My V-Day With Princess Leia and Her Rules

The truth is I sort of haven’t had sex in nearly six years.

I’d like to say it’s not my fault, that my first wife was both cold and expensive, and that when another woman caught her eye she left me holding all the debt. Not that I blame her, I’m pretty sure she didn’t realize there was anything for her on that side of the fence until it drove up into her backyard as it were. I blame myself really; I knew better but I enjoyed making my friends crazy jealous by having such a classic beauty.

My vanity and I ruined three years of each of our lives by staying together. Then I spent the next five years wallowing in guilt, alternating holes in the wall with evictions, and fending off the creditors hounding my forever assistant librarian-ly salaried ass. Between broke and guilty, it wasn’t just that women or even decent porn weren’t on my radar, it was more like my libido had fallen off the map.

It’s not as if I haven’t had opportunities either. My fellow co-worker has been showing all the signs of heavy interest since she came on staff a month ago, but I’ve a hard time holding conversation with anyone so prim, proper, resemblant of my ex-wife, or clueless as to what an ‘R2 unit’ is. But yet another Valentine’s Day has rolled around and simply because I thought having someone’s interest, anyone’s interest, might make me feel less depressed about life in general (okay, really about my life in specific), last night I finally took up her invitation for drinks at the bar down the street.

But of course we can’t hit it off with so many strikes. The place is pretty dead because of the holiday (and I use the term loosely) and we’ve nothing but awkward small talk to occupy ourselves until the woman behind the bar slides up and hails me with, “Oooh a scruffy-looking nerf herder! What’ll ya have?”

Yes, I did in fact have a bit of stubble, and yes, fortunately I’m a slow grower and can make my razors last longer by skipping the occasional day. The more important thing is that here was a great looking woman who knew what a ‘nerf herder’ was and had a sense of humor. So after I replied with the obligatory “Who’s scruffy-looking?” my co-worker became a third wheel for few minutes.

But awkward isn’t my co-worker’s thing; when ‘Leia’ wanders off to tend some drinks, my co-worker just says real cool-like “She really is much more your type isn’t she?” And before I could even reply she kisses my cheek and adds, “That’s all right at least you might crack half a smile tomorrow.” And when she even tosses a “Have a good night!” over her shoulder on her way out the door I am certain there’s much more to my co-worker than I initially figured.

And she was completely right because ‘Leia’ and I totally hit it off. We talk all night about everything from our exes –who sadly had a lot in common– to our jobs which despite the pay we actually both rather enjoy. When her shift’s over at 2am she knocks back two shots of tequila, walks out from behind the bar, gives me this incredible kiss, and nonchalantly says, “Since we agree our own places are complete rat holes and having sex in a cars breaks several of my rules–”

Well, I know instantly she’s suggesting getting a room somewhere, and while I can’t believe I’ve got a home run on my hands, my mind’s conditioned to think fast about wallet restrictions. So I easily break in with “Well you know I happen to work at place where they insist on privacy and quiet.”

“Hmmm, if I’m behind the reference desk do I get to decide where to refer you to?”

“Absolutely.”

~~~

She insists on walking down to the library, which I honestly don’t understand. I drove the hundred feet to the bar earlier because the last thing I ever want to do after drinking is walk somewhere. But we’re kissing and groping all the way and by the time I’ve unlocked the door and keyed the alarm we’re already missing several items of clothing.

Perhaps it was the guilty years without sex, or perhaps having a nearly sexless relationship in the first place, or perhaps both, or perhaps something else –but I don’t care what it was; I haven’t felt that hot since I was a hormone bag in high school. By the time we make it to a couch in the reading area we’re both naked and her hands are clearly referring my mouth below her waist. Now this is an activity that has never been on my top ten ideas of a good time. Last time I tried it, admittedly out of desperate sexual frustration with my ex-wife, was such an embarrassing failure that it was the last time we ever tried touching one another.

But Leia might as well be from a different planet than my ex. A very nice planet that I plan on visiting again as soon and as often as is possible. We are in the zone, in sync, and in the black so freaky quick it’s as if our parts were computer designed and laser cut for one another. Things are incredible. Wonderful. Indescribable. And just as she’s about to have a seriously toe-curling oral-gasm I realize that I must be so close to exploding myself that I’m seeing flickering blue and red lights.

Right. Well.

It takes a few moments to rise above my case of ‘sex-brain’, but it sinks in someone must have seen us entering the library and called the cops.

In my younger days I think I might have enjoyed the thrill of the taboo in a situation like this. But truly all I can think is how surreal it is and how it cannot possibly be happening. I mean, there I am: trying to tell this woman, that I just met tonight, how instead of getting arrested at my place of pitifully-paying-but-mostly-enjoyable-and-still-absolutely-necessary-employment, we should instead get the hell outta Dodge ahead of the swift arm of the law –but since she can’t quite let go of the back of my head yet, my dire warnings are getting completely lost in her still shuddering hips.

~~~

Long story short: we do manage to crash out the back unnoticed, and we only make a momentary scene for drivers-by as we simultaneously run down the street and pull on the few bits of clothing we were able to snag on the way. After we’re sitting in my car and have finally caught our breath from the running and laughing, she sighs and says “it may be cliche but wow, ‘you sure know how to show a girl a good time’!”

“Oh come now, ‘the night is still young’ and I don’t believe we’ve quite finished up. Perhaps you some advice as to–”

“Yes I do, my nerf herder: Since we are definitely not doing this again until the scruff-burn you gave me heals and you can’t be trusted with a razor, you should grow a goatee. It’ll look great on you. Well, to me. As for tonight, my rules say always go home when the cops show up. ”

And that was the end of my V-Day night with ‘Princess Leia’ and her rules, having –all strict definitions aside– what I’ll continue to call ‘the best sex I never had’.

On the other hand I will say that on the way home last night I bought a new razor, and this morning I cut myself a new goatee.

Unfortunately I’m a slow grower.

The Biological Experience

Apropos of the addiction experience (though quite aside from lumping “uncommited sex” and “one-night stands” in with ‘transgressive infidelity’), this report about a specific variant of the DRD4 dopamine receptor biochemically links addictive behaviors with ‘sexual thrills’.

“What we found was that individuals with a certain variant of the DRD4 gene were more likely to have a history of uncommitted sex, including one-night stands and acts of infidelity.

The motivation seems to stem from a system of pleasure and reward, which is where the release of dopamine comes in. In cases of uncommitted sex, the risks are high, the rewards substantial and the motivation variable — all elements that ensure a dopamine ‘rush.’” (Original Research Report)

People with the thrill-seeking gene variant were about twice as likely to report a history of one-night stands as those without the gene variant. Half of those with a love of risk imprinted in their DNA reported committing infidelity in the past, compared with 22 percent of those without the variant.

It also states fairly well why (fascinating though they are) these sorts of biochemical science bits have never had much experiential explanatory power with me:

“The study doesn’t let transgressors off the hook. These relationships are associative, which means that not everyone with this genotype will have one-night stands or commit infidelity. Indeed, many people without this genotype still have one-night stands and commit infidelity. The study merely suggests that a much higher proportion of those with this genetic type are likely to engage in these behaviors.”

The interesting aspect to me (whether one is submissive, uxorious, prudish, promiscuous or anything else)  is that there are so many ways in which we are ‘predispositionally programmed’ (for lack of a better phrase) –even biochemically– to look for ‘the good things’ in life (‘feeling alive’: fire, zest) yet there are no guarantees about our path choices for getting there (meaning, significance). It’s all part of why I think of life and living life as a “game” we “play” within a “biological meaning matrix“.

~ ~ ~

When consequences overwhelm,
when futility looms ‘neath the edge
of inevitable end of all,

I remember:
We want things, make choices.
(And whether we get what we want or not,)
Life, consequences, continue, happen.
(And whether we cope well or not at all,)
Life always goes on (until it doesn’t).

We’re always who (biologically ‘what’)
we are; the experiences (and too
the symbolizations) of fate, free will,
decision, destiny, choice, desire,
love, drive, want, passion, the will to power,
ambition, transcendence, significance,
meaning, numinous, sacred and mundane –

all, each and every one, remain, persist,
and often, confusingly, coexist.

Only About Sex?

I wrote the following nearly two years ago now, and though I’ve quoted part of it before I think it’s still relevant enough to finally reproduce here in full. Ovadah’s Sexual Self is still an excellent book, the only one about the interior aspects of human sexuality I would recommend to date. It does have an excellent take ‘relationship dependency’ though I don’t think it’s quite accurate enough to think of submission or uxory as merely a different degree of emotional dependency. However, my essential point refuting the idea that submission or uxory is solely about sex and sexuality that I think is worth rereading. All underlining is emphasis added for this reposting.

Funny enough, just today I read the best ten pages on relationship dependency, something present in all relationships to some degree, according to “The Sexual Self” by Avodah Offit, M.D., a psychiatrist and sex therapist (not me or anyone I know). The author also notes dependence has a long history of being erotic: sexual relations between teacher and student recapitulate children’s parental dependency; low libido’s links to lack of security and stress (e.g. financial trouble) are an inverse of the eroticism of dependence; men once dependent on their wives for their career prospects, will have an affair with the secretary when their career takes off and they become dependent on their secretary. So I rethought the question: if submission is simply a greater degree of dependence than average(?) relationships, does this greater degree mean sex becomes the only thing, or most important thing?

No, for two reasons. First, the logic doesn’t make sense. Since dependence is always present, the greater dependence of submission would have to push something else out of the relationship mix so that shear sex is all that’s left. Possible I suppose, but then the person would also have to pursue a simple sex exchangeable on the relationship market, forgetting there was anything better. Now I can imagine some people out there, submissive or not, think and live this way all the time – everything up for trade and exchange. But this attitude seems a different problem having little to do with submission itself.

So reason two: Where’s the love? I want the desire I have for my wife to be the background hum of my life, but a desire rooted in who she is, a desire to draw us closer and more intimately so. Sex is great and naturally there is a sexual aspect in my desire for my wife. But sex doesn’t even consume my idea of intimacy with a person, let alone my idea of a great relationship with a person. I don’t even have much kink beyond my desire to please my wife and make her happy. Why do I want to make her happy? Because when she is at her best and clicking (not a rare event), it is truly a sight to behold. Strong, smart, intelligent, intuitive, witty and holistic. In a word, amazing. At times like these (and most others too) I want nothing more than to feed her fire – the fire in her that is her – do my best to keep it growing. And yes, do my best to enjoy the raw beauty. Thus at the worst, you might think me a selfish and perhaps spineless voyeur of others’ character virtues, but I don’t think you could reduce my ‘submission’ to a ploy for sex. I’m simply in love with her, her character, and frankly a bit in awe of her as well. I love participating in the process of optimizing her happiness (and thereby our happiness) by any means she deems, because I love her and want to make myself as useful as is possible.

The Addictive Experience

PLEASE GET HELP    if you or someone you know needs it:
Porn | Drugs | Alcohol | Gambling | Suicide

~

I think there’s an interesting intersection of

addiction – food, sex, porn… any behavior conceivable
biology – the chemistry of addiction
evolution – we’re optimized for fewer resources
psychology –  as in ‘psychology of addiction’
frameworks, symbols – addiction to experiencing /thinking in only one way
passion desire – when is a passion an addiction?
relationships – relationship (inter)dependence –> addictive/codependent
submission/uxory – when (and to what) is one addicted?

In reading from the following articles and many others, the most interesting realization for me was that our brains can’t handle, that we can’t handle constant pleasure. We have to have the down side, the ‘reset’ period, a balance for pleasure. We need restorative cons for our dopamine pros—-> we actually need an ‘imperfect world’ and an imperfect world is actually perfect for us (whether we were designed by the world, or world for us, or both, or something else).

~

Submissive men often liken submission to an addiction – and how they feel the need to keep “upping the ante”, “upping the dose” – but what if they’re desensitizing themselves to the flood of dopamine and really need to ‘reset’ themselves and their chemistry?

They may want to have the submission high more and more but at some point they simply MUST learn to deal, cope, live, love, and be happy without the resolution of desire, (despite the anxiety of their passion) even if only for long enough to return to normal baseline brain activity.

While everyone’s brain, life, chemistry, partners, relationships and whatever else can and will be different (not to mention their coping tactics), I wonder if there mightn’t be some commonalities on finding/negotiating/discovering/maintaining that normal baseline brain activity.

Clearly there are always going to be ups and downs and a range of experiential pleasure (and effective dopamine), but then also always an average as well; you can spike high but you’ll always come down. One has to wonder if it might be better to find that golden mean, that effective average so as to optimize our overall constant pleasurable experience – and avoid the feeling of being addicted. (I have always identified the feeling of addiction as a negative one though I still use the word “addiction” in a positive manner to adequately and accurately identify, label and point out relationships and dynamics.)

~

A Swedish team found that a stomach hormone called ghrelin could make rats seek sugar the way addicts seek drugs. And a team at the University of California, Santa Barbara found that male rats chose sugar over small amounts of cocaine, while female rats did just the opposite.

Yale researcher, Ralph DiLeone: “There’s an ongoing argument in my field whether food is addictive or not … But whether it’s addictive or not, there’s probably components that are similar to addiction.”
~ NPR, Overeating, Like Drug Use, Rewards And Alters Brain

Really? Biochemical sex differences in the way we seek pleasure? Mmmm perhaps not too surprising, yet…

Still, the concept that “food can cause obesity because it is like a drug” is perplexing. After all, our rather buff ancestors ate a lot, and quite evidently were enthusiastic about sex. Yet becoming dangerously hooked didn’t seem to be much of a risk. Didn’t their brains light up for food and sex? Yes, of course. The difference is that they weren’t surrounded by superstimulating, synthetic versions of food and sex. We are, and it is a relatively recent hazard.
~ Psychology Today, Intoxicating Behaviors

What matters is whether our ancestors’ brains faced similar conditions and evolved to cope well with them. If a stimulus is well beyond the range of “normal,” then there’s a risk that a primitive part of our brain will continue to perceive it as very valuable, even when it causes distress. Judging from the problems many porn users are reporting, porn is indeed a superstimulus with the power to dysregulate dopamine sensitivity in the brain.

…the brain releases dopamine in response to enjoyable experiences such as eating cheesecake, having sex or snorting cocaine. But, too much pleasure skews the brain’s reward pathways by overstimulating the D2 receptor and causing it to shut down. For the rats addicted to junk food, the only way to [continue stimulating] their pleasure centers was to eat [ever] more high-fat, high-calorie food.

[It suggests] heavy users of superstimulating Internet porn may be tampering with their brains’ reward circuitry and altering the way they experience reward (driving them to binge)…
~ Psychology Today, Not All Warnings about Porn Are Moralistic or Unscientific

I often hear men discuss ‘subspace’, this bliss of being female led, as their drug, and well let’s face it, every addict needs a dealer helping them to the next level. Yet a parent, a gatekeeper, a dealer, a god, enjoys a love-hate relationship with even its most loyal and childlike of junkie worshiping subjects, and such rule is only had by the god-maker’s permission. For when parents are only godlike to their children, divinities only monster-like to humans, when symbol confusion leads one to love power exchange instead of loving one’s partner, the resulting relationship becomes philosophically untenable if not functionally untenable as well. … [I] tread with fear and trembling as I differentiate between erotic truth’s self discovery and addiction’s meaningless abyss.
~ OH, Monsters

…we may know our interior need and inside need is for something different than what we find ourselves wanting, but we cannot manage to stop wanting what we desire even if it doesn’t wholly fulfill that ‘hole’. In a way perhaps sometimes our frameworks addict us to certain symbols because it just isn’t flexible enough in some area to accept other symbols; and all frameworks have areas of comparatively more or less flexibility and even the occasional blind spot. Thus a symbol may fulfill our needs just enough to keep us going back for more in a sort of symbol addiction of the mental framework.Yet we all want meaning, need meaning, in symbols we can understand, and in this regard I rather think we’re all symbol addicted, we … all having an interior reference framework telling us we’re missing some semi-specific piece of lived life coherency, some particular experience, value and worth. … yet when a symbol really works for our interior need and desire, it really works and we know it.

… sex by itself does not equal the erotic truth or the desire dynamic I experience. I (now) think of it as a passion addiction… as all people have their framework symbol addictions, the particular form of my framework symbol addiction is to want, desire, and love passionately my wife, and to want to experience the same (or a similar) desire and passion of my wife. (I wonder if this compaction of our simultaneous separate passions is related to, possibly an expression of [?], the sensed unity of partners that we express as ‘being soulmates’, cf. Love’s Fate, Love’s Destiny)

~ OH, Passion Addiction
(A post I’m sorely tempted to reproduce here in it’s entirety for its spot-on relevance)

Adore: Sacred or Sacrilege

“I (positively) adore you.” I say it all the time. Just last night when I said this my wife replied, “Good - I like being adored” and I felt a wonderful sense of completion — a sense of completion sadly broken a moment later when I started thinking about exactly what the word meant. (Didn’t someone somewhere once say you can think or be happy but not both?)

Like most words, its meaning can be slippery and depends on context, intent and people’s general predisposition. I’m reminded of the word ‘submissive’ and how some people dislike and object to the meek/weak/less than/servile/’sub-human’ connotations on principles of equality – occasionally even voicing distaste for the implied superiority as well. Yet other people, Shadowlady not least among them, defend the word for the connotations of choice, of an offering or proposal, even of an application, and see it’s principle of choice and of difference working together.

By and large to these sorts of preferences I simply say different strokes, different people, different meanings, intentions etc. Yet similarly I think there’s something interesting behind the principles with the word ‘adore’.

From Dictionary.com Unabridged: verb, a·dored, a·dor·ing.

–verb (used with object)
1.  to regard with the utmost esteem, love, and respect; honor.
[World English Dictionary: to love intensely or deeply]
2.  to pay divine honor to; worship: to adore god.
3.  to like or admire very much: I simply adore the way your hair is done!

–verb (used without object)

4.  to worship.

—Origin:
1275–1325; < L adōrāre  to speak to, pray, worship, equiv. to ad- ad- + ōrāre  to speak, beg ( see oral); r. ME aour ( i ) e  < OF aourer  < L

—Synonyms
1.  idolize; reverence, revere, venerate.

—Antonyms
1.  abhor.

First off, while perhaps in the 13th century to ‘adore’ your spouse wasn’t too far different from ‘worshiping’ them as a Divine Lord, but times have changed – and thankfully. Neither my wife nor I want her to be my ‘Divinity’ with a capital ‘D’. I have mentioned in the past that for me there’s a numinous quality to the experience of uxoriously living my wife as I do, but even I am wary and careful of my words because -again- in no way do I want to collapse the divine/mortal relationship in our marriage. My wife doesn’t even want to “be on a pedestal” or even idolized — she certainly doesn’t want to be someone’s religion.

Actually and interestingly that ‘idolize’, ‘reverence’, ‘revere’ and ‘venerate’ all have semi-religious symbolism at their sociological/etymological hearts points to the difficulty in separating the ‘sacred’ from the ‘divine’. Many religions have an acknowledged evil, non-sacred, (semi-)divinity, and while there are many who tout “life is sacred” only Christianity claims full divinity for a human and only that one particular human as a singular exception – one hotly argued in the millenia since. Even when Shakespeare only said “What a piece of work is man! [...] in apprehension how like a god!” it was clear — in one way man is like, and only ‘like’, a (indefinite) god. Even Achilles’ rage (again, single character aspect) was only “god-like”.

The fact is, on the very event horizon of our consciousness, on the ‘rim’ where we occasionally perceive, intuit and experience the cosmos/universe above, beyond and past our five normative senses, things take on the sheen of the sacred, of the highly meaningful and significant – even though as a matter of principle not all those things should be mixed. Thus one may find something sacred about their children, about their wife, about sex, about nature, about political representation and/or a host of other things, but yet desperately want to keep most or all of those completely separate from each other in their life.  That we perceive things as having numinous and sacred aspects or dimensions does not mean they themselves are completely divine or that they should even be mixed with any other thing we perceive as having numinous and sacred aspects or dimensions. In Hebrew, the word for ‘sacred’ has the connotation “separateness” or “kept set apart” (and so therefore) “dedicated”, “holy” — mixing and matching, even of various kinds of sacred, is strictly a no-no.

In fact such mixing and matching of the differently sacred only highlights their mundane aspects by juxtaposition, and we can more easily see something is out of place, out of knit, “rotten in the state”, and more easily see that the sense of something-is-where-it-does-not-belong is the very essence behind dissonance, profanity, sacrilege and blasphemy.

So yes, I regard my wife with the utmost esteem, love, respect and honor, and I do love her intensely and deeply – and in, around and amongst these (my experiences) there is something powerful and profound, something so significant and meaningful that it is in some ways and in some aspects numinous, sacred, worthy of recognition, reverence and deference. Nothing more, certainly nothing less, and I definitely keep these experiences ‘set apart’. And my wife likes it that way. And now, I’m going back to that sense of completion.