Sunday, April 24, 2011

A Very Bad Idea

By Lisabet Sarai

What was I thinking?

Having sex with G. was a terrible idea . He was my housemate, for heaven's sake. He had a girlfriend. Meanwhile my steady lover of three years shared the same house. Alarm bells should been ringing, but I couldn't hear them. I was temporarily insane.

I can offer a million excuses. G. was tall, blond and buff, from a rich Connecticut family and studying to be a doctor. He'd been flirting with me for weeks, ever since we danced together at one of our house parties. (He was a fabulous dancer; while I was in his arms, I was in some kind of blissful trance.) My own boyfriend, J., was away at a conference, so of course I was lonely and horny. While J. was gone, it seemed that G.'s teasing only increased in intensity.

I might also place some of the blame on J., who was responsible in the first place for the fact that I shared the ramshackle three-story row house with five men. I would have preferred an apartment for just the two of us, but he didn't feel comfortable officially "living with me". A group house was less threatening, less of a statement. Yes, it was all J.'s fault, because he wasn't ready to "make a commitment".

Despite the above facts, I can't deny that I was the one who knocked on G.'s door, after a long night of TV and double entendres. He didn't come after me. Sure, he let me into his bed - what red-blooded twenty five year old guy would have turned me away? I wanted him so badly! I couldn't sleep; my fantasies kept me awake. G. broadcast a level of sexual knowledge that I found irresistible. Curiosity aligned with lust to drive me crazy.

We had a brief encounter that mostly cured me of my infatuation and left me moody and morose. The next day G.'s girlfriend came to visit. I fled to the movies and sobbed my way through Saturday Night Fever. (I still can't listen to some of those Bee Gees songs without wanting to cry.) When J. returned, I tearfully confessed my transgression. Within a month I had moved out of the house. Within two months my relationship with J. had painfully disintegrated and I was on my own. Within six months I began the BDSM affair that has so influenced my sexuality and my writing.

I'm usually a fairly rational person. Looking back on that incident, which in some sense may have changed the direction of my life, I'm reminded of the power of desire. My obsession with my sexy roommate overwhelmed my intelligence and my morality. Giving in to the selfish, arrogant man that G. turned out to be - risking a love that had sustained and nurtured me for so long - choosing a course of action that would deeply hurt the man I cared about - clearly this was an act of lunacy. I've labeled it a bad idea, but in fact it wasn't an idea at all, as much as a compulsion.

I've written about this incident before, when our topic here at the Grip was "Regrets". I can't honestly say that I regret the way my life has turned out. Would I have been happier if J. and I had stayed together? That's in some sense a meaningless question.

The point is, lust can be dangerous to your sanity. It can lead you to do things completely alien to your normal behavior. While you're under the influence, you won't even realize that you're acting crazy.

Of course, this provides a rich source of inspiration for creating erotica. But in real life? Consider yourself warned.


5 comments:

  1. hi Lisabet!

    This is the first time you've ever explained how you met your dom. That's an interesting story - and you came to him. Whoa.

    I'm a little surprised though, to hear you speak of G as a selfish and arrogant man. I mean, maybe he was, I wouldn;t know, but after all your first novel is dedicated to him. He was your master and must have had a profound effect on you that has lasted you over the years just as certain individuals from my past still haunt me.

    You;re familiar with the themes in the novella I just wrote. I know that you experienced "subspace" with G and still he haunts you, which makes me curious about some of the ideas I'd been playing around with on the theme of sexual imprinting. It makes me wonder if there is a reality beyond my attempts at science fiction on this theme. Maybe there really is such a thing as sexual imprinting when you;ve been in that special subspace. What do you think? Maybe G is the realized Mack Daddy.

    Garce, always curious about you

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  2. Hi, Garce,

    No - I guess I've confused you. This was a different G.! I didn't get together with my dom until six months later. Probably I wouldn't have, though, if I hadn't broken up with J.

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  3. I'm always struck by how huge life changes often hinge on seemingly small choices. Interesting story!

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  4. Interesting story! And very understandable. Supposedly animals simply mate when they feel like it, and we are mammals. Yet we are raised to believe that we should always make rational decisions about sex. Lisabet, I'm sure you're not the only one here who has done something on impulse that had long-term consequences.

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  5. And still I'm baffled by why sex is treated so damned differently than any other biological drive. Why can't we be more like Bonobo monkeys and simply have sex when we want to, with whom we want to, without fearing judgment from others? Years ago I truly believed that by now, when my generation was the "oldies", we'd have done away with the sexual shaming of women, and full equality would have been achieved. I'm so deeply disappointed to see that not only has nothing changed for my own young adult children, but there are still people who believe firmly that no one should enjoy sex, because it is ONLY for procreation in marriage, therefore there is NO need for birth control services or abortions (which is an oxymoron because without birth control there is a need for more abotions.) Why have we so perverted what should be one of the most enjoyable experiences a body allows us to have?
    And why do you still feel guilty for sex you had so many years ago?

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