Confessions of a damaged heart is me sharing some of my written up lines over time; From love, over heart-break to healing. A, hopefully, honest look inside a queer femme’s heart and her journey in life. In these writings, I never intend to shame anyone else’s truth of life, it is simply me sharing my ever-changing own.
The following post I wrote a year ago after intense years of indulging in hook-ups, relationships and flings, a “failed” abstinent period with another one ahead of me and some disastrous yet hopeful dates to find love.
Why I stopped hooking up
I actually wanted to call this blog “Please take my hand” because essentially this is how I feel.
It has been a long journey from being this hyper-sexual creature in unhealthy on and off relationships to now the intimately-hesitant single. I don’t suffer but I am still tender. For a long time, probably for most of my sexually active life, I played a role. A role that is surely an aspect of my true self, however, it mutes my softness, insecurities and doubts.
I was leading with sex. Partially, because I am a rather sexual person who loves and believes in the idea that we could live in a world where sex-positivity means healing intimacy and consented, mutually inspired desire. But als partially, because I thought that’s what most people are interested in, at least in regards to me. I kept “friendships” alive and gained new acquaintances through that. In a way a good chunk of my relationships were built on it.
It comes naturally to me. I am a flirtatious one and do love to indulge in it. I like to make people feel good about themselves and I like to feel good about myself. However, in this format it was not what I really wanted. I mixed up flirtatiousness with sexual advances and affection with lust. It became a cycle of feeling objectified and devalued and objectifying and devaluing myself because I craved so desperately companionship, safety, honest friendship and caring intimacy. I think that is what I always wanted. I remember being 15, with a friend of mine on their bed who asked me what I wanted to do and I answered; “can you just hold my hand”. I do recall very vividly, the disappointment that glanced in their eyes and I realised that I must have said the wrong thing.
It is still an extremely painful discovery for me that if you take sex out of the equation many people have little interest in maintaining acquaintanceship or even progress it to a level of friendship. I often hear people say, they already have enough friends. That might be true, but if you don’t want to be my friend, how could you possibly be my lover? I had many occasions were people just vanished out of my life and those were the best cases. Many turned cold, malicious and spiteful. We live in a world where some people are taught that they are entitled to have you, no matter who you are, but sometimes I can’t help but wonder if it is in a queer context heightened when you are or present as Femme. I can’t count the times people were mad that I did not want to enter into or progress a sexual relationship. The way they articulated their anger was subsumed with entitlement, they often tried to justify it with financial, emotional or sexual investments.
I stopped giving into that, well, I am trying to stop. I realised that the people I want in my life, platonically and romantically, are the ones that love, care and respect the person that I am, beyond sexual availability. It took me a while to understand that I can be flirtatious without owing someone physical favours, that I deserve to have friends and lovers that value my critical mind and my caring personality above my willingness to get down and dirty and that it is ok to crave non-sexual intimacy as it is to crave sexual intimacy.
Take my hand.
I don’t usually write comments, but I had to here. I’ve often thought there’s a connection between my femmeininity and the inability of people to accept me as a friend without benefits. I don’t have many friends I haven’t slept with. I know it places me as more disposable in people’s lives , and they leave me behind for true non sexual friends and when partners come along. I just don’t know how to change that yet.