That felt fast. But I had said I would do this, so I was going to do it, because I said I would do it, did I already say that? My hands felt tingly.
I agreed to meet him after texting eighteen of my friends to ask whether I should meet him.
What if he’s a modern Ted Bundy? I texted my friend Allison. Dating apps seem like an amazing way to find victims.
No, they’re horrible, she replied. There’s a clear digital trail. Have you never watched a police procedural?
There was still some adrenaline hanging around as I sat at the bar in a Mexican restaurant in Northwest Portland waiting for him. There were chips and salsa in front of me but I didn’t want to eat them because my boobs are messy-food magnets. I was grateful that it was the middle of winter and my hands were still cold from walking outside and therefore not clammy. My leg bounced to its own techno drummer. I perused Facebook on my phone and questioned both the OFW Project and dating as a concept.
I took a sip of ice water because eating or drinking, especially eating or drinking something very hot or very cold, can help nervous people focus their attention on their senses and away from their ruminating thoughts. (Ruminating thoughts, in the psychiatric sense, are negative thoughts you should let go of, but can’t, like a mental tug-of-war where everyone else at the picnic has moved on and is drinking beer and eating potato salad, and you’re still in the mud, holding on to the rope and asking it why you never finished college. They’re extremely popular with OCD sufferers.)
The Ethical Slut walked in with purpose and speed, wearing a sharp navy peacoat and a turtleneck sweater. He shook my hand with great vigor and a huge smile on his face. I took a deep breath when I realized he didn’t seem at all like a monster.
He sat down and started talking as I took more deep breaths and used my left hand to force my leg to stop bobbing. He clearly had no issues meeting strangers. He was adorable and earnest, and as soon as my mental chatter quieted down and I could actually hear what he was saying, I became fascinated by his no-nonsense approach to dating. He let me know immediately that he was an ethical slut (a term coined in the 1997 book of the same name by Dossie Easton and Catherine Liszt about “consensual non-monogamy”) and believed strongly in constant honesty. So constant was his honesty, in fact, that it was jarring.
About twenty minutes in, he leaned into me at the bar, flashed a wide, enthusiastic smile, and said, “I think this is going really well. Do you think it’s going well?”
Um. I don’t know. There’s a lot of stuff going on right now. I’m still trying to figure out what I think of your hair.
“Yeah,” I replied. “You seem…nice.”
And as much as his ethical-slut thing probably turned a lot of people off, I was being honest. He did seem nice. Really, the nicest slut I’d met in a while.
He told me he’d decided to try consensual nonmonogamy (dating a bunch of people at once and being radically honest about it with all involved) after a conversation with his mother.
“She told me that I’d be really lucky if I found three things,” he said. “Someone to socialize with, someone with whom the sex was really good, and a playmate for camping and hiking and stuff.”
“That sounds about right,” I said.
“Yeah, so I just had a kind of tough breakup from a monogamous relationship, and I’m hoping, ultimately, to find three different women who can each fulfill one of those roles so I won’t have to depend on any one of them for everything.”
I squinted a little.
“I don’t think that’s what your mom meant,” I said.
He laughed.
“No,” I said. “I mean, I really don’t think that’s what she meant.”
“I know,” he said. “But it just seems like the safest way to go for me right now.”
That made sense to me. Immediately after my one-and-only heartbreak, I would’ve wanted to keep things light and airy as well if I hadn’t waited a fucking decade to date again.
The ES was attractive, and his attitude, charm, and enthusiasm made him a sort of human Labrador, but we didn’t necessarily want to talk about the same things. (That night, we talked over nachos about HIPAA requirements regarding e-mail correspondence, which I realize doesn’t sound very interesting, but you might be surprised to learn that it’s even less interesting than it sounds.)
Still, when he wasn’t waxing unpoetic about e-mail legalities, he could be quite entertaining, and the best part was when he made it clear that he was attracted to me, which was refreshing after that yearlong lack of clarity with Rich and then Text Guy’s rejection.
After two dates, the ES came home with me and we…enjoyed each other’s company greatly. After that, I stopped referring to him as the Ethical Slut and began referring to him as the Cunnilingus Savant.
He was so good at it that I asked him if he would be willing to come to my house and diagram his technique on a whiteboard so I could present it to future dates. He seemed willing, but if I were him, I’d’ve kept that shit locked up. Dating is competitive, and he had the romantic equivalent of the Coca-Cola recipe. Patent it. Trademark it. Send cease-and-desist orders.
We dated casually for a few weeks, both of us being clear that we were seeing other people and knowing this probably wasn’t leading anywhere. In the past, I had only had sex with men I was interested in having a romantic relationship with, and I was surprised at how easy it was, after the initial self-consciousness and apprehension wore off, for me to have an almost purely physical relationship.
In fact, it was kind of a relief that I didn’t want a romantic relationship with him. It meant I could just play. Now I understood all those dudes in college who kept sleeping with my friends but had no desire to be monogamous. Emotional attachment is a buzzkill. It gets you all wound up and worried, and the moment you get attached is the moment you start wondering what will ultimately unattach you.
That might just be me.
At one point, he asked me in an e-mail how my other dates were going.
Fine, I suppose, I wrote back. But I’m so tired. It’s exhausting trying to appear charming for this many hours a week.
I know, he replied. Dating is exhausting. But if you can find one or two people you enjoy going out with, bringing home, and then sending away so you can get some work done, then that’s success.
I laughed out loud when I read it and responded that that was the most romantic thing anyone had ever said to me.
It was refreshing to see exactly what I didn’t want laid out in black and white like that.
It made me think maybe I should let him go and move on, but I didn’t really have to because we just sort of faded away from each other.
I was grateful to the Ethically Slutty Cunnilingus Savant, though, for being my very first online date. From then on I was significantly less apprehensive about meeting people because my experience with him had made something crystal clear: Dates were just job interviews with booze and apps. Both people involved have lists of requirements they need fulfilled, and each is just feeling the other out to see if that person has the experience, demeanor, and skill set required.
Of course, dates are (often, but not always) more fun than job interviews, but looking at them that way helped me calm the fuck down, and calming the fuck down and enjoying myself was what the Okay Fine Whatever Project was all about.
High Score: Sex. By a long shot
Complicating Factors: I’m reasonably sure his roommate was in love with him
Lesson Learned: Bring dating CV to bar along with condoms and lube.
First Date #5, Late February: Wait-List Guy
He was a sweet, funny, and curmudgeonly-in-the-most-charming-way advertising creative director who unfortunately started seeing someone exclusively just as we were setting up our first in-person date after chatting on OkCupid. He said he’d meet me anyway, since I was technically grandfathered in.
We met at a bar in my neighborhood and he was, tragically, just as adorable in person as he
’d been online: crumpled, world-worn oxford button-down over a T-shirt, scruffy beard, and a baby face that made him look well under his forty-six years. I immediately felt like we had been friends forever, which helped to shrink my dating dread ball to approximately golf-ball size. We talked for three hours that first night, mostly about my dating trials, how much working for corporations sucked balls, and a semi-obscure band we both loved called Slim Cessna’s Auto Club.
“We were at a SCAC show together about a decade ago,” he said.
“What?” I responded. “We were? Did you just remember that?”
“No,” he said. “I was kinda drunk and you were with a friend…a blond woman.”
“Marie, yeah,” I said, as I remembered standing self-consciously on a makeshift dance floor in a smoke-filled club on Hawthorne Boulevard with a sparse crowd of sweaty, pogo-ing cool kids.
“I told her I thought you were lovely,” he said.
“That’s insane,” I said. “How do you remember that?”
“Well, she told me about Live Wire!,” he said. “That I should check it out. And I did. So I remember you.”
It’s always so strange when you have a memory of an event and suddenly you get a whole new piece of information that expands the picture beyond your own experience—like you lived the original script and someone hands you a rewrite. Before, it was just me and my friend geeking out at a tent-revival-like rock show, and now it was a story about missed opportunities.
Now I understood why he’d grandfathered me in—because that’s a pretty great story to be able to tell someone you randomly meet on the internet.
In the coming weeks, we drank and chatted a few times. I always kept things totally platonic, but I knew what I was doing was at the very least mildly sketchy.
Why was I hanging out with this man who was already taken? Because I wanted to make sure I was first on the waiting list if that other woman didn’t work out. Is that something a sociopath would do? Probably. I was in a dating gray area that was really more bright red and flag-shaped, but our conversation flowed better than on any of my dates so far, and he had just started seeing that other woman exclusively a week before we met, so…
Yeah, it still sounds terrible.
Eventually, Wait-List Guy became Sweet Curmudgeonly Friend Guy. He turned out to be a great confidant and very helpful as a primary source for the straight-male-in-his-forties perspective on things. (“Why isn’t he texting me back?” “Because he doesn’t like you?” “That is brilliant. Thank you.”)
He became like a second brother, except that I was once super-attracted to him. So not like a second brother at all. Gross. But a good friend.
High Score: My Overall Affection for Him
Low Score: Myself, as a person, for rating him at all once I really came to like him
Lesson(s) Learned: I might be a sociopath, but sometimes good things can come from the worst intentions.
First Date #8, Late March: Guy-Who-Doesn’t-Know-What-He-Wants Guy
The second of five coders I met on OkCupid, this guy wooed me, immediately disappeared, drunkenly apologized two weeks later, went on a text rant about what assholes people in Portland were (I wasn’t sure if I was included or not), asked me out again “as a friend,” and then followed me on Twitter when I said, “No, I think I’m good.”
Lesson Learned: Maybe stop dating because this is uncomfortable and inconvenient and meeting on the internet is unnatural because you would never otherwise cross paths with these people and isn’t it more logical to date humans you actually meet in the real fucking world because that means you have at least one goddamn thing in common that somehow leads you to be in the same physical space?
It was after first date #8 that I deactivated my OkCupid profile for the first time. I knew it was just temporary, but I was tired and just a little demoralized.
Dating was hard. At this point I’d been on twenty-four dates total (I’d been on as many as eight dates with some of these guys), and that felt like plenty for now. Maybe forever.
When I looked over my spreadsheet, I realized that it was flawed for lots of reasons, but one huge one was that I hadn’t weighted particular categories more heavily than others.
For me, Good Conversation was far more important than just about any other category, but if someone with whom I’d had a great conversation scored lower in other categories, he would seem, overall, to be a lesser match. If I were better at math or spreadsheets, I could’ve adjusted for this issue.
I know this is going to sound weird, but I was realizing that maybe rating people on a scale from 1 to 10 wasn’t the best idea in the world. Even so, I was still doing it. Something about it gave me comfort, as if an algorithm would be able to solve a mystery that I couldn’t crack on my own.
At this point, I wasn’t sure I’d ever actually find anyone through online dating, but I was proud of my stick-to-itiveness.
Even so, for a couple of weeks, I was just going to apply that stick-to-itiveness to something else.
Like napping.
1 Massive rationalization.
2 There are tales of men going through Tinder and swiping right on every profile so they can see who likes them and then decide whom to fuck from that pool. FYI, if you are one of these men, you’re a movie villain. Just know that.
A Brazilian in Portland
Wherein I Discover a Border I’d Rather Not Cross Again
Hair is weird.
Hair on your head makes sense; if you have any bald friends, they can tell you how bone-chilling it is when their shiny pates go uncovered on a cold winter night.
But pubic hair? What possible purpose could pubic hair serve at this point in human evolution?
Theories vary.
Some believe it’s a guard against friction in an area subject to skin-on-skin action during the course of the day (or week, or month, or, in the sad case of me in my twenties, never).
According to some sources, it could be a sort of nest for pheromones released by sweat glands that, combined with sebaceous secretions, create what you might call the body’s own musky “come-hither.”
Still others regard pubic hair on women as the “eyelashes of the vagina,” keeping dirt and other detritus from entering their lady-bits.1 I’ve never had any stray items fly into my vagina and I’ve always kept it pretty au naturel, so maybe there’s something to this theory.
Regardless of the reason why the hair’s there, people can’t seem to decide how they feel about it.
I’d thought that the trend of yanking it all out was a new(ish) thing, but shaving and depilatory practices go back to at least ancient Greece, when women would pluck, pumice, and even burn the hair off their nethers with smoldering ash or heated lamps. (I always think that putting a razor near my clitoris is playing with fire, but smoldering ash? That’s leveling up.)
King George IV (1762–1830) commingled his lovers’ hair in a snuffbox, now kept in a collection at the University of St. Andrews that I assume is titled Gross Shit from History. But he wasn’t an outlier. Apparently, nineteenth-century British women used to give pubic hair to their lovers as a fond remembrance.
Right now in America, people are a lot less sentimental about their pubic hair. Mostly, they just want it gone.
Pubic crazes run the gamut from the full-on porn-star/creepy-prepubescent look to the oxymoronic full-bush Brazilian, which means that you take all the hair off the labia but leave what some refer to as “the magic triangle” intact.
In Korea, apparently, a shaved or waxed vagina is not considered attractive. There, pubic hair on women is viewed by many as a sign of health and fertility, so there are women paying up to two thousand dollars to have pubic-hair-transplant surgery, like a vaginal Hair Club for Women.
Don’t they know that a decent merkin runs only, like, twenty bucks?2
I’d never felt particularly strongly about pubic hair one way or the other, which was evidenced by my lackadaisical approach to my own. I have friends who keep
their hedges neatly trimmed regardless of whether they’ll have an audience or not, but I am not in that camp. If my hedges were being viewed by someone other than myself, I’d give them a little bit of attention. Otherwise, hey—you do you, labia.
But back in February after my infamous Facebook post inviting all comers, I was embarking on what I hoped would be a robust series of dates that ideally would lead to sexual encounters if all went well, so I figured those areas that had previously been dark and overgrown with the vulval vines of singlehood would need some attention.
At that point I still wasn’t the size that I wanted to be, but even after gaining a little weight back, I was still about fifty-five pounds down from my heaviest and feeling confident. Not, like, normal-size-person confident,3 but confident. Although that confidence would not necessarily translate to the bedroom, even if my vulva was properly attended to by a waxing professional.
I have always felt self-conscious about my body in the bedroom. So much so, in fact, that it’s a miracle that I can enjoy sex at all.
I’ve got friends who talk about totally losing themselves during the act, but that has never happened to me. I’m still absolutely, 100 percent in my brain no matter what’s going on in my vagina.
Whoever I’m with has to be immensely talented to get past my internal monologue.
Don’t get me wrong—I enjoy sex, and I can get pretty damned heated. It’s just that underneath the heat, there’s a bunch of chatter. And 98 percent of it has to do with my body.
It’s hard to explain, but this may help illustrate.
A Sample Inner Monologue I Generally Have During the Act of Sexual Intercourse
Mmm…this is nice. This is so nice. Jesus, he’s a good kisser. What’d I have for lunch today? I should’ve brushed my teeth before this…oh, mmm…the neck thing. Nice.
Oh God…don’t touch the backs of the thighs…so gross. [Turns slightly to the side to make cellulite less noticeable.] That should do it.
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