Day 51 of 66 Days of No Sex

(Previous week here)

Mood: Overlooked

I’m 75% done with the challenge and from this vantage point, 66 days without sex seems like child’s play. The first four weeks were the hardest in terms of temptation, but now I feel like I could go a year or even a few years without sex. I think it’s more about adapting to a new lifestyle than sex itself.

Giving up sex is like giving up blueberry PopTarts—when I don’t actively think about not having it, it’s easy. But the second I taste that hard sugary icing and dry crust, I’m already thinking about the next time I’ll tear open a silver pouch of my favorite kind of processed crack.

I haven’t so much as kissed anyone in the past 51 days. Without any romantic activity, the only guys I see regularly are my coworkers and pre-existing group of friends. I’ve had a handful of dreams about male colleagues, and I must say, I’m pretty proud of my self-control even in Fantasyland.

Dream Connie and a coworker were on a tropical trip. Sun was hot, sand between our toes, throwing glances in the cool Caribbean shade.

We were kissing and I looked up at him.

“We can hook up a little bit,” I said, “but I can’t have sex with you.”

He said that was fine, and I went into work the next day with an unfounded appreciation for his soft lips and respect for women’s boundaries.

I told my work best friend about the dream, to which he replied: “Oh no, is he on the list too now?”

We give each other a hard time about our dating antics. At the peak of our Roaming Wild days, we made a bet that the other person would be the first to marry. Loser pays a month of the winner’s mortgage (neither of us are close to buying). He has a girlfriend now, so I’m really rooting for them to work out.

My best friend at work is a guy. My best friend in life is also a guy.

I’ve always tended toward male company, but haven’t been able to articulate why. I used to say girls were catty, but it’s the drama I hate, and I’ve found plenty of girl friends who avoid that like the plague.

I found some clarity this weekend after comparing my interactions with two distinct friend groups: 3 girls on Friday vs. 2 guys on Saturday.

I realized I like hanging out with guys more because roasting one another is a cornerstone of male friendships.

Nothing is nicer than a merciless verbal takedown of someone you love in the name of good fun—I live for the mix of embarrassment and amusement on a friend’s face when I get ‘em good. The clap of a high five after I’ve kicked someone right where it hurts, a one-liner as scathing as it is true. It’s what I imagine a baby’s laughter sounds like to people who like babies.

It’s easier for me to break the ice with guys because it feels natural for me to shit on people or joke about something crude. I feel in my element, without the need to soften my words or brighten my demeanor.

It’s harder with girls.

My female friendships are primarily based on emotional support and validation, and while I have plenty of hilarious girl friends, rarely are we the butt of our jokes. By contrast, my guy friends can offer just as much thoughtful conversation and consolation, so it makes sense why I prefer the more dynamic relationships.

I just can’t imagine walking into a room of girls and openly addressing the density and/or promiscuity of their respective mothers. It’s probably a character flaw that I think that’s ever okay, really.

In all seriousness, it comes down to comfort level. The best friendships are when you don’t have to try to be yourself.

I’m various levels of myself with a lot of people—I’m most myself with a few.

To be fair, preferring guy friends is also a control thing, at least among those outside my inner circle. At the end of the day, if my personality falls short, a guy friend who is somewhat attracted to me has more of a reason to stick around than a girl friend. A sick, but true assessment.

Good Charlotte put it best when they said, “Boys will laugh at girls when they’re not funny.”

Attraction has a way of blinding us from the vices. It’s the same social buffer that ushers two mildly compatible people into a relationship, and greases the squeaks long enough for them to drive miles into the sunset before realizing it’s actually an engine problem.

Maybe it’s a fear of abandonment, but I like knowing someone else has a stronger inclination to hang out with me than vice versa. I like power, especially the power of choice.

I harbor a deep resentment toward appearance-based attraction, though I’m guilty of it. I most dislike when people can’t be honest about their motivators.

Me stroking the stubble of a guy whose personality and face I once loved: “If we didn’t look the way we did, we probably wouldn’t be here.”

I respect that he agreed with me.

I grabbed lunch with the guy I asked out last week—“asked out” in a very literal sense. There was no implication it was a date, just food between friends. His reciprocated interest would have tipped the scale in my favor, but when he showed up 15 minutes late in a graphic T carrying a stuffed backpack, I was sure it wasn’t a date.

We ordered brunch plates at a newly opened tap house in the Seaport, more of a mountain cabin transplant with dark chairs, thick wooden beams, and soft gold lanterns along on the wall.

I was comfortable talking to him about work and places and politics. I didn’t feel jitters, as I did with guys online, but maybe because we were grounded with mutual friends and there was no pressure for things to “work out.”

Our interactions were not put to a test, no checklist of qualities to make it to the next round. We had already accepted each other as people. We were friends.

It still feels wrong to say I like him because I don’t think I know him well enough.

I want to separate who he actually is from who I think could be in my life.

As the waitress kept checking in on us, I was a bit disappointed about how I had no effect on him. I’m not sure what I expected to happen, what an indication would have looked like.

But that’s one of the things I liked most about him, how unnecessary I feel to who he is as a person. I hope he doesn’t need me, or anyone for that matter.

The first time we made eye contact was at a happy hour. We saw each other from across the room, and before we had talked or even introduced ourselves, I sensed it. He’s fond of me, I thought.

Looking at him now across the table, I didn’t sense attraction, and I haven’t seen it since we first met. Attraction is how drawn you are to someone. Chemistry is what actually happens when you interact.

I think a lot of people are willing to overlook chemistry when both have agreed to stay attracted.

My ease in being around him made me question whether I actually liked him as more than a friend, or if I was chasing his attraction. He has a great smile when he laughs.

We left the restaurant and as we were walking to the T, I knew it wasn’t just friends because I thought I wouldn’t mind holding his hand.

Next week here!

Day 43 of 66 Days of No Sex

(Previous week here)

Mood: Excluded

I’m at a hotel party hosted by my old college professor. We’re a few blocks away from an annual writer’s conference that draws out over 12,000 attendees every year. The hotel room is filled with educators in boxy glasses, poets in beanies, and too many liberal arts degrees. Of my professor’s network, I’m the only one not currently enrolled in an MFA program or teaching or buying a damn bookstore in Baltimore.

It’s awful being in a room with your own kind and feeling like an outsider.

My professor introduces me to another a previous student of his who recently completed his MFA at NYU. He has stubbled cheeks and an impressive mustache.

“So what do you do in Boston?” he asks.

I recite my job summary the way I would confirm my address at a dental office. I have no pretty bows to wrap up how my life fits into itself, or why job has nothing to do with writing. I feel bad for leading mustache man down a rabbit hole of failed dreams. There’s a social contract not to make others feel bad about your life not panning out and for others to nod kindly at whatever you say.

“I’m figuring things out,” I say. I take another sip of my bourbon, really hoping this mouthful will the merciful one that knocks me out. “I still write on the side,” which is technically true, like how your sirloin steak is on the side of your veggies.

“What do you write?” he asks.

It feels weird to label what I do. Erotic blogging? Slut journalism?

“Creative nonfiction.”

I exhaust my relevancy in a minute, and my poet friend jumps in to talk to mustache man about faculty members they’ve had, specifically ones I’ve never heard of. I excuse myself and my half-empty bladder to the restroom.

I’m drying my hands when my professor comes by.

“You talk to [mustache man]? I was trying to hook you two up.”

“Yeah.” I ask my professor instead about another writer who was at his reading.

“He’s married,” he says. “His wife is a writer, too.“ He tells me they’ve been married for so and so years, and cuts their dating history short when he notices I’ve stopped listening. “But if I had to pick someone who could successfully…“

I smile and take it as a compliment.

The bourbon has yet to serve me my last waking breath so I return to the party, but linger in the corner to check my phone.

There’s a guy I’ve been texting, and I have this unreasonable infatuation with him. We’ve known each other for almost a year but have only interacted in person a handful of times. We met under casual circumstances, so he has no reason to believe I like him as more than a friend.

I don’t think he has a preference for me, and if he did, he has the social awareness not to go for me the way others do—he’s not the type to let his tail wag at the smell of food.

I find myself thinking about our future, though we’ve never been on a date. I know how familiarity will feel with him: being on our computers in bed, remembering what’s in his bathroom drawers, asking him for help. We would have a sensible and emotionally manageable relationship.

I don’t want to sleep with him—I want to be associated with him, and for people to look at us and think, “that’s a strong pairing.”

I drink the rest of my bourbon and pull up his name on my phone.

Would you like to get dinner sometime?

This is the only guy I’ve asked out in the last year since deleting all my dating apps. It feels judicious.

***

I’m at a gay bar later in the night. My poet friend’s classmate is getting eyes from a guy behind me. He’s leaning against one of the walls covered in sports memorabilia and giant black and white portraits of women from the 1900s.

“Don’t look now,” I tell her friend, “but the guy in the baseball T thinks you’re cute.”

“Does that mean colored sleeves?”

It takes one rum-and-coke drink order for me to return and find them kissing. It’s all skinny arms and the ruffling and flattening of boyish hair.

They hang off each other’s bony shoulders like they’re clinging to a buoy, as if holding on to someone, anyone at all, makes them safer than the rest of us.

I can’t stop watching them kiss. Despite being in the middle of a dance floor, it’s not grotesque or trashy. In between making out, they smile at each other like they need the breath and the extra moment to appreciate the face so close to them. It looks kind. They look happy.

I’m being called honey as men excuse themselves around me. A drag queen in a vibrant fuchsia dress is being peppered with kind words. There’s an inclusive energy among the distinct friend groups at the bar.

Without warning, I’m imaging the venue being sprayed down with bullets—the framed pictures on the walls with fresh holes, the choreographed ducking and falling of bodies to protect ourselves. The playlist pounds on over a clash of voices like an unrehearsed opening night, the orchestra of fear.

I stay low and still, inches away from the face of someone else. We breathe the same sweat, and our cheeks stick to a floor covered with simple syrup and lemon rinds. We hear nothing at all, yet sense the drying of mouths and the enlarging of lungs.

Maybe we kiss to feel safe, or at least look at each other to be kind.

“Hey, I think I’m going to call an Uber.” I lean into one of my friends who is dancing in a tight circle. A remix is playing and everyone is smiling and on their feet.

***

I’m alone in my hotel room. The bed has two feet of walking space around the edges. It’s positioned directly in front of the bathroom, which has a toilet that runs all night unless I use the ice bucket to refill its tank.

I’m tipsy. The bed sheets are starchy and hard, and I think I’m allergic to something because my legs have been itching at night.

I lean over to the bedside table and grab my phone. I start unbuttoning my shirt, revealing more of my necklace, more of my chest. I take exactly two pictures: one on my back and one on my side where the single ceiling light throws a flattering shadow.

I don’t have any recipients in mind. Sometimes, I just like to look at myself to appreciate the times I do feel pretty, and to validate my loneliness being a choice. In pictures like these, I try and see myself how guys do when I look at them.

I see a girl who knows exactly what she’s doing.

I see a girl who’s asking for very different things than me.

Next week here!

Day 35 of 66 Days of No Sex

(Previous week here)

Mood: Torn

Happy Chinese New Year! It’s the year of the Rooster, but the only dick pic I received last weekend was this bedazzled cock from my mom:

I’m pretty in touch with my Asian-ness. To ring in new beginnings (again), I attended a family-style dinner in Chinatown last Saturday with an Asian professionals group I found in Boston. Afterward, I grabbed drinks with college friends I met through Asian-interest Greek life.

Had I not grown up in rural Kansas, maybe I wouldn’t have joined an Asian-interest sorority. At 18, it was the first time in my life I could walk into a room and look like everyone else. It was a major culture shock to transition from a hometown that was 0.6% Asian to a university that was 25% Asian.

While I finally blended in with my peers, my taste in guys didn’t transition as smoothly. I grew up liking white guys by default—there were really no other choices.

My high school boyfriend was Crest Whitestrips white. We shared many of the same foundational values, but we were from two different worlds. I thought I was destined for city life, one diploma away from leaving my hometown and never turning back. He was president of the Agriculture Club and wore cowboy boots out of practicality, not style. I toured his family’s farm and, for fun, he taught me how to pitch hay. He also let me pet his goats, and that’s not an innuendo. It was like a gimmicky episode of The Bachelor where they attempt to do cute activities together but really they’re just making out in random places like barns in Kansas.

We got along, loved each other even, but we both knew it wasn’t long-term. Neither of us could provide the lifestyle the other wanted. The only lasting thing from that relationship was my inclination toward white guys.

I barely knew any Asian guys before college. Aside from two guys from my online Chinese class in high school and a handful I met at a summer leadership camp at Stanford, pretty much all the other Asian guys I encountered were family. Because of that, I felt a sense of kinship when I did see Asian strangers, and expected cordial interactions because of our “shared blood.”

I maintained this mindset from childhood through high school graduation. By the time I actually met Asian guys in college, it felt incestuous to pursue any of those relationships romantically.

After a house party my first week of college, a brother of one of the Asian frats walked me back to my dorm. It was a sexually confusing time where I found him attractive, yet I also felt related to him. Ignorant and overly transparent me decided to tell him, “I’m not into Asian guys.” I thanked him for walking me home, and spent the next few months fawning over one of the only white guys in his fraternity.

Fast-forward a semester to a less racist me: I started hanging out with an Asian guy who friends said had a good reputation on campus. Guys and girls alike deemed him handsome. I wasn’t initially attracted to him, but I fell prey to the peculiar physical magnetism that transpires from enjoying someone’s personality.

I liked him so much, my tastes changed to suit him. On the whole, I was still more physically attracted to white guys, but he was the major exception, my special case.

We started dating and I brought home to meet my parents a year later. My mom and I waited for him at the airport in Kansas City. He stepped off a plane from New York in a clean black jacket, dark jeans, and studious glasses.

I hugged him and introduced him to my mom, whom he called, “ah yi” or a respectful title used for an older woman or aunt-like figure. They continued to speak in fluent Mandarin.

I had never brought someone home—friend or more—who could fully communicate with either of my parents without my translation.

We went to Ruby Tuesday’s for steaks afterward and he spoke openly with her about his flight, his family, his food—my mind was blown. I had one ongoing conversation with both of them, without breaks to explain phrases or mime out words I couldn’t translate. Everyone was on the same page. It felt easy.

Dating changed drastically for me after that relationship. He and I never explicitly talked about it, but our cultural similarities served as a lubricant for our already compatible personalities. There were unspoken norms, such as intense academic devotion, the binding obligation to care and provide for our parents when they grew older, and balls-to-the-walls aggression when fighting for the check at dinner.

These singular examples were only a snapshot of our upbringings and the countless experiences we shared before we even met.

For those who have never played the original Sims, there was an option to toggle your character’s personality traits. You had a set number of points you could distribute to qualities like Neat, Outgoing, Nice, etc. If you made your character very Neat, it would compromise how Outgoing were, and so on.

I subconsciously judge my dating prospects in this way. I have lower standards of physical attraction for Asian guys because I know there’s a cultural compatibility that better looking non-Asians are unlikely to have. I think we all weigh our options in this give-and-take way. The best relationships happen when both parties understand which personality points are most important to them.

For me: If you wanna be my lover, you gotta get with my Asian parents.

After college, I tried dating a handful of half-white and half-Asian guys to balance my physical and cultural needs. But none of them spoke Mandarin, so I may as well have dated a hot white dude. After my third failed “relationship” with a halfie, I threw up my hands and resigned to a steamy case of Jungle Fever. Contrary to popular belief, you can actually return from going black—it’s really a matter of preference, but you do you.

Korean/Irish Daniel Henney, for research purposes.

It’s hard for me to explain, but compatibility goes beyond speaking Chinese to my parents. It’s not to say I can’t find all the same qualities in a non-Asian. It’s a matter of convenience and the likelihood of finding these traits in a person. It’s small stuff that doesn’t make or break a relationship.

In the simplest sentiment: I want to be with someone whose life movie has the same background music as mine.

Currently, I’m living a silent movie. Things are black and white. There’s not even a sex scene (still going strong!), so it’s pretty much a dud at the box office. I hear music, but it’s not my soundtrack. All the same, I’m simultaneously mouthing the words to a song as a lead and watching myself as moviegoer, wondering if in the next scene my solo could  turn into a duet.

Next week here!