s just a shape where he once was.

And now? I’m busy imagining more goodbyes; I’m imagining the void that my absence will bring to another person’s life. We’ve only just begun and I already need to forget.

A woman sitting on a toilet in a wedding gown next to a litter box. A woman, naked, lying on a settee. A pregnant woman dressed in a bathing suit. A woman pumping breast milk. A woman lying next to a small child and a cut-out skeleton. And 61 more photographs featuring the same woman in a range of states of undress, most featuring the subject’s face either cut from the frame or obscured.

This is what makes up Michael E. Northrup’s Dream Away, published last month to acclaim from the New Yorker and the Guardian, among others. The experience of looking at the work is a little unnerving: Vogue Italia acknowledged the discomfiting nature of the images, saying “you’re not sure you’re allowed to but nonetheless you can’t look away.” That seems to be the point.

The woman in Dream Away is Northrup’s ex-wife, and the pictures were taken over the course of their relationship — they met in 1976, married in 1978, and divorced by 1988. The domestic intimacy of the images is all part of the 1960s snapshot aesthetic that Northrup himself has expressed affinity for. A commercial artist as well as art photographer, much of his work over the past decades has played with this style of image-making, while also experimenting with light and flash. He’s certainly quite successful at making the viewer feel like they are getting a long glimpse at private moments.

But it is nearly impossible to look at the works that make up Dream Away and not think about the relationship between the photographer and the photographed. Looking at the photos allows the viewer into an intimate relationship, a marriage that is now over.

Thing is, in the discussion of these “arrestingly intimate” images, there appears a comment from the artist that might give one pause. “She hasn’t seen it yet,” he says in an interview with Sleek, “if she likes it that would make me immensely happy, and if she doesn’t, that’s her problem.”

Looking at the photos allows the viewer into an intimate relationship, a marriage that is now over.
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Though there’s no mention in any of the articles about what the woman in the photos might think about being in said photos, a quick Google search reveals that his ex-wife did, and perhaps still does, have a problem. Back in 2013, in a short email exchange published on a photography blog, Northrup writes about how his wife had asked for these images not to be published. Northrup asked for permission and received a no in response. On Twitter, Alexandra Schwartz, who wrote the piece about Dream Away for the New Yorker, revealed that Northrup received a refusal for an initial edit and that this is a new set of photographs. But that doesn’t indicate permission.

Before continuing, it should be said that this is not an attempt to suggest that the book should not have been published and that its existence is somehow illegal. It’s more a question of what it means to ask someone a question, not receive the answer you want, and then move ahead. What are the ethics of producing this type of work? And what does it say about the relationship between a male photographer and a female subject?

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Northrup’s personal, written admission of his ex-wife’s refusal was then accompanied by a hearty helping of reasons why, as an artist, he has a right to publish his images: “I have a copyright lawyer here who says my first amendment rights trumps her rights to privacy as long as I meet some requirements.” He then expresses the opinion that he is “the creator” and “in the art world, once you pose with the understanding of the intentions of the photographer, then you’re giving rights.”

Reflecting a problematic view that if a woman says yes to one man in one circumstance, that should do for all men and if circumstances change, Northrup continues that since his ex-wife posed naked for another photographer and that photo has circulated without complaint, he should have no problem. Reading argument after argument — at one point Northrup says that his ex is “immoral” for denying his request for permission — it is hard not to feel that this is the attitude of a man who feels that he has a right to more than just a photograph. In the ensuing discussion (all amongst men, it should be noted), it is suggested consistently that the photographer’s rights trump that of the subject.

Max Houghton is a professor of photography at the London College of Communication, and she runs their master’s program in Photojournalism and Documentary Photography. She has spent a great deal of time thinking about the issues around photography and the representation of women both in images and in the field in general, recently publishing  Firecrackers: Female Photographers Now alongside Fiona Rogers. When asked about Dream Away and the issue of consent, “for me,” she says, “it is about this absolutely outrageous sense of entitlement.”

“I really hated the way that he brought up the fact that she posed for other people naked,” she says. “I detested the fact that he used that as if to say she’ll show herself anywhere. It just is not relevant. The guy literally thinks that he has the divine right because they were once married to do whatever he wanted.”

The female voice is pushed aside or silenced and the male project becomes all-encompassing. For Northrup, this isn’t work that has come out of a relationship between two people. This isn’t a creative partnership, perhaps like that of Emmet and Edith Gowin, which Houghton provides as a comparative example of photographer husband and photographed wife. “Close human relationships can be the most beautiful places to explore intimacy and what that is. It can be consensual,” Houghton explains. “But these things can change over time. Even if it is the male with the camera, with the power, with the framing, with everything, it’s not necessarily problematic from the word go.”

This is about an absolutely outrageous sense of entitlement.
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Instead, Northrup’s ex-wife simply becomes a vehicle for Northrup’s creative practice. “I’m also not sure why the concern is so heavy to the side of the subject instead of the photographer,” he complains, in the comment section of photographer Jin Zhu’s no longer active blog that took him to task for his perspective. “If I publish, she looses [sic] nothing. I would not publish images that I thought might damage her situation. And if you llook [sic] at the images I think you’d have trouble finding anything demeaning in them. If I don’t publish I loose [sic] 10 years of part of my life and the ability to share my work. I loose [sic] my freedom of speech.”

But we still do not have his ex-wife’s opinion in all of this, the simple fact of whether or not she’s okay with her often nude body being displayed in public. Considering this, it’s not hard to understand why so many images cut chunks of his ex-wife out of the picture. When she has a voice — a voice that denies his request for permission — she becomes a hindrance, an immoral denier of his free speech, of his art, of his solo “creation.” This attitude requires that he see her as nothing but an object, and he does, stating that the photographs don’t even display his ex-wife at all. They “have [her] likeness but that is only through the illusion of the photo.”

When she has a voice — a voice that denies his request for permission — she becomes a hindrance, an immoral denier of his free speech, of his art, of his solo “creation.”

No matter how much Northrup would like to pretend otherwise, the photographs in Dream Away did require two people to be made. Northrup can choose which photos to include and audiences can argue whether or not the photos are defamatory (which has occurred online), but this leaves out the other person — the one who was photographed repeatedly for a decade starting over 40 years ago. Northrup does not, in any discussion that he has had online, seem to recognize his own privileged position as artist, as photographer. Reflecting what has become a familiar men’s rights refrain, he sees the woman as being all powerful simply for denying him that which he feels entitled to.

Northrup complains that his ex-wife doesn’t have a good reason for questioning his publication of these photographs, but what is his reason for insisting? And why is it any more valid?

Beyond this, however, is perhaps an even wider question: What societal forces have allowed Northup to feel entitled and justified in his defense of his work? He clearly does not recognize the power and privilege that he holds as the man behind the camera. As Houghton puts it, “anyone can make a nice image these days, really. And so we do need to be asking more of people who choose to call themselves a photographer, an artist, a creator. If you are going to use those terms, they are loaded terms, they are privileged terms, and so what are you doing to earn that privilege?”

Identities are important. They help us define who we are, and understand our place in the world. But sometimes, those very same identities exist as diametrically opposing forces within us; they are a juxtaposition that sends ripping cracks through our very idea of selfhood, leaving us confused, isolated, and bound in inner conflict.

And that’s how I felt for many, many years. Jewish. Lesbian. Lesbian. Jewish. I was both, and that made me feel like neither.

From one community I hear, “how can you be a part of a religion that hates your very existence?” while the other says, “how can you be a part of a group that G-d would not approve of?”

And so I’ve teetered on the edge of both worlds; finding pride in both my faith and my sexuality has been a long, arduous road to reconciliation.

At 13 I came out—for the first time—but at a fairly religious school (as you can expect) it was not accepted with open arms flung wide. I distinctly remember the moment it happened. During a history lesson, we had trailed into a dangerous discussion of homosexuality. The usual comments, slurs, and noises of disgust echoed around the room. I couldn’t take it. Years of anger, angst, and self-hatred burst forth and formed the words that blurted from my mouth: “I’m gay.”

What came next is a blur. But the moment those two words left my lips, my world changed.

Although there were those who stood by me, I had the usual mix of rejection, name-calling, and in one particularly unfortunate episode, a petition by some of my peers to get me expelled. Old Testament verses of corporal punishment were frequently quoted during discussions of my sexuality at school alongside other students and in the Synagogue with sermons; my fate of eternal damnation was certified, and attempts to save my soul through prayer were lovingly given.

But in truth, the harshest criticism, and the most vile disgust and hatred, came from none other than myself. Every night I would pray to G-d to make me straight, to make me like the way a boy’s hoodie smelled when he gave it to me if I was cold, to make me feel enticed by the way stubble rubbed against my cheek, to make me normal. I didn’t understand, why me.

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If G-d loves all his children, why would he make me so detestable? I used to sit on the floor of my kitchen, tears flooding my face, feeling painfully torn in two directions. Knowing who you are is supposed to be a beautiful thing, a moment of epiphany and realization and calm.

But for me, knowing who I was was to be tormented.

Over the next four years, through deep conversations, debates, and determination, many came around and embraced my sexuality, including those who had previously shunned or questioned me; they loved the sinner despite the sin.

But for me to truly learn to love myself and accept my sexuality, it took far longer. I went along with the usual playground flirtations and games, the adolescent dance of sloppy kisses at parties, the dates over drinks and food 18 year-olds think is fancy. I was in and out of the closet so much that people believed I’d found Narnia.

Those around me just couldn’t understand; how I could be so vocal in asking for acceptance from others, but couldn’t find the same acceptance from within? In truth, until I was 19 (six years after I first came out, and 12 years from the time I first realized who I was), I couldn’t understand this internal dichotomy either.

I can’t pinpoint the exact moment where I finally found my peace. It’s an amalgamated feeling of foggy memories of finally finding love—slipping my hand into my girlfriend’s felt right, not wrong—throwing handfuls of sweaty glitter onto Pride floats, and hours of RuPaul’s Drag Race. Seeing all the joy, beauty, and goodness people felt within themselves because of their sexuality, and not in spite of it, made me question what could be so awful about feeling the way I did.

I recognized that I didn’t have to make a choice anymore — my Judaism and my sexuality were equally valid aspects and wants of my heart. I suppose I finally believed the old adage that tells you to follow it.

I was in and out of the closet so much people believed I’d found Narnia.
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My story is not unique. It is one that plays out in churches, mosques, synagogues, and places of worship across the world. Coming out is never easy, but coming out within the context of religion adds another layer to the struggle. Individuals who are both religious and LGBT+ face the prospect of an entire community that they grew up with turning their backs on them, of being cast out and criticized.

Pride means something different to those who face these particular threats. So, I asked people who identify as both having faith and as LGBT+ to share their experiences, and what Pride means to them.

Rowan, 18, FTM, Christian

“I’ve received a lot of criticism — I’ve had people tell me that they ‘disagree’ with my identity. It just so happens that growing up in a Christian community meant that most of the people I came out to first were childhood friends I knew via the church. These people always made it very clear that their opinion of my identity didn’t affect how much they cared about me—even if it hurts—and that counts for something I suppose.

I never personally had any doubts that God loved me under justifications that He doesn’t make mistakes. If I’ve been made like this, it’s a path he wants me to take, and I can use my body in a way that honors Him through becoming the person He wants me to be . . .

But there was always the thought in the back of my mind that I was twisting the Bible’s words to make me feel better about my situation. Talking to other people who shared my faith—or at least who had a faith and so understood my experience—made it a lot easier for me to reconcile my sexual/gender identity without feeling guilty at all.

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I do feel proud of both of my identities, kind of more so because I have both identities—like, there’s often stereotypes of people with a faith/religion hating queer people and queer people in return being intolerant of faith groups, and it’s nice to think that I can be open minded on both sides.

Pride should be a celebration of inclusivity and tolerance, so it would be unfair of me or anyone else to allow my faith to prevent me from enjoying it.”

Brian, 21, Bisexual, Christian:

“The most rejection I’ve faced has been from my parents, and the Afrikaans church that they’re a part of. My parents don’t accept my sexuality; they say that they pray for me to stop being gay every day and refuse to be a part of my life with my partner.

Religion to some people is something very beautiful, but to others it is something very harmful. Because I have understood what it means to be rejected by a religion, I find Pride is a concept that means a lot to me; it means I’m saying I’m not going to let any institution tell me that what I am isn’t okay. I take pride in the fact that me and others share in a large experience of rejection. Religion for me informs my pride.

Religion has meant that people aren’t willing to consider what it actually means to be gay, and for a lot of religious communities being gay is not accepted and it’s a fairly common experience amongst LGBT+ globally that they find it difficult to come out or they’re completely rejected by their community. For me and those people, Pride means something powerful: I’m proud of who I am, I’m proud of my chosen family.”

Qaisar, 30, Queer, Muslim:

“Pride is not only the opposite of shame; it’s the opposite of invisibility, erasure, and silence. To be a queer Muslim during Pride month is about voraciously affirming one’s own existence against a backdrop of religiously-motivated homophobia, and against the virulent Islamophobia and racism that underlines many Western queer spaces and movements.

Online and in the books of bearded Saudi-funded clerics, you can find a million ways to spell out your hell-bound journey. But my own experience in real life has been remarkably serene; I am lucky to have a family that for the most part—though with difficulty—has accepted my sexual orientation, and have further found allies within my own community networks. Granted, there have been plenty of friendly and unfriendly debates on the reconciliation between faith and sexual orientation or gender identity, but oftentimes I have found being Muslim in queer spaces a greater challenge than the reverse.

Pride is not only the opposite of shame; it’s the opposite of invisibility, erasure, and silence.
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Firstly, that the history of Islam and the Muslim world — the orientalist geography of the term notwithstanding — is replete with orientations and identities wholly alien to modern heteronormative ideals, and queer life has found expressions in Islamic cultures from Persia, to Morocco, to India and Indonesia.

Secondly, I have found like-minded Muslims from across the LGBTQI+ spectrum with whom to build affirming community groups, discussion circles, and prayer spaces, and in doing so, shatter the false fantasy shared by Islamic conservatives and LGBT secularists; you can’t be gay and Muslim.”

Masha, 24, Bisexual, Roman Catholic:

“I grew up in Russia, where the majority of believers belong to the Russian Orthodox Church. However, my family background is partly Polish and Lithuanian, therefore, at the age of 9, I was christened into the Roman Catholic Church and had been a member since. This period covers most of my experience growing up, as well as exploring my sexuality and coming to peace with it.

I slowly realized that I may not be totally heterosexual around the age of 15. As I was a devoted Catholic, I had a mini-breakdown a couple months before my Confirmation, but had no one to talk about it with at the Church or in my family. I went to confession and asked forgiveness for kissing a girl—among other things—skipping class and smoking a cigarette.

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Finally, a little while later, at one of the services during the homily, a priest said, “one should not come to the confession if they are not truly sorry about their sins, and shouldn’t come to the communion unless they have committed something extremely bad.” Personally, I didn’t feel particularly bad about loving another person and although I knew it was a sin, I did not feel it was extremely bad; in all other parts of my life I acted like an “OK” Christian.

In a way, Pride for me is to know who I am, and not be ashamed of it. With Christian morals, it is also important to me to be a good, kind, and forgiving person. I believe that, no matter what, the way you treat people is always more meaningful than who you are attracted to. I am always glad to see religious organizations and charities taking part in Pride marches and I feel that in general, we as humanity are moving in the right direction.”

As a community, we’ve all faced rejection, isolation, and the external, internal, and eternal struggle of finding acceptance from others and from ourselves. But, as the above stories show, despite the darkness there are glimmers and bright glares of hope, acceptance, and love to be found and to be proud about. Watching this year’s Pride celebrations around the world, I think I finally understand what that word means.

In the Talmud, the sacred text of Judaism, there is a story of Hillel, a sage scholar said to be associated with the holy book’s development—one of the most important figures in Jewish history. He came across a gentile who demanded that the entire Talmud be explained to him while standing on one foot. Hillel simply replied:

“What is hateful to you, do not do to your fellow: this is the whole Torah; the rest is commentary.”

Love, kindness, and social justice are the beating heart of the Jewish faith, and of many other religions; these virtues should be given freely no matter how a person identifies. We are all deserving subjects of the Lord’s love.

I’m Jewish, and I’m a lesbian. I can be both. I am both. I will always be both. The internal divisions have healed, even if the scars are still there — and I endeavor to live a life that G-d would be proud of.

I found myself in the position I never expected to be in, echoing the words of countless women undone by the violence of the men in their lives: ‘But I still love him.’

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M y relationship with Anthony was like most relationships. It was good until it wasn’t. In this case, it was exactly what I’d always wanted until it turned inside out, became something so distorted it didn’t seem possible it was the same relationship.

I fell in love with Anthony. Because I’d never been in love before, I figured that he must be good. I couldn’t have loved him otherwise, right? I’d been through too much, was too smart, too vigilant, too feminist, to be with anyone but a kind, sensitive man.

I’d done my time with ungenerous men. I’d racked up a handful (or two) of questionable nights where I was too drunk or he was too pushy or my “no’s” dissolved as if they were never said. I’d done my time healing those wounds. Anthony seemed like the reward.

For a while, he was. But then, the relationship collapsed, irretrievably. He revealed a capacity for violence I never thought I’d see in my own life.

I found myself in the position I never expected to be in, echoing the words of countless women undone by the violence of the men in their lives: “But I still love him.”

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We started dating at the beginning of last summer. It felt like a balm.

Anthony didn’t care about being successful, popular, or traditionally masculine. He didn’t particularly care if I was pretty, smart, or nice.

His childhood was marked by violence and poverty, and when his peers went to college, he went into the desert to camp, heal, and figure out what mattered. What mattered, it turned out, was nothing except his cat, guitar, and climbing.

He didn’t even care about sex, which was a relief. I asked if we could wait, and we did. Lying in his arms, I’d dissect my fear of men and intimacy. He would listen and then say everything I’d always wanted to hear: “We don’t ever have to have sex. If we do, it will only make us closer. There’s nothing you could do to make me like you less.”

When we finally had sex, I knew, for the first time, that I really wanted it.

He offered infinite room that seemed able to hold anything. I filled up plenty of that space with insecurity and fear, until I realized that for the first time, I had drained myself of my self-loathing, and he had stayed, essentially unfazed. I was stunned by the feeling of stability and sure-footing. I liked who I was when I wasn’t trying to be the best, and was surprised to find that he did too.

One night, I got sick and threw up outside the car window and all over his bathroom. I was embarrassed and on the brink of tears, but he rubbed my back and told me not to worry: “I’ve chosen you and once I choose someone there’s really nothing that can bother me.” I wanted to build a home inside that sentence.

After a heady summer together, I went to Mexico for a month in the fall. The night before I left, we said we loved each other and held hands until morning.

I was stunned by the feeling of stability and sure-footing. I liked who I was when I wasn’t trying to be the best, and was surprised to find that he did too.

I left sure that I was in a loving relationship, something I’d feared I’d never have. I spent a month in Mexico pining for him.

The day I got back to the States, the collapse began.

I called Anthony, and an automated voice told me the number had been disconnected. I texted our mutual friend, Elle, and she told me he got a new number. I still felt unsteady, but he texted me from the new phone a few minutes later. “Deep breaths,” I thought, “don’t be paranoid,” but it felt like my stomach had slid from my body.

I saw him in person a few days later. It was then that he told me what had happened while I was gone. He’d cheated on me with Elle (first he told me it happened once, then maybe twice, then “a handful” of times).

Before I could absorb this news, he told me that after I’d been gone a couple weeks, he’d packed up his room, changed his number, ghosted his job, and drove to Oregon. He would still have been in Oregon when I got back, he said, except once he got there he “had a bad feeling.” He turned the car around and came home.

The following month was a blur of unrelenting pain and confusion. We mostly didn’t talk, but I couldn’t adjust to this new reality, couldn’t understand it. Hadn’t he said he loved me? That he was proud to be with me?

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At the end of the month, a fatal combination of events contributed to my dwindling emotional strength, and I texted him to hang out. I didn’t leave his room for four days. On the fourth, he kissed me goodbye and went to work. Three hours later, he texted me to say he’d walked out of work, again. He was leaving, again. If I wanted to see him for the last time, it would have to be soon.

I crawled through the day, feeling betrayed and abandoned all over again. Then, a few hours later, an acquaintance told me something that froze the edges of my organs.

He’d been threatening Elle over text and at their shared workplace. “He’s been manipulating everybody, especially you and Elle,” the acquaintance told me.

Hours before he left for good, we went to a coffee shop and I asked him about the threats, waited for him to tell me I’d misunderstood.

Instead, he told me he wished Elle would die of AIDS. He called her a filthy whore and said he’d punch her if she were a man. He wanted to push her off of a cliff. “I really mean it,” he clarified.

I forced myself to say his words were unforgivable, terrifying.

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His face folded with anger. “Good luck with everything,” he said, before standing up and walking out of the cafe. I ran after him and convinced him to get in my car to drive him home.

Once in the car, he said he might jump out.

I tried to keep my breath calm, my eyes even, but I was scared, like I was next to an unpredictable stranger. “Just get him home,” I thought. I’ll drop him off, drive away alone, and find a way to survive the knowledge that I was in love with a lie.

But when he calmed down, he cried. He apologized over and over. He didn’t mean to get angry. He wasn’t in control. I believed him.

He told me he didn’t know how to deal with Elle, but that he shouldn’t have done what he did. He loved me, I was the best woman he’d ever been with. He didn’t mean to hurt me. Maybe we’d be together one day, he said, if he could take accountability and if I could heal from him. I wanted to believe that, too.

He got in his car and drove to New Mexico.

He apologized over and over. He didn’t mean to get angry. He wasn’t in control. I believed him.

I’d entered the relationship eager and anxious, so happy to be in love for the first time. The way it ended — and ended, and ended — broke me.

“I’m a feminist!” I wanted to yell, “How could this have happened?” To me! An advocate for sexual assault and domestic violence survivors, a sex-educator, a reporter on gender justice!

I recognized his threat to leap from my car from a pamphlet on domestic violence: “Red flags include threatening self-harm or suicide.” I recognized his apology from the cycle of violence wheel I’d passed out countless times — blowups are followed by apologies so that the cycle may continue. Calling Elle a filthy whore wasn’t a red flag, but a bloody banner proclaiming his disregard for women.

I remember a night I’d been called into the hospital to advocate for a woman whose husband had dragged her across their driveway. Her body was covered in scrapes and bruises. She cried for her husband and the only time she spoke to me was to beg me to find him. My training had told me this was common, but I struggled to understand how she could want someone who had hurt her so badly.

Now, I understand more. I understand how the black and white pamphlets articulating the bounds of a healthy relationship fail to register in the part of the heart that yearns for love, or what feels like love.

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I tell people what Anthony did — the cheating, the deserting town, the threatening Elle — and feel like I’ve done something wrong. When I try to talk about about how good the relationship had felt, people stiffen with the shadow of suspicion or pity. As if I’m temporarily insane. As if I don’t realize I’ve been manipulated. I become strange to myself — how can I miss a man who would do any of what he did?

Friends are quick to call him garbage, a psychopath, abusive. I understand why, but the words don’t resonate, don’t seem right. They cut me — what does it say about me if I fell in love with garbage?

The therapist I start to see when Anthony leaves town tells me to read Why Does He Do That?, the seminal text about abusive men.

“I’ve read that!” I want to scream. “I’ve given this book to women! You don’t get it!” But when I skim the pages, some bullet points are chillingly familiar. I slam it shut.

What does it say about me if I fell in love with garbage?

The truth is Anthony had said things that registered as red flags, but I was careful to qualify them, to add them into a larger narrative I had about him being a tortured soul healing childhood trauma and unlearning toxic masculinity.

He told me he struggled with anger. His car was dented from when he’d battered it with a shovel after a bad day. His life work was to contain the anger and not cause harm, he told me. He was always so gentle with me, and I thought that if he was self-aware then I needn’t be worried — you can’t hold people’s pasts against them, right?

I should have listened when he told me he’d escaped his childhood by leaving his family, town, and life completely, and that he’d been escaping like that ever since. Not anymore, not with me, I thought.

He also says I should have listened. The last time we spoke, I told him I was still stunned by what he said to and about Elle. He didn’t take it back. In fact, he was frustrated:

“I told you this is who I am. I tell people this is who I am, but then when it comes out, they can’t deal with it. Those things I said are minor. I don’t understand why it matters to you so much. I wouldn’t actually hurt her.”

No amount of screaming or crying could make him realize how badly he’d hurt me or Elle.

I realized with excruciating clarity that nothing could touch him. The love and vulnerability I’d shared so freely with him hadn’t touched him. I’d thought that in his unshakeability, he’d been holding space for me. Actually, he just was space. The trust and care I’d shown had floated away. When he told me he loved me, it wasn’t a lie, but it didn’t obey the rules of gravity. It slid into black space. Threatening to punch someone, wishing death on a woman — those words slid to the same place.

The trust and care I’d shown had floated away. When he told me he loved me, it wasn’t a lie, but it didn’t obey the rules of gravity.

Losing him was painful, but in the months following my return from Mexico, I felt like I was also losing myself.

I’d found the scrape of energy necessary to tell Anthony that I was on Elle’s side. I knew I wouldn’t be able to live with myself if I let the words “I wish she’d die of AIDS” slide. Words like that tend to wake a person up.

I found myself willing to forgive almost everything — the cheating, the lying, the abandonment. The only thing I couldn’t forgive was what he did to Elle. I was lucky that his most extreme violence was directed at another woman — I had more clarity about what she deserved than what I did.

The lessons I learned from the breakup are also burdens. I learned that resources, training, and feminist credentials didn’t stop me from falling for someone capable of violence. I learned that his violence was his, and that I neither provoked nor could have prevented it. I learned that I am not immune from the thoughts that I know are typical of people who have had unhealthy relationships — I feel ashamed for choosing the relationship and for struggling to move on. I feel embarrassed that I still sometimes miss him. I fear that I can’t trust my intuition or feelings in the future. Some days, I think maybe it wasn’t that bad.

Why We Must Walk Away From Destructively Dependent Relationships

I struggle to tolerate multiple truths — I loved him, and I think he loved me. He was also violent and unremorseful. I can’t choose just one of those truths without hurting myself.

The worst thing Anthony did was to put me in the position of nearly choosing him over what he knew I valued most — the safety and equality of women. Ultimately, it felt like choosing between myself and the memory of feeling loved. I chose myself, but barely.

Now I’m back in my life after months in a cloud of pain. I have hope for the future again, and feel proud of my resilience. But I’m hurt. Every morning since I got back from Mexico, I wake up and before I open my eyes, tell myself that I’ll be OK, that I’ll survive the day.

I had hoped to learn about intimacy, love, and sex with Anthony. But the greater, more subsuming lessons have been about healing from the emotional pain caused by the violence of men — these are lessons I’m tired of learning.

I become overwhelmed when I try to understand why everything happened, and what it means for my future, so I’ve liberated myself from thinking about either. I only know that I want to care and be around others who care. I want words to mean something. My internal world has rearranged since Anthony left — it’s more sensitive, more complex, more grounded. For now, I spend each day occupying more of my own body, my own life, exploring its contours and boundaries. There is more room now that I’ve been pulled apart.

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]]> https://theestablishment.co/my-feminism-couldnt-save-me-from-staying-in-an-abusive-relationship-2943439cfc40/ Mon, 16 Apr 2018 16:19:25 +0000 https://theestablishment.co/?p=1740 Read more]]> I found myself in the position I never expected to be in, echoing the words of countless women undone by the violence of the men in their lives: ‘But I still love him.’

My relationship with Anthony was like most relationships. It was good until it wasn’t. In this case, it was exactly what I’d always wanted until it turned inside out, became something so distorted it didn’t seem possible it was the same relationship.

I fell in love with Anthony. Because I’d never been in love before, I figured that he must be good. I couldn’t have loved him otherwise, right? I’d been through too much, was too smart, too vigilant, too feminist, to be with anyone but a kind, sensitive man.

I’d done my time with ungenerous men. I’d racked up a handful (or two) of questionable nights where I was too drunk or he was too pushy or my “no’s” dissolved as if they were never said. I’d done my time healing those wounds. Anthony seemed like the reward.

For a while, he was. But then, the relationship collapsed, irretrievably. He revealed a capacity for violence I never thought I’d see in my own life.

I found myself in the position I never expected to be in, echoing the words of countless women undone by the violence of the men in their lives: “But I still love him.”

#MeToo Has Made Me See Anyone Is Capable Of Sexual Abuse—Including Me
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We started dating at the beginning of last summer. It felt like a balm.

Anthony didn’t care about being successful, popular, or traditionally masculine. He didn’t particularly care if I was pretty, smart, or nice.

His childhood was marked by violence and poverty, and when his peers went to college, he went into the desert to camp, heal, and figure out what mattered. What mattered, it turned out, was nothing except his cat, guitar, and climbing.

He didn’t even care about sex, which was a relief. I asked if we could wait, and we did. Lying in his arms, I’d dissect my fear of men and intimacy. He would listen and then say everything I’d always wanted to hear: “We don’t ever have to have sex. If we do, it will only make us closer. There’s nothing you could do to make me like you less.”

When we finally had sex, I knew, for the first time, that I really wanted it.

He offered infinite room that seemed able to hold anything. I filled up plenty of that space with insecurity and fear, until I realized that for the first time, I had drained myself of my self-loathing, and he had stayed, essentially unfazed. I was stunned by the feeling of stability and sure-footing. I liked who I was when I wasn’t trying to be the best, and was surprised to find that he did too.

One night, I got sick and threw up outside the car window and all over his bathroom. I was embarrassed and on the brink of tears, but he rubbed my back and told me not to worry: “I’ve chosen you and once I choose someone there’s really nothing that can bother me.” I wanted to build a home inside that sentence.

After a heady summer together, I went to Mexico for a month in the fall. The night before I left, we said we loved each other and held hands until morning.

I was stunned by the feeling of stability and sure-footing. I liked who I was when I wasn’t trying to be the best, and was surprised to find that he did too.
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I left sure that I was in a loving relationship, something I’d feared I’d never have. I spent a month in Mexico pining for him.

The day I got back to the States, the collapse began.

I called Anthony, and an automated voice told me the number had been disconnected. I texted our mutual friend, Elle, and she told me he got a new number. I still felt unsteady, but he texted me from the new phone a few minutes later. “Deep breaths,” I thought, “don’t be paranoid,” but it felt like my stomach had slid from my body.

I saw him in person a few days later. It was then that he told me what had happened while I was gone. He’d cheated on me with Elle (first he told me it happened once, then maybe twice, then “a handful” of times).

Before I could absorb this news, he told me that after I’d been gone a couple weeks, he’d packed up his room, changed his number, ghosted his job, and drove to Oregon. He would still have been in Oregon when I got back, he said, except once he got there he “had a bad feeling.” He turned the car around and came home.

The following month was a blur of unrelenting pain and confusion. We mostly didn’t talk, but I couldn’t adjust to this new reality, couldn’t understand it. Hadn’t he said he loved me? That he was proud to be with me?

A Letter To My Abuser
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At the end of the month, a fatal combination of events contributed to my dwindling emotional strength, and I texted him to hang out. I didn’t leave his room for four days. On the fourth, he kissed me goodbye and went to work. Three hours later, he texted me to say he’d walked out of work, again. He was leaving, again. If I wanted to see him for the last time, it would have to be soon.

I crawled through the day, feeling betrayed and abandoned all over again. Then, a few hours later, an acquaintance told me something that froze the edges of my organs.

He’d been threatening Elle over text and at their shared workplace. “He’s been manipulating everybody, especially you and Elle,” the acquaintance told me.

Hours before he left for good, we went to a coffee shop and I asked him about the threats, waited for him to tell me I’d misunderstood.

Instead, he told me he wished Elle would die of AIDS. He called her a filthy whore and said he’d punch her if she were a man. He wanted to push her off of a cliff. “I really mean it,” he clarified.

I forced myself to say his words were unforgivable, terrifying.

I Loved The Man Who Abused Me
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His face folded with anger. “Good luck with everything,” he said, before standing up and walking out of the cafe. I ran after him and convinced him to get in my car to drive him home.

Once in the car, he said he might jump out.

I tried to keep my breath calm, my eyes even, but I was scared, like I was next to an unpredictable stranger. “Just get him home,” I thought. I’ll drop him off, drive away alone, and find a way to survive the knowledge that I was in love with a lie.

But when he calmed down, he cried. He apologized over and over. He didn’t mean to get angry. He wasn’t in control. I believed him.

He told me he didn’t know how to deal with Elle, but that he shouldn’t have done what he did. He loved me, I was the best woman he’d ever been with. He didn’t mean to hurt me. Maybe we’d be together one day, he said, if he could take accountability and if I could heal from him. I wanted to believe that, too.

He got in his car and drove to New Mexico.

He apologized over and over. He didn’t mean to get angry. He wasn’t in control. I believed him.
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I’d entered the relationship eager and anxious, so happy to be in love for the first time. The way it ended — and ended, and ended — broke me.

“I’m a feminist!” I wanted to yell, “How could this have happened?” To me! An advocate for sexual assault and domestic violence survivors, a sex-educator, a reporter on gender justice!

I recognized his threat to leap from my car from a pamphlet on domestic violence: “Red flags include threatening self-harm or suicide.” I recognized his apology from the cycle of violence wheel I’d passed out countless times — blowups are followed by apologies so that the cycle may continue. Calling Elle a filthy whore wasn’t a red flag, but a bloody banner proclaiming his disregard for women.

I remember a night I’d been called into the hospital to advocate for a woman whose husband had dragged her across their driveway. Her body was covered in scrapes and bruises. She cried for her husband and the only time she spoke to me was to beg me to find him. My training had told me this was common, but I struggled to understand how she could want someone who had hurt her so badly.

Now, I understand more. I understand how the black and white pamphlets articulating the bounds of a healthy relationship fail to register in the part of the heart that yearns for love, or what feels like love.

What My Own Abusive Relationship Taught Me About My Mother’s
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I tell people what Anthony did — the cheating, the deserting town, the threatening Elle — and feel like I’ve done something wrong. When I try to talk about about how good the relationship had felt, people stiffen with the shadow of suspicion or pity. As if I’m temporarily insane. As if I don’t realize I’ve been manipulated. I become strange to myself — how can I miss a man who would do any of what he did?

Friends are quick to call him garbage, a psychopath, abusive. I understand why, but the words don’t resonate, don’t seem right. They cut me — what does it say about me if I fell in love with garbage?

The therapist I start to see when Anthony leaves town tells me to read Why Does He Do That?, the seminal text about abusive men.

“I’ve read that!” I want to scream. “I’ve given this book to women! You don’t get it!” But when I skim the pages, some bullet points are chillingly familiar. I slam it shut.

What does it say about me if I fell in love with garbage?
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The truth is Anthony had said things that registered as red flags, but I was careful to qualify them, to add them into a larger narrative I had about him being a tortured soul healing childhood trauma and unlearning toxic masculinity.

He told me he struggled with anger. His car was dented from when he’d battered it with a shovel after a bad day. His life work was to contain the anger and not cause harm, he told me. He was always so gentle with me, and I thought that if he was self-aware then I needn’t be worried — you can’t hold people’s pasts against them, right?

I should have listened when he told me he’d escaped his childhood by leaving his family, town, and life completely, and that he’d been escaping like that ever since. Not anymore, not with me, I thought.

He also says I should have listened. The last time we spoke, I told him I was still stunned by what he said to and about Elle. He didn’t take it back. In fact, he was frustrated:

“I told you this is who I am. I tell people this is who I am, but then when it comes out, they can’t deal with it. Those things I said are minor. I don’t understand why it matters to you so much. I wouldn’t actually hurt her.”

No amount of screaming or crying could make him realize how badly he’d hurt me or Elle.

I realized with excruciating clarity that nothing could touch him. The love and vulnerability I’d shared so freely with him hadn’t touched him. I’d thought that in his unshakeability, he’d been holding space for me. Actually, he just was space. The trust and care I’d shown had floated away. When he told me he loved me, it wasn’t a lie, but it didn’t obey the rules of gravity. It slid into black space. Threatening to punch someone, wishing death on a woman — those words slid to the same place.

The trust and care I’d shown had floated away. When he told me he loved me, it wasn’t a lie, but it didn’t obey the rules of gravity.
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Losing him was painful, but in the months following my return from Mexico, I felt like I was also losing myself.

I’d found the scrape of energy necessary to tell Anthony that I was on Elle’s side. I knew I wouldn’t be able to live with myself if I let the words “I wish she’d die of AIDS” slide. Words like that tend to wake a person up.

I found myself willing to forgive almost everything — the cheating, the lying, the abandonment. The only thing I couldn’t forgive was what he did to Elle. I was lucky that his most extreme violence was directed at another woman — I had more clarity about what she deserved than what I did.

The lessons I learned from the breakup are also burdens. I learned that resources, training, and feminist credentials didn’t stop me from falling for someone capable of violence. I learned that his violence was his, and that I neither provoked nor could have prevented it. I learned that I am not immune from the thoughts that I know are typical of people who have had unhealthy relationships — I feel ashamed for choosing the relationship and for struggling to move on. I feel embarrassed that I still sometimes miss him. I fear that I can’t trust my intuition or feelings in the future. Some days, I think maybe it wasn’t that bad.

Why We Must Walk Away From Destructively Dependent Relationships
theestablishment.co

I struggle to tolerate multiple truths — I loved him, and I think he loved me. He was also violent and unremorseful. I can’t choose just one of those truths without hurting myself.

The worst thing Anthony did was to put me in the position of nearly choosing him over what he knew I valued most — the safety and equality of women. Ultimately, it felt like choosing between myself and the memory of feeling loved. I chose myself, but barely.

Now I’m back in my life after months in a cloud of pain. I have hope for the future again, and feel proud of my resilience. But I’m hurt. Every morning since I got back from Mexico, I wake up and before I open my eyes, tell myself that I’ll be OK, that I’ll survive the day.

I had hoped to learn about intimacy, love, and sex with Anthony. But the greater, more subsuming lessons have been about healing from the emotional pain caused by the violence of men — these are lessons I’m tired of learning.

I become overwhelmed when I try to understand why everything happened, and what it means for my future, so I’ve liberated myself from thinking about either. I only know that I want to care and be around others who care. I want words to mean something. My internal world has rearranged since Anthony left — it’s more sensitive, more complex, more grounded. For now, I spend each day occupying more of my own body, my own life, exploring its contours and boundaries. There is more room now that I’ve been pulled apart.