Does living without sex mean living without sexual intimacy?

My answer is no. There are many ways to fulfil our needs.

A couple of days ago, a fellow blogger Cynni Pixi, reacted to my post “What is it like to be married to someone who is disgusted by your sexuality.”  She writes an excellent blog about the vicissitudes of life which you can find here:

cynnisblog.wordpress.com

She posed a question, made an observation, which, as so often seems to be the case, got me thinking about the nature of love, life, sex, and intimacy.

She wrote that she would find it difficult to live as I do without having sexual intimacy with a partner.  And in truth, she is right.  How do we do it?

Because all of us need things from life in order to get by, and certainly if we are to thrive, they are vital.  In this sense, we do need to feel love, not just to love someone but also to be loved by someone…and that someone needs to be an adult-to-adult feeling, a love of choice.  I do not think that family love, sibling love, parental love is sufficient.  Nor is friend love.  These are all important, but they do not carry the same significance as love of choice.

Where does that leave me?  I am in a confessed sexless marriage.  My S.O. and I even joked about it last week.  I know that my wife is very physical, and that is something which I have struggled with my whole life.  Apparently, ADD people tend to one of the two extremes of the spectrum of really liking/wanting/needing touching and not liking to be touched, with most ADD people being the former—but me being the latter.  As an aside, Mistress is the first person I recall every having in my life whose touch is always welcome.  I can’t explain that.  But her hand on me is very calming—it is a giving hand, whereas I often feel that other hands are “taking” hands.  I don’t know if that makes sense to you.

Indeed, where does it leave me?  In processing Cynni’s observation, I began to think about how my needs and hers are not different, and this might be true for all of us.  We all need intimacy, we all need to give and get love, we all need sexual release, we all need emotional release—but what might change is how we get them, or how we need to get them.

A part of me wishes that my S.O. was also dominant to me.  I have tried in little ways over the years to introduce small aspects of FLR-inspired actions, not in the bedroom, but in life, and sometimes those are accepted and others not.  But also, a bigger part of me is not ready for my spouse to be dominant to me.  I wonder if that in part is that there is too much water under the bridge, that we have too many things to unpick for our relationship to evolve in this direction.  The answer is ‘no’, it would just likely take more work, and would take more of me in overcoming my internal resistance to submission…and that would require a lot of communication between us, probably quite a bit of therapy, and plenty of bumps along the way.  That does not mean that life won’t take me in this direction.  I just need to grow up a bit.

I love my wife and my children.  Loving them fills me with the greatest purpose of my life.  It is beautiful and makes life worth living.  I see in my children so much hope, my hope, and a desire for them to be protected from the things which hurt me, to be able to grow freely and healthily, and that is a wonderful feeling.  I love my wife in part in relation to our children.  My commitment to her from the outset was about creating and raising life together.  To me that is the most sacred bond.  And our children are beautiful, wonderful people, that would make any parent proud.  I am pleased with myself also for not making so many of the really damaging mistakes my parents made, and my wife has been an excellent mother.

In that, we are friends.  Life friends.  We have a level of intimacy that comes with that, comfort, that is nourishment at its most basic level.  But, we do not share those moments of sexual intimacy, when we are at the edge, and the universe tears a bit, and for a little while we leave our bodies to commune with the great beyond.  We did a bit when we first dated and were first married.  She certainly found that kind of release with me on occasion, though I can’t honestly recall that I ever did.  Our sex for me was not so fulfilling.

Although I should not, I blamed myself for that.  The weight of social pressure conditioned me to reject my needs as “weird” or unacceptable, and in truth, when I think of my “needs” I still can’t quite shake loose the feeling that I am being selfish to ask.

In the end, from a pure sexual release standpoint, I am alone in those moments.  That does not diminish the power of an orgasm…I have an “ability” to self-pleasure at a level that does not leave me wanting—the release is complete.  Without being graphic, I would simply say that masturbation can be done in many ways…and for reasons beyond the scope of this post, could count on one hand the number of times that I have achieved release through contact with my sex.  Is it better than being with a partner?  With most partners, for me, yes it has.

But love-making?  The intimacy?  What of that?  This is an interesting question.  And what I am discovering is that for me love-making is a mental process.  It is so mental, that I have dissociated it from the physical.  In other words, I can make love to someone without actually doing it—I am not saying just fantasising, but sharing intimacy with someone, perhaps verbal, perhaps through touch, even through flirting, can touch all the same buttons.  Just sitting next to Mistress and talking to her, listening to her words, hearing her say my name has the effect of caressing my soul, my most intimate self, telling me that I am loved, cherished, desired.

As I look back over my life, I see that all of the significant women in my life have fed that need in different ways, always circumscribed by the boundaries of our relationship—ie. nothing ever inappropriate, but touching me in this way on an emotional level, yes, absolutely.

In ways, I experience this even with strangers.  When a woman sees me, responds to me, and I know that she really, really sees me, I have that feeling of intimacy which is the same as what love-making represents.  And when I say “sees” I really mean that she sees through me, through my shell, and sees my id, and understands it, and smiles at it.  She flirts back, shows curiosity, interest.

I am the opposite of a sexless person even though I have a sexless marriage.  I am the opposite of a sexless person even though I choose to live a very chaste life.  Indeed, I would argue that my choice of chastity is an eroticising one.  It puts me on the edge, and the edge is a very delicious place to be.

So, Cynni, there you have it.  I don’t know if that explains at all why I don’t feel the lack of sexual intimacy in my life, because I have just found other ways to satisfy it.