Date with open relationship girl in about 2 hours. Just need to vent real quick.
I've mentioned in this log before my... unease about talking to other people about polyamory/open relationships. Or, okay, more like reasonably controllable panic attacks. But I don't think I ever really explained why.
So, back in college, I was having trouble getting laid. As a teenager, I'd gone made some major steps socially from being despised by everyone around me, to being mostly tolerated. I college, I finally became a halfway decent human with some good friends who didn't think about killing himself every 1-3 days. But this didn't give me a whole lot of experience to lean on when it came to bedding women, which I desperately, desperately wanted to do. Unfortunately, this impulse was countered by a desperate shrieking in my head to never, ever, ever, ever, EVER, talk about sex with anyone, or else they would figure out what a loser incel I was and would never talk to me again.
I'll skip the rundown of all the awful, cringy shit I did, the easy touchdowns I fumbled, and my agonizingly slow journey to becoming a somewhat fuckable human being, and jump to my senior year. In a series of the most emotionally harrowing moments of my life I manage to lose my virginity to a girl. A hot girl, who is part of my social circle. And for a couple months, it's great, as we regularly hook up while I continue my fumbling attempts to get with other girls. After this period, she gives me the dreaded relationship talk - the absolute last thing I want to hear. For the first time in my life I'm getting regular sex, and I'm feeling amazing and have good leads, and I want to try to have more sex with other women... But I still have no idea how to do this, so I don't want to lose the regular sex I'm getting at the moment. So I agree to being in a relationship.... as long as it's an open relationship.
The more experienced people here will recognize this tactic - agreeing to a relationship in order to maintain access to regular sex - will recognize this as what is known as, A Really Fucking Stupid Idea.
Of course, as soon as it comes out that we're a couple, all my social leads dry up, and I graduate college having fucked only one girl - my girlfriend. Post-college, I move across the country and we break up, and if that were the extent of my sorrowful tale, I would not be writing this post.
Instead, we kept in touch. She's come visit occasionally, or I would, and we'd fuck. A while after I moved to my new city and abjectly failed to get laid at all, we decided we'd keep dating long distance - still open, so I'm still free to date other girls. The Really Fucking Stupid Idea rears it's head again. After a couple years of this, she breaks up with me. I proceed to still not get laid.
Then, the Very Bad Part. I have a gap in my employment, and am crashing our mutual friend's spare bedroom. She decides to also quit her job, and wants to hang out with my friend and I. Of course, as soon as we get a moment alone we start making out, feeling each other up, grinding on each other... but she flat out refuses to have sex or get to third base. At first I'm like "that's not ideal, but at least I'm touching boobs. That's better than nothing."
In fact, it was worse than nothing, as my mental health entered a state of precipitous decline. My emotional state would careen from "fine", to inexplicable homicidal rage, self loathing, to sobbing dejection and hopelessness. I would spend hours in bed doing nothing but suffering these emotional swings until I finally forced myself to tell my ex I couldn't keep doing this if we weren't having sex. So we stop for a few days. I get my head screwed on straight again. And then during a night of drinking, we start making out again, don't fuck again, and I'm plunged right back into my spiral. At this point, my memory becomes significantly more hazy, but I begin to get suicidal urges, and start seeing intrusive mental pictures of a literal demon from hell saying he's gonna kill me. Eventually, I tell my ex we need to talk, and to get in my car. We drive to some random pull off in the middle of some random canyon, and I can walk about 50 feet into the woods before I just collapse and start sobbing and spilling my guts about everything that's been rattling in my head, including my complete inability to get laid. She - being a nice person with her own history of mental health struggles - says she'll help me, which gives me just enough hope to pick myself up off the ground and get back home again.
So, with her encouragement, I overcome my fear of both large corporations stealing my data, and anyone I know at all ever seeing me on tinder, and I make my first online dating profile. I proceed to get approximately 0 matches. Then she says we could go to a bar and I could hit on girls. I proceed to drink my beer. Then I drink her beer. Then I drink a few more beers. And then I'm drunk and still experiencing panic attacks at the thought of going up to a girl and talking to her.
That night, both of us quite drunk, she starts blowing me in the sidewalk on our walk home, and then I fuck her and make her cum a record breaking 15 times. Which, I suppose, convinced her that maybe we should get back together. Yeah I know - really fucking stupid idea.
So I start working again and she gets a job in my city, and for a while things are going pretty well.... kind of. Admitting that I still couldn't get laid to save my life, and having her agree to help me out kind of lit a fire in me. But the fire burned dirty. I started reading everything I could find about how to make open relationships and polyamory work, which is all heavily steeped in the feminist tradition. I read a lot of somewhat good advice which was not at all useful to my circumstance, and a lot of really shitty advice that made me feel like I was a terrible person, and I started going a little bit crazy again, but slower this time. More of a steady and unrecoverable slide into long term anxiety and depression. As I slid deeper into this whole, I started hammering her with endless questions about the theory of dating, the ethics of one choice or another, what her perspective was on X, Y, or Z, which she found increasingly unbearable, until she demanded I go to a therapist to sort my head out
So I did. The therapy worked - in that it stopped me from going completely off the deep end. But failed to make any meaningful change.
At this point also, I finally overcame another of my fears, and figured out how to attend a polyamory meetup. I have to say, the hoops I needed to jump through for this were quite excessive, especially considering I was so far past the point of even wanting to hit on any girls. I just wanted to talk to some old guy about "how the fuck do I do this?" After working up the courage to finally show up, I arrived to the group to spend one of the most uncomfortable hours of my life sitting in a hippy feather-circle where all discussion focused on the social justice issue of the day - after which I was absolutely too emotionally drained to even try to talk to one of the old guys. A real shame, since the 60+ crowd there actually seemed like very nice people, while the 20s and 30s crowd seemed like the most negative, toxic group I'd ever encountered. As I got into my car to drive away, all I remember thinking is "wow, maybe I'm a depressed loser who can't get laid for shit and keeps having intrusive suicidal thoughts... But at least I'm not *those* people!"
Not long after this, we broke up for the third and final time. My lay count during my 5-or-so-year-long on-again-off-again open relationship: 1.
Hence why this topic sets me off. Just like when I was a virgin, I'm terrified that I'll spill the beans. I'll tell the truth about what happened, how I failed, how I tried as hard as I could and came up short because I'm a worthless piece of shit - and then there go my friends, and there go my prospects.
So tonight, I'm going on a date. Except it's not a date. We're meeting "as friends" - because apparently she's new to this, and he has some sort of hangup about her going on a date where she might get laid. Why would I agree to this? I dunno. I guess I'm hoping for a redemption arc, where I can help out someone who was struggling like I was. Or maybe we will just not be into each other at all, and it'll be an awkward waste of time. Or maybe I'll spill my guts and all my pain was worth nothing, and she'll think I'm some weird fucking loser. But I'm afraid, so I guess that means I have to do it.
