Dear Fuck-Up: Oh Shit I Think I Want to Fall in Love

Dear Fuck-Up,

I am in my mid-twenties, and through a combination of execrable self-esteem (I'm objectively conventionally attractive but you can’t tell the lizard part of my brain shit), what I would describe as a severe lack of interest from other parties, and what my therapist would describe as pretty meticulous avoidance of anything sexual or romantic in favor of areas where I could exercise control, I have not had a romantic partner and have never had sex. I haven’t even gotten particularly close to either. I was sexually assaulted in college, which obviously damaged my sense of being able to be safely intimate. Even without non-consensual activity entering the picture, allowing someone to be near me in that way feels like an invitation to be injured because I haven't had this area be positive and it is, frankly, humiliating to possess the same level of experience as nerdy teenagers. It is only fairly recently that I have fumbled about in the dating and romance world (and gotten burned). I have, unfortunately, admitted to myself that I do in fact want love and sex with someone; the prospects of that also remain decidedly inauspicious.

Recently, a friend told me (there was context) that I should have sex for the first time with someone who loves me. I am resentful of both ideas: that I am not good enough to be loved, and that I have to be before I finally have sex. When you are not a 17-year-old stumbling into puppy love, you can't just walk down the street and find someone who adores you. I am the extreme opposite of beating back suitors with a stick, so making love a precondition of losing my virginity would most likely preclude that event for many years, until some age when I hope I've had enough time to convince someone to give me a shot in that way (by which point its persistence will be even more bizarre).

This has become such a big thing that I feel it will inevitably be a failure if and when I let someone be physically intimate with me (who doesn't/won't love me) and then they discard me, as is the ending of the vast majority of dating relationships. I also know that my stupid woman brain will torment me with after-the-fact hormones a man will not have, and I feel like I will just literally never recover from being rejected after intimacy. Part of me so badly wants to just get it over with and wonders if having sex with someone I have no attachment to would be self-protective, but I can't do casual sex — I'm obviously too sensitive for that arrangement.

The rub is that, as much as I know in my more prudent self that it is absurd to believe someone will love me before I make a sexual debut, I think I actually maybe do want that, which is fucking terrifying and awful. I can’t even imagine locating someone who could feel safe, let alone care about me enough that letting them be with me is not an exercise in self-degradation. At the same time, I don’t relish being the living misogynistic stereotype of the clingy virgin. So now I am very unhappy about the fact that I missed my chance to have head-over-heels, silly, sweet, youthful lovemaking (not that this happens for everyone, but it does for a nonzero number of non-me people) and am stuck in a sea of twenty-somethings for whom sex is nothing (hookup culture/Tinder/etc. is the other giant pain in the ass here, since as you can imagine it runs directly against everything I would like), waiting to try it out so I can feel exploited or duped.

I'm not going to ask if no one will ever love me because the fact that the answer may be yes is much too much to bear and I don't want to hear it. But on the sex front, am I doomed to either be de facto cloistered, or to get to have a sex life (I actually think I want to, finally) but at the expense of feeling like a human being?

Love,

Not-yet-40-year-old virgin

Dear Virgin,

Among the litany of embarrassing things about me — atheist, bisexual, has consistently mispronounced Simone Weil despite being corrected many times — near the top of the list has to be “die-hard romantic.” It’s an okay thing to be at 15, or 22, but at my age and with my history of failed relationships one should have traded this belief for something a bit more dignified, like astrology or communism.

Sometimes I will meet people who describe themselves as real romantics and I’m so relieved to think yes, here is a person who will understand. But eventually it becomes clear that they mean “I wrote long, overwrought emails to a college girlfriend” or “I cry a lot at movies” and not “I believe in the redeeming power of romantic love.” That is what I mean though, and what I believe in. Jenny Diski once described Nietzsche as having fallen “gauchely in love” and I remember thinking yes well is there any other way? Despite all evidence to the contrary I continue to hope against hope that I will find a sustained and sustaining version of the kind of love I have only, as of yet, had brief glimpses of, and I think that in a meaningful way to give up on this hope would be to not quite fully live.

I think you are a bit of a romantic too, Virgin, and I understand why this comes as a terrifying and awful revelation. To just go around very much believing in love as one of the few things that make life worth living is the height of cringe. It has become somewhat commonplace to focus on the agonies of romantic desire, it’s sundry indignities and embarrassments. To see love as something that must be wrenched from an anxious chasm of things unsaid or miscommunicated, something for which one must risk — gasp! — being perceived. Everyone would rather exist as a floating, disembodied presence, without flesh and without feeling.

I won’t lie to you, it is sometimes very horrible. I was most recently rejected so thoroughly — met with a kind of blank astonishment that I had imagined my feelings were returned — that it felt as though everyone else could surely tell. Like strangers on the street could smell it on me, like my dogs walked slightly farther ahead to avoid any association with such a pitiable, unloveable creature. Yes, it was humiliating. Yes, it was painful. Yes, it was still worth it. Because for some brief, however misguided few weeks there was nothing in the world that was boring to me. I started looking at the things that mean the most to me, things I often take for granted, in the new light of wanting to explain them to someone else. I felt present and eventful, flush with the unfolding thrill of revelation (this is how I see things, do you see them this way also?), alive to the gentle pleasure of knowing and becoming known. The alternative to suffering is not its absence, just suffering in a different way, and I would rather suffer for being a fool than a coward.

You will need to work up a bit of courage, Virgin. Not even a special amount, just the ordinary courage it takes anyone who wants what you want. You aren’t alone in wanting it, I can promise you that. You may have been convinced that sex means nothing at all to everyone else your age but this simply is not true. It can mean a great deal to the people who have a lot of it. The danger to you will not be people who are easygoing with their bodies, but people who are careless with their words. What you will require is someone with a bit of integrity, who will be responsible and considerate, who is loving towards you, at a minimum. It may take some patience to find this person, and after you do it could very well turn out to be the case that you tire of them. You seem pretty convinced that you are uniquely difficult to love and I won’t bother telling you otherwise because you will not believe me, but I will say this: what you may lack in sexual experience you make up for in having a clear sense of what you need to feel safe and comfortable. That’s far better than I was doing at your age.

You have admitted to yourself what you want, now you need to be ready to admit it to other people. This is scary but the alternative is to live as a traitor to your own heart. That’s worse.

Love,

A Fuck-Up

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