Category Archives: Love

You may have heard this term ‘power of the pole’ mentioned by go-go dancers, strippers or other sex workers. I actually was a go-go dancer for a brief time in the summer of 1996. It WAS powerful – mentally, physically and sexually. Sexy clothes, dim lights, tantalizing grooves, seductive dancing. The eyeballs on me vying for my attention, waving or throwing dollar bills hoping I’d come over, talk to them and let them have a grab or two. I felt like everyone in the room wanted to fuck me.

For me, though, the power of the pole goes way beyond all this. It is really the power of confidence in my sexuality.

I think sexuality is a tricky word to define. It’s so personal – a blender of thoughts and feelings you have about your sexual interests and desires, sexual orientation and sexual self-awareness. I checked a few online dictionaries for assistance and found many didn’t quite capture what it was to me.

The Oxford Dictionary said this:

“The feelings and activities connected with a person’s sexual desires.”

Sort of, but not very wholistic, so I kept looking.

Merriam-Webster:

“The quality or state of being sexual:

a: the condition of having sex
b: sexual activity
c: expression of sexual receptivity or interest especially when excessive”

What? Sexuality means just sex? And WTF is “…especially when excessive”?

To me these miss the mark because they only address the part of sexuality focused outside of one’s self mostly as it relates to others. They totally overlook the concept of how I think and feel about who my sexual self is, my sexual confidence, my body confidence, my sexual power. Sexuality, to me, isn’t defined solely in relation to someone else and what I may or may not do with them sexually. It is my sexuality – not yours or ours.

Looking back I believe I first started building a sense of my own sexuality pretty early in life when I began dance classes at age 4. For five or so years, I learned my body – its rhythm and how to move it and how to move it with confidence. At age 9, I discovered sports and continued, without self-awareness mind you, to learn performance, how my body was, how it worked, and how it was changing.

This gave me a connection from my mind to my body in an entirely new way, but still, I was slow to understand this connection and slow to feel comfortable and confident with my body. As many youth are, I was also self-conscious as I was growing up.

In my angsty teenage years, I hated my body actually. I had a big nose, small boobs and ribs that didn’t lay flat along my torso. I was uncomfortably taller than everyone else. I grew fast – about 5’8″ when I was 12, 5’10” in high school and then 6′ in college. I didn’t experience growing pains, but I did get stretch marks on the outer sides of my upper thighs. I thought I must be fat because only fat people have stretch marks.

My mind went through very chaotic and sometimes very dark years with my body.

When I was 16, I received my first body compliment and that helped me link the feeling of connection to my body with feeling comfortable and confident in it. It’s not surprising that that had to come from the outside – I didn’t have the perspective and self-awareness within me yet.

The compliment was about how nice my legs were. I was so surprised and also beyond flattered. I hadn’t consciously thought of them as sexy – more that they just were long, muscular, and helped me run down the strikers on the soccer field as the sweeper.

Then I started looking at women’s legs. Wow – mine were really nice! Long and muscular was sexy. I gained body confidence in the awareness and my sexuality began to bloom.

By 19, I was taking revealing pics to mail to my first BF who went back to London after a year abroad at my university. Me in my single dorm room working some suggestive poses dressed only in a thong with my face very visible. This was the 1990s back when I had to take them to a place to get developed. I actually didn’t care. Lucky photo developer – I hope I was material for a good wank!

The next summer I wasn’t making enough money waiting tables so I got a job as a go-go dancer. Topless with thong. The power of my more mature sexuality prancing around on that stage was intoxicating. It was fun to feel so sexy, so powerful and get paid for it. When I go to strip clubs now, I think even at 46 that with a few days of clean living I could easily get back on stage. I may need to take pole dancing classes to update my moves from 1996, but I look just as good, sometimes even better than, those 20 and 30-somethings that I see up there now.

But unfortunately my evolving sexuality suffered for the 5 years that I lived in NYC in my late 20s. I saw lots of beautifully thin, fit people and I became obsessed. I worked out every day. Road my bike everywhere instead of taking the subway. Kept my daily caloric intake during the work week to 1000. Binged on the weekends and became depressed on Monday if the scale said anything over 152 pounds. (Today, I range between 153-156, exercise about 4-5 times per week and eat healthy with a good balance of French fries, cheese, pizza, cookies and mayo. What a fuck of waste of time all that was!)

My developing sexuality, including my body confidence and sexual self-awareness hit pause after that – all through my 30s. I don’t think my sexuality really became a full adult until it all came together in the last 7 years. It started at age 38. PhD and I were separated. He was cheating at that point, but it was unconfirmed. A guy 9 years younger than me (Wino BTW) started flirting with me one night at a local bar near my culinary school apartment. I hadn’t felt sexy or sexually confident in a very long time.

That night I felt powerful. I felt my sexuality. I felt like myself – not repressed or weighed down by past baggage. Again, it came from an outside source, but it whipped me back to focus. It was all inside me – being sexually self-aware and body confident.

A year later I broke up with PhD and decided to get on some dating apps and have fun. I got all kinds of perspective then – just read through the FUCK posts! This was the time my sexuality finally graduated – over those years I learned the last part that made me complete – my sexual interests and desires. You would think at 40 YO I would have known that stuff by then, but I didn’t. I was in three back-to-back monogamous relationships from 19 to then and shit just gets routine and boring after awhile. This is why I went on lots of dates with lots of different people, including women, guys totally opposite to what I was normally physically attracted to, older men, foreigners, every shade of color.

Today, I own my sexuality and its inherent power. I am sexually self-aware, sexually confident, body confident, and I know my sexual interests, desires and orientation – although I’m always curious to try new things. I actually think the self-awareness and confidence that comes with knowing all this and loving it about myself gives me more power, but I also might secretly have a little dictator running around inside my brain.

Even if you’ve never gotten on a stripper pole in front of a bunch of randy drunkies, you can develop your own power of sexuality. You made not need the outside perspective to give you sexual self-awareness and sexual confidence in who you are. You may not yet fully understand your sexual interests, desires and orientation. But I hope if you haven’t found the power of the pole, you’ll go seeking. And if you have already arrived, I hope you’ll continue to walk with fierceness in your own secret super power.

I have been dating a new man for just shy of a month. I am naming him Duke because we both have an insatiable love of mayo. He so much so that he orders Duke’s online and keeps a healthy stash in his pantry. If you don’t know Duke’s mayo, it’s a Southern institution born and raised in Greenville, SC.

This isn’t really a story about Duke, but rather about my surprise at where my brain is with regard to relationships.

I was jolted on a recent date with Duke – well they are all recent really – we’ve only had four of them! We had just had a fun romp in bed and were lying there afterward chatting. Even though it’s early days, I have found that now that we are long-time adults serious relationship conversations can start happening pretty early in the association.

So we were lying there naked on our backs next to each other and somehow the topic turned to ‘us’. I can’t remember how it got there, but only what he said.

“Well this can only go so far because you are married.”

At that moment, I was overwhelmed with both sadness at the comment and relief that it was pitch black in the room because my eyes started to well up.

Part of it was for sure baggage from a previous relationship that broke up about a year ago. I haven’t written much about him – it still makes me sad and I haven’t quite processed it all, but essentially that guy had the same line of thinking. If I can’t have all of you to myself in a monogamous relationship then I don’t want you at all OR the only thing to work toward in a romantic relationship is marriage.

Those thoughts have haunted me since that break up. He threw away a deep honest love because he couldn’t see any grey or didn’t want to because he thought it would be too complicated or he couldn’t see a way he could get all his needs met. Well fuck that – sometimes things don’t come to you in neat little packages and they are hard – I would say especially the worthwhile things. In my (angrier) opinion, the weak MF just gave up because it was too hard.

The implicit idea of possession within monogamy always pisses me off. My husband isn’t mine – I am not his. We are still independent people – for me, the two did not become one when we married. We are not assets, possessions or trophies of the other. I have heard this statement too many times to count and I’m sure I will again.

“Wow, it’s so great that your husband let’s you do this.” [implied: date other men]

You can fuck all the way off with that!

My husband doesn’t “let” me do anything. I don’t “let” him do anything. We have a connected, communicative relationship where we really listen to the other person’s needs, wants and feelings – and really care about hearing what they have to say. Then we create a path or a space together so that the other person can feel comfortable and supported and confident in pursuing those needs, wants and desires. Each person is heard, validated and respected. It takes continuous communication, honesty and above all the truest love that comes from a place where you, with all your being, want the other person to be happy and fulfilled in whatever they want to pursue.

Back to the bedroom: I also realized in that moment just how much I had unwound my brain in the past 7 1/2 years with regard to all types of relationships, but particularly intimate ones. My thought patterns don’t have two lanes – black or white. I see infinite possibilities – a beautiful grassy plain in front of me with no worn paths, no trees or rocks defining the way. I can walk in literally any direction.

This obviously took conscious work I wanted to do. Sometimes I forget I live in a monogamous world. My brain just doesn’t think like that anymore. With everyone who comes into my lie, I assess in the beginning how and where the relationship/association is or where I can see it may be going or just go with the flow and don’t think about it all. But always with the idea to “Let Relationships Be Where They Are.” Not to force or push in a direction, but rather try to be open to receive the person as they are and vice versa and see how we naturally fit together. The fit can also change over time – friends become lovers, lovers move to the friend zone. Some friends become make out buds without intercourse. Some lovers are just fun acquaintance hook ups.

The monogamous world we’ve all been brought up in doesn’t allow for all this grey area. It once did a long time ago, but I don’t want to get into a history lesson.

Why couldn’t Duke and I have a long-term relationship? We are prisoners of our own thinking sometimes.

Instead of confronting him with that question, I expressed just a sliver of what I was looking for. Maybe he would start to see things differently over time. It is definitely too early to tell, but I’m just putting myself out there.

I told him I was interested in one long term relationship with someone, and then I stepped out on the potential plank just a bit. I added that I could see the possible…maybe…potential in him for me – not knowing of course if he saw anything remotely like what I did. He’s 70 years old, a semi-retired pilot, widowed for 20 years and never remarried, no kids. He had had a long term girlfriend before, but they never lived together. He’s got a very active social life, including four planes and is always flying near and far to visit friends and fly in airshows. He’s still besties with his ex-GF – they even share one of those planes together. All of this is exciting to me that we could be a complement to each other’s otherwise full and fulfilled lives.

But will he be open enough to see the potential? I can see the challenge – 70 years of thinking like a monogamist.

I am also not in any way disparaging monogamy. I hope none of this comes across that way. I just truly believe that if people were exposed to the possibility of ENM, learned how it could work successfully, ethically and with respect and then given the freedom to pursue their true heart and mind, the world would be a more magical, happy place. Some would still choose monogamy, some wouldn’t.

Before we left the bed, Duke said, “You are really pulling at my heart strings. I really like you.”

Well I hope with time, talk and trust, I can help bring his mind along with his heart.

Remember the scene in Princess Bride when Wesley and Buttercup are walking through the Fire Swamp and he tells the story of how he became the Dread Pirate Roberts? The then Dread Pirate Roberts takes Wesley on as a valet and every night says:

“Good night, Wesley. Good work. Sleep well. I’ll most likely kill you in the morning.”

As much as I say I’m the happiest I have ever been in my life, and I absolutely am the happiest I have ever been in my life, still non-monogamy isn’t all fantastical tales and happy love endings.

I look back on all the various relationships I have had outside of my primary one and that sentiment from the Dread Pirate Roberts now resonates with me strongly. It has only just come together in my head. As if after each date my lover says:

“Thank you for a fantastic evening. So fun and sexy! But I’ll most likely need to get rid of you pretty soon.”

Maybe I’ve just become cynical about dating.

I think until the two recent difficult break-ups this year (I have not yet wrapped my brain around writing about them although one of them is mentioned below), I approached meeting someone new with excitement and an open heart, just waiting to see where the adventure would take me, not looking to see what was around the corner.

I say in dating app profiles, and often in person, that I want to care about my partners. While sex plays a strong leading role, I want to enjoy the time I spend with someone outside the bedroom. I want to be intellectually challenged, playful, comfortable, enjoy activities together, and genuinely caring toward a partner. I want to know about their lives, history, challenges, aspirations, passions.

I want to connect.

I have since learned that connection can be dangerous. It requires vulnerability. Vulnerability, in my experience, often leads to pain and disappointment.

I suppose I could simply call myself naive and that I need to get tougher. You would think I would have a thicker skin being from the fuck you East Coast. I often walk around like it’s old, worn leather, but it’s really just an act. As much as I don’t like to admit it, I have a liquidy candy center.

Maybe this in just par for the course from non-monogamous dating. I AM married and can only offer so much to someone else. Our relationship can only progress to a certain point. A certain point I am happy to live in forever, by the way. But I cannot go on vacation with you. I cannot move in. I cannot come for Thanksgiving dinner, and I do not want to meet your kids, your friends, your colleagues.

I also have wondered if I attract a certain type of older man who is in transition in his life – just looking for a fun attraction to ride while on vacation from figuring out the rest of his life.

I’d like to recount some of the more notable, or I suppose painful, ways I’ve been killed in the morning.

In the first year, I was mostly ghosted. That sucks, but I learned to choose slightly more mature, sophisticated and reliable men.

With that has come more sophisticated ways to die.

I dated one man for nearly 10 months. We met just a few months before COVID began and we maintained our own little love pod, seeing each other several times a month at his house. We would enjoy walks through his vegetable garden, birthday suit dips in the hot tub followed by birthday suit dinner making complete with lovely old wines. Often dinner had to wait as naked cooking became naked groping and then pushing the beautifully set tableware aside and fucking on the dining room table.

It turns out he had been seeing someone abroad for over a year and decided to move her across the world and into his house.

I unknowingly was invited over for one last romp and then to take home all the lingerie he had bought me. I got killed.

I dated another man for only about four months. I was hesitant when he told me in the beginning that he had a fiancee in Europe and they would be married. But it wouldn’t be for two or more years because she wouldn’t move to the US until her precious, old horse that she loved so dearly passed away.

He would come to my town several times per month either finding a location with a kitchen so he could show off his Italian cooking skills or take me out to a nice dinner before enthusiastically hitting the sheets. He was generous, communicative, caring.

Until she decided she didn’t want to wait and wanted to get married within several months. She set a date and had bought a wedding dress in Europe. I got killed.

I found a kind, mid-Western man who lived in my town – amazing! He was single – amazing! He spent a lot of time traveling for work so would want to see me a bunch when he was here and then we’d have weeks go by while he was out of town – also amazing!

While not so sophisticated about food and drink, he actually introduced me to a new gin made in New England from botanicals that included honey. I still enjoy this gin and have shared it with friends.

We enjoyed watching porn together and talked about a threesome with a trans woman (on my bucket list – getting fucked with tits in my face? YES PLEASE!). My favorite session of ours was in his living room. Porn on the jumbotron above the fireplace. Me riding his cock reverse cowgirl so we both could watch. It was so fun to be in control and grind on him. Quite a thigh workout too! Hear him moan. Hear the TV moan. Feel the grip of his hands on my hips pulling me back and forth. Rising and rising until everyone exploded.

He was generous too. Then told me he started seeing someone new and felt it was wrong to be also seeing me on the side. I understand, but I got killed.

Then I thought I had found the prefect man with the perfect scenario. He was married, but they lived apart. He in the city and she in the country about two hours away. They would see each other on the weekend. He enjoyed cooking, mezcal, baseball and long conversations. He was painfully shy, but I thought with time we would become comfortable with each other. We were both very excited about this match.

After about 4-5 dates, he mentioned he was taking a 6-week unpaid sabbatical from work and planned to travel to various retreats and camps across the country. He wasn’t sure if he would go back to work or retire. He wanted to explore what the third chapter in his life might look like.

Perhaps I had no right to ask at such an early stage of our relationship, but I inquired where he thought I might fit in to this scenario. We had both been excited by this stable duo-marriage pairing. He didn’t have an answer very much as if he didn’t even consider it. I was killed yet again.

There are many other stories of fits and starts eventually falling apart for one reason or another.

Today, I have several new men in my life. One I have been dating for a few months – England is from near Oxford. He is divorced with two teenage children. He has told me he absolutely believes he was a woman in a previous life – he feels his sensitive nature is very feminine. He has been quite enthusiastic about me recently making a joke about celebrating our three months together, a three-month anniversary or something to that effect. I asked has it been three months? He quickly laughed and said he didn’t know. I checked back and our first date was three months ago.

I have felt myself being pulled in emotionally with England as in previous new relationships. Opening my heart blindly without a thought to the future on my radar screen. Just skipping down the path that we create.

He is fun, sexually exploratory, patient, generous, genuinely loving, genuinely caring.

I want to try not to be killed.

During our most recent date, he made a quick, under the breath comment about one day there being pain when we stopped seeing each other. That pulled me to attention and the future possibilities started making bleeps and bloops on the screen.

Rather than wait to be killed I thought A-HA! This is the opportunity to practice emotional restraint. But could I do that? Could I halt my feelings for him right there where they were, care about him but not let myself grow to love him and still enjoy my time with him? Could I be slightly colder and less emotionally enthusiastic?

The Dread Pirate Roberts did tell Wesley every night that he would most likely kill him in the morning. Wesley didn’t know when it may come, and in the end it never came. I’m not sure I believe the end never coming is a possibility anymore – I once did.

So rather than be blind-sided when I do get killed in the morning, could I simply believe that I will be killed at anytime, enjoy the moment, protect my heart and not be so upset when death comes knocking?

I know this may sound completely antithetical to my recent post Let Relationships Be Where They Are. It’s probably accurate that it is. I never claimed to not contradict myself. This is a journey with very few maps to rely on for guidance. So I am just out in the world trying to create a successful pathway, and not to get killed.