I wanted him to change his mind. I thought that if I was patient enough, sweet enough, easy-going enough he would change his mind. I thought that if I kept pleasing his body, his mind would follow. I knew that he was the type of man whose heart followed his mind. If he saw the logic in being with me, I knew that he would love me. I watched him do it with enough women to know it was possible. I wanted him to make me more than the girl he texted late at night when he wanted sex.
He never misled me about what he wanted from me. I knew, going in, that it would not be a romance but a meeting of bodies. It was a deal between two people whose sexual interests seemed to match perfectly as he used to put it. Every conversation was like a transaction that led to the same end. We were not building up to anything together. No relationship. No future. I was alone in all of that. I started building up to love after the very first time we had sex. All of my detached confidence that led up to our first encounter was broken apart by what I experienced in bed with him. I left his apartment the next morning knowing that I was too attached to keep going with our arrangement, but I craved his attention too much to do what I should have done; shut the whole thing down. I watched the way he treated the women he dated and I gave myself a goal: I would find a way to the other side, escape the island of his sexual interest and land on the shores of his love. I became obsessed with this goal. was no longer a woman who stood tall on her own; my every mood hinged on the nature of his attention. If he told me I looked good that day, I felt beautiful. If he said nothing, I went home and drowned myself in gin and wine until I fell asleep. It was, without a doubt, an epidemic of lonely dependence. Soon, I was too caught up to even care about the type of attention – I just wanted his attention. My choices became about what he would find funny, interesting, worth commenting on. I did everything I could to illicit his attention. I starved for it.
I was in love and I was all alone. I was too weak to tell him to go - and stay - very far away from me.
I thought that he would change his mind. I thought that he would make me real. A real woman worth loving, claiming. When he went to Easter service with his girlfriend and posted their photos on Facebook, I liked them and commented my well wishes. I wanted him to see me as the chill girl who wanted nothing else but to make him feel good. Then I shut myself into my apartment and cried bitterly. When he texted me for sex soon after that, I told him nothing of the pain I felt that day.
Before we crossed the line and I became a person who cheats knowingly, someone I have always said I would never become, I used to say that with clear communication there would never be any confusion. I let him talk to me about sex even though I knew it was inappropriate, even though I knew it was a step on in a series of steps I would always regret. I was a set of body parts to him. I could become nothing, or I could remain a set of body parts. I didn’t know how to become nothing.
I told myself that he was mine first. I was the one who gave him everything and asked for nothing in return. I made him feel good. I told myself that there was no line for me because I existed in a different realm; I was the girl who knew him deeper than anyone else. I made him shake with ecstasy. I lived in that rare place where he felt pleasure with another person. I told myself that he wouldn’t come to me if she knew how to do what I could. It was the lowest and loneliest point of my sexual life.
Because of shame, I hid. I was completely alone. I hid everything we did. I hid myself. I retreated from the friends I needed the most, the ones who always told me the truth. I retreated from myself. I grew colder and colder, burrowed deeper and deeper into my own darkness. The loneliness was in everything; it was there when he was inside me, telling me that there was no one else like me. It was there in the way he looked at me during stolen moments inside my apartment, sometime between late night and early morning.
He used to tell me I was irresistible; that’s why he texted me late at night when he’d had a few drinks or his date didn’t go the way he expected. Irresistible felt better than easy. My body was easy to press into late at night when there was no one around. My body didn’t ask for anything other than his body. My body was quiet, welcoming, warm, easy. My body didn’t have the expectations of a whole woman with needs and expectations.
We look for wolves and victims in stories like this one because it’s easier if we can point to someone and say he was a jerk or she was an idiot. But, sometimes, there are no wolves. Sometimes, the wolf is the voice that tells you to accept relationships that hurt because you don’t deserve anything better. Sometimes, the wolf is the deranged optimism of starting a relationship with someone that you know is wrong for you even if your pleasures match. Sometimes, the wolf is the people who tell you false stories about yourself that you don’t know how to dispel. Sometimes, the wolf is just you.