Okay Fine Whatever

by Courtenay Hameister

  I dated three polyamorous men.

  I went to a sex club and sampled more than the buffet.

  I doubled my overall sex number, which took me from below average (more than a nun, less than a bi-curious girl on rumspringa) to above average (more than your mom, less than Axl Rose at Burning Man), which felt like a huge accomplishment to me.6 I’d always been embarrassed by my late start, and while I’m sure my mother would never see it this way, I’m proud of my foray into casual sex. It taught me a lot about myself. And about penises.

  That being said, as we talked and he told me about his traditional job and even more traditional life, I thought that even though I was on the square side of hexagonal, after that year, I still might be too alternative for him.

  But I kept talking to him. There was something about his affect that calmed me.

  His voice was slightly melodic and he gesticulated slowly as he talked, like he had all the time in the world to say whatever he had to say, but maybe he didn’t have to say it at all. He listened intently and often took a moment to consider his answers, which was almost jarring in its old-fashioned charm.

  Who considers anything anymore?

  He told me about his daughter, who was studying nursing.

  “I’m trying to steer her away from that,” he said.

  “Why?” I asked.

  “Well, she’s a really good musician,” he said. “She plays guitar and writes her own songs.”

  “Oh,” I said. “So you’re trying to convince her to become a musician?”

  “Yeah,” he said. “She wants to become a nurse, get established, save some money, and then do the music thing. I think that’s backward—she should do the music thing now, while she’s young and adventurous.”

  “You realize you’re breaking the dad code by telling her that, right?” I asked. “What’s she gonna fall back on?”

  “I don’t know,” he said. “My 401(k)?”

  Maybe he wasn’t quite as traditional as I’d thought.

  After we shut the bar down, he said he’d walk me to my car. I told him he didn’t have to do that, largely because the week prior, I’d knocked the driver-side mirror off my car coming out of a parking garage and I didn’t want him to see it dangling there like the injured appendage of a child whose mother was too irresponsible to take her to the hospital.

  He said it was late and it wasn’t the best neighborhood, so I grudgingly let him. I stopped short of the front of my broken car to say good night so he couldn’t walk me to the driver’s door.

  He kissed me, sweetly, and it was intoxicating to have to tip my head back so far.

  Apparently, I have a thing for tall men. How embarrassingly banal of me.

  “I’d like to do this again if you’re amenable,” he said as he backed away under the glow of a streetlight.

  “Oh, I’m amenable,” I said as I got into my car and closed the door carefully so the dangling appendage wouldn’t whack the door.

  He nodded and smiled, then turned and walked away, looking like a figure in an Edward Hopper painting.

  That was a good date, I thought as I drove away. Not earth-shattering. Not “I saw him and I just knew.” Just good, warm, and sweet, like I’d been cold and someone put a blanket over my shoulders.

  I thought there might be something there, which I almost never thought. So it sort of was earth-shattering in its non-earth-shattering-ness.

  He texted me the next day to ask me out again. I agreed and he suggested a very expensive restaurant in downtown Portland that I definitely couldn’t afford on the nonprofit salary I’d been paid for the past decade. But since he’d sneakily paid for the first date while I was in the bathroom, I figured he’d pay for this one, and I thought, Hells yeah! I’ll go to that swanky restaurant with an amazing view and appetizers I can’t pronounce! Hooray for archaic patriarchal customs that only made sense when women weren’t in the workforce!7

  We went and had another lovely evening during which he talked about the friends he’d lost when his first marriage ended, and I talked about the friends I’d lost because I was a jerk.

  When the check came, I reached for my credit card just to be polite, and tragedy struck: He didn’t insist on paying. I’d made a classic miscalculation in assuming he was a “men always pay” guy when in actuality he was a “men always pay unless women offer to pay half, in which case they should totally pay half because, duh, it’s only logical” guy.

  As the waiter took our cards, I made polite conversation while trying to calculate which bills I wouldn’t pay that month. (I would later post about this experience on Facebook, garnering over a hundred and fifty responses ranging from Never see that cheapskate again! to Why did you pull out your card? Rookie move. I was ambivalent. I love when men pay because I’m usually poor, but I know that if I had money, I’d hate it because it doesn’t make any damn sense. My bank account had turned me into a bad feminist.8)

  He drove me home and we made out at my front door, but I didn’t ask him in. I wanted to try the “third-date sex = marriage material”9 theory out on him.

  On our third date, we went to a movie. I chose it, and I chose badly. I’d heard Foxcatcher was good. I knew it wasn’t an uplifting story, but I didn’t know exactly what it was about. Pro dating tip: Watching an unrelentingly dark, creepy film based on the true story of the 1996 (spoiler alert) murder of an Olympic wrestler is not an aphrodisiac.

  After the viewing, we both rode the escalator down to the street level at the theater with the glazed looks one might have after watching a man get murdered by Steve Carell, who had seemed so nice on The Office.

  “Jesus cripes,” I said. “I need a drink.”

  “Excellent idea,” he said.

  We walked from the theater to a nearby bar, where I apologized for my choice and we attempted to shake it off.

  Perhaps because I felt that I had nothing to lose after that movie choice, I told him some of my harder-to-tell stories that night. The story of how I waited way too long to have sex for the first time. How I went to school in New York City and still managed to have a kind of boring time in college because I was afraid of everything. How I’d been heartbroken after my first breakup because my brain hoarded shitty experiences for way longer than other people’s did, like those kids who could make their Halloween candy last until summer. I hated those fucking kids.

  I was in the middle of telling him all about Build-Your-Own-Burrito Night at the sex club and how upset I’d gotten when they ran out of tortillas when I finally stopped myself.

  “What am I doing?” I said. “That’s the kind of story you tell someone you never want to see again.”

  He laughed. “No, that’s the good stuff,” he said. “Plus, it sounds like you’ve gotten most of your mistakes out of the way now, so dating you should be a breeze.”

  “I hadn’t thought of that,” I said. “I should put the fact that I’ve met my lifetime mistake quota in my profile. Seems like a selling point.”

  “Depends on who’s reading it,” he said. “Some men hope to be your next big mistake.”

  He seemed unflappable, which was a nice counterpoint to my own perpetual flappability.

  We stepped out of the bar and walked to his car in the wet chill of the ever-present Portland mist. He took my hand as we stepped into the street, interlacing his fingers with mine.

  The gesture felt quiet and small and monumental.

  He drove me home and I invited him in. I offered him a bourbon and we sat on the couch and talked while intermingling body parts before indulging in what can only be described as a colossal make-out session, which led to some extremely hot third-date sex.

  He was, miraculously, tender and sweet and rough and filthy.

  I was smitten.

  Not because of the sex (although that helped), but because he was just…good.

  I knew he was interesting when we first met. I didn’t know how hard and fast I would fall for his curiosity and kindness and how hanging out w
ith him was like having my own personal walking Wikipedia and how easily he took my hand—how it felt warm and simple and real and earnest—and then there was his fucking tallness. He was just. So. Tall.

  I know that shouldn’t matter, but sometimes a lady has a tall shelf she needs something fetched from. It’s very handy.

  After our third date, we hadn’t really discussed anything serious and I had no idea where this was going, but I knew I didn’t want to date anyone else.

  We dated for another month, well into February, and my affection for him grew.

  It was still too early to have “Where is this going?” conversations, but one night as we sat on my bed, I did note that there was a large gray pachyderm in the room, and I addressed it.

  “You just got separated four months ago,” I said.

  “I did,” he said.

  “And I spent a whole year dating kind of a lot of people,” I said.

  “Don’t brag,” he said. “It’s unseemly.”

  “I’m serious,” I said. “You had two single months after ten years of marriage and you can’t have sown all the oats you probably wanted to sow.”

  “I don’t think I had that many oats to begin with,” he said.

  “All I’m saying is, I’m pretty much done,” I said. “And you’ve just begun. Just seems like bad timing.”

  “I wouldn’t say that,” he said, scooting closer to me on the bed. “I’d say it’s an extraordinary piece of good luck. And I’d be an idiot not to take advantage of it.”

  That was enough for me. I didn’t mention it again.

  One afternoon a few weeks later, after putting a two-dollar-and-seventy-five-cent charge on my debit card and incurring a forty-dollar overdraft fee, I was trying to create a budget for myself. I opened Excel, and my dating spreadsheet came up in my Recent Documents. I clicked on it and my stomach dropped.

  What the hell had I been thinking? A spreadsheet? Really?

  It felt especially callous now that there was someone I truly cared about on the list.

  He’d scored quite high when I’d first added him, but he hadn’t been at the very top.10 I realized that was because there were some important categories I’d left out, like thoughtfulness, physical affection, being half awake and making a sweet “Mmm” noise whenever I made him the little spoon, and an encyclopedic knowledge of Gerald Ford’s 1975 Halloween Massacre cabinet reorganization.

  The spreadsheet was such a giant dick move. I was a grown-ass woman, not a frat-boy villain in a John Hughes movie.

  But more important—it was ineffectual. Even if I could’ve accurately predicted my compatibility with someone when I first met him, our feelings about people change as we get to know them. For example, the following week, #28 revealed a new skill that endeared him to me even more: he was an excellent spider killer, and he squealed like a little girl while doing it. Utilitarian and entertaining.

  Moving forward, I’ll only use spreadsheets to create budgets that I’ll never stick to, and I’ll live with the questionable judgment of my broken head and heart. Because love isn’t quantifiable and if we’re really smart about it, the last thing we’re doing is keeping score.

  1 There is nothing wrong with being a roadie for a metal band. I just am not one.

  2 That guy was a real charmer—it took him only three texts to send me a dick pic. Once I discovered what he’d done (plagiarized Craigslist) and called him on it, he desperately tried to prove he wasn’t a bad guy by sending me a picture of his four-year-old daughter, which only added to the creep factor, since it came right after the dick pic. I told him that the act of procreating did not automatically make one a good person. I love technology, but sometimes I miss the ability to slam down a phone receiver on someone who desperately deserves it.

  3 You can scoff, but I’ve actually seen long-term marriages that follow this structure exactly.

  4 Fun fact: Text messaging was first conceived of by Finnish engineer Matti Makkonen, and the first text message was sent on December 3, 1992. The text was from Matt to his girlfriend and it said, We need to talk.

  5 Let’s be honest—one of them was a dating rite of passage. The other was because he was attractive and funny and staying in a really nice hotel and my car was locked up in a parking garage. I hadn’t discovered Uber yet and I hate cabs. Also, I like fucking.

  6 According to a recent survey, the average person in the United States has 7.2 sex partners during his or her lifetime. I imagine the .2 is dry humping?

  7 Please be on the lookout for my second book, Of Course I Made Him Pay, I’m No Dummy: Making Sexism Work for You!

  8 Women who are in favor of men always paying—I get it. I know why you want to fight for this. I love it, too, but it really is illogical. If you truly want equality, you need to let go of this antiquated tradition. If anything, have the waiter split the check so that you pay 40 percent and he pays 60 percent, which makes up for the fact that you make eighty cents for every dollar he makes.

  9 To be clear, I didn’t want to marry this guy at this point, it’s just that my have-sex-immediately tactic hadn’t been working, so why not try something new and different? Or, actually, really old and different.

  10 That spot was reserved for someone I never saw again after our first date. Anyone can be amazing and perfect when you don’t know a goddamned thing about him.

  Fellatio Class

  Wherein I Learn That There Are Ways in Which My Oral Fixation Makes Me an Overachiever

  It looked more like a museum store than a sex shop. The toys were brightly colored, beautifully sculpted pieces of filthy modern art, and the docent was one pleasant, discreet employee who could talk about the differences among ten different lubes with the same casual friendliness a Whole Foods employee displayed when chatting about olive oils.1

  They had pushed most of the display tables to the sides of the small shop in order to accommodate the thirty or so students. Among these were single women in their thirties and forties who looked like they’d just come from work, two slightly older straight couples, and a few men in their forties who didn’t seem to be together. All the students, including me, appeared to be completely engrossed in whatever was happening on their cell phones. Smartphones are a great way to connect with people remotely, but they’re also the perfect way to pretend humans aren’t actually a thing.

  I wriggled to try to find the sweet spot in my metal folding chair2 and did a little deep breathing to counteract my being-alone-in-a-public-place brain trigger. It doesn’t manifest as anxiety so much as a powerful desire to bolt. In this situation, the discomfort was at an 11. So high that my leg seemed to have its own motor.

  Our professor was M. Makael Newby, an extremely animated relationship coach and dance instructor who described herself as having a “particular skill for breaking physical action into components and teaching them with enthusiasm.” This was not false advertising. Newby is also the author of a choose-your-own-adventure-style erotic novel, which, it turns out, is a literary genre. (Hers has forty-eight unique endings, which is a choice we never get in real-life sex. I have generally experienced one of two endings: having an orgasm or faking one because I feel guilty for taking so long, especially when I’m only exacerbating that issue he has with his neck.)

  Before the class began, Newby offered up ten dildos for the bravest among us to practice with, claiming that “muscle memory is a huge part of learning.” She had a point, and trying new things was my raison d’be-here, so I raised my hand. She gave me an incredibly realistic flesh-colored silicone penis with the length and girth of a healthy butternut squash and the consistency of a pencil eraser. I thought this would be helpful if my next boyfriend were the spawn of the Jolly Green Giant and Gumby.3

  I held my practice penis in my lap, watching in horror as it grazed the upper thighs of a latecomer squeezing past me to get to her seat. I had no idea how to apologize, so I just pretended it never happened, much like I’d done with all the other humiliating sexual encounte
rs in my life.

  Newby stood at the front of the class next to a wooden bench. Standing on this bench was her demonstration volunteer, a young, equally enthusiastic blond woman in her twenties wearing the most adorable black-and-gold-lamé striped tap pants and a strap-on with a long, glow-in-the-dark dildo attached.4 The class communally agreed to pretend this was just a standard Tuesday night.

  So how did I come to be holding this Gumby schlong? you might ask. A couple of months prior, I’d noticed a class offering in the newsletter of She Bop, a woman-friendly sex shop in Northeast Portland. The class was called Full-Bodied Fellatio: The Art of Giving Great Head, which I found right alongside the ad for Bon Appétit! The Fine Art of Cunnilingus.

  At this point, I was a few months into my dating spree (I hadn’t yet met #28), and I was always looking for ways to improve my brand differentiation. I already enjoyed fellatio, but this could be a way to tip me into the eightieth or ninetieth percentile of blow-job-givers. And a class wherein I would sit in the room with a bunch of strangers practicing fellatio fit perfectly into my discomfort zone, so it was also ideal for the OFW Project.

  So there I sat, member in hand, waiting impatiently for an opportunity to use it. I guess this is what it’s like to be a man, I thought.

  The class began when Newby passed out the syllabus, which contained headings like Hand Skills, Dry vs. Wet, Playing with Balls!, and, my personal favorite, Introduction to Assholes, which, weirdly, wasn’t about my first advertising creative director.

  She began with some basics, like the fact that positive reinforcement is far better than negative when it comes to any sort of instruction for sexual partners. This was a real lightbulb moment for me. “Don’t do that” gives the other person a million other wrong choices to make. “Do this” gives him one right choice. Take note, mean PE coaches of America.

  Then came Hand Skills, wherein we learned that a really good blow job isn’t solely a blow job, because you should be using your hands as an extension of your mouth. So think of it more as a blandjob. Or a hojob. There’s probably a better portmanteau for it, but you get the idea.