Sleeping with Hypocrisy, or: A Note from Intimacy Issues
This is NOT a safe space for emotional slut-shaming.
Hypocrisy seems to be a recurring theme in the questions I have received so far, and it stands out amid the myriad of marital, romantic, and physical intimacy issues. Before we begin with your questions and predicaments, I would like to reflect on this label—this scarlet letter still hot to the touch. A word, or rather, a blunt stone to bludgeon ourselves with in an act of human sacrifice, masochism most desired.
Why are we so terrified to be a thing different than who we have agreed to be? Why must we limit, or even force ourselves, into a boundary it seems we do not want to engage with? To change, to err, to decide and re-decide has long been demonized by societal mores and then reflected back on our inner selves.
Look how pretty, we think, a new standard to aspire to, a judgement to behold, an impossible thing to be. I must have it. We hold it as the weapon it is and we beat ourselves with, hoping pulverization might bring absolution, a way to wipe the slate clean. More blood will not heal our wounds. Take it from me.
I have always been obsessed with love—a self-proclaimed emotional cumslut. Raised on the season premiere of Rock of Love, notebooks lined with MASH, and Tiger Beat quizzes that grew into a Cosmopolitan sexual schooling, I hungered quietly as I starved.
I never went on a date in high school, and I never went on a date in college. I spent twenty-one years suffocating in a closet I hoped I might die in. Instead of love, I only found myself entrenched in abusive and toxic relationships – both platonic and romantic. My obsession with love was exploited time and time again, I clung to anything I was told was love and contorted myself in grotesque ways in attempts to make it last. I might have loved them. But they would not love me. Finally, I decided to look straight down the barrel of my deepest fear realized: maybe I would never find love.
A silent death of hope felt inevitable, easier, efficient. I became a mirror for my own romantic destruction. I closed my heart and turned my back on those who would try to love me kindly. I decided who I was without giving myself a chance, I believed the way I was treated in the past, and not who I was instead. I even decided who others might be before knowing their name or what their lips might taste like in the morning. I was convinced I knew the end to this story—that I could and would not be so deserving of what I desired. Then, one day, I came face to face with one of the most delightfully human truths: I discovered I was wrong.
Last weekend, I met a twenty-one-year-old woman in the bathroom of a bar. She wanted advice for the first date she was on, divulging her insecurities about sexual inexperience and aspirations in life and love, as is the toll for the women’s toilets—to succumb to intimacy.
She said, “What do you wish you had known?”
I told her that she could walk out the door and never see that man again, if she wanted. She could sleep with him, if she wanted. She could sleep with a woman instead, if she wanted. I wish I had known that I was allowed to want. And that the things I wanted could change, just like that. I was fixated on a need to be desired and adored, depriving myself of my own needs as I held out for something I thought could be love.
The next night, I saw a man walking down the street, listening to Lana Del Rey on the speaker of his phone while whipping a large chain through the air with each step he took. It was if he was warding off all who might cross his path, causing pedestrians to cross the street and simply admire him, a bit unnerved, from afar.
I was in awe of this man. He seemed like a reflection of my own long protected heart, holding on to a lyrical vision of heartbreak or someone else’s experience of lust and love. Striking through the air to keep anyone else, any threat of connection at bay. Violently longing.
Love and stability will never go hand in hand. We humans have minds and hearts as changing as the tides. We are born hypocrites. It is our birthright. To try and fail, to say one thing and do another. We deserve the chance to love, to break, to flail our chains about as we self-medicate to “Video Games.”
So come along, those deserving and those deserved, as we embark on this hypocritical journey together. What a glorious joy, to be a hypocrite. How liberating, how sweet, how true. How lucky we are to take many shapes, to transform, to evolve—together.
I will entreat you to bear with me, for I do not have all the answers. How could I ever hope to? I could sleep with thousands of people, marry and divorce, become both parent and child, and still not know what to do. Much like the hypocrisy we measure ourselves against, it will never be enough. We do not ever gain the knowledge we seek. Instead, we find something much more powerful: perspective.
Lay down your weapons of self-flagellation and take my hand as we discover what happens when we listen to our unmet needs—when we find the truth within the hypocrisy—a pure, valid thing that deserves being heard. After all, no one knows better what you need than you.
XOXO,
Intimacy Issues