Marie's insecurities and Hosea in bed, part 3

Here are selections from Marie's reply back to this letter of mine:

Good morning, my dear one!  Thank you for this response! 

Thanks first of all for answering so promptly; yes, your instinct that I would prefer you to answer SOON rather than to wait and think so you could answer with full consideration was correct.  I very much appreciated having this to read when I woke up.

A lot of what you said about your sexual response you've said before, but not together in one place.  So I hadn't applied it fully to the observations I was making that had me feeling insecure.  There was one thing new, however.  You'd told me before that for you the woman's enjoyment is the Main Event; but this time you added the detail, "When I masturbate, I always have to picture myself with a woman who is already farther down that road than I am."

THAT is an extremely reassuring data point, from my perspective.  Because it suggests that one way to look at this issue is, not that I have some unfortunate deficiency in my knowledge of how to arouse a man (you) by my touch, but that the pair of us have delightfully coincident mutual perversions.  Since when I masturbate, I always have to picture a man (or men) doing things to a woman to arouse her (usually against her will or better judgment, sometimes without her initially being aware of his manipulations).  And in my masturbatory fantasies, they might end by fucking, but they might not--sometimes he brings her to orgasm repeatedly without entering her, usually as part of a nefarious scheme to manipulate her feelings....    

So my standard sexual fantasy involves a man/men focusing intensely on a woman's pleasure.  He acts, she reacts.  That's my perversion.

But maybe there's nothing wrong with that if that's your perversion too....

So maybe I can relax about that issue and not worry that I'm being selfish or an inadequate lover to you when I let you put my pleasure first.

We can talk about this more, but I already feel much more comfortable about the issue.

The other: we've also talked about your itchy skin (and not just your back) before, but this is more comprehensive.  It's good to know my observations are accurate, and very good to learn that these reactions pre-date me and are therefore independent of me.

Yes, that's what I thought you felt about cuddling.  That if you're on the outside, it's cuddling; if you're on the inside, it can feel like being trapped or something.  Which, as long as that's not a referendum on me, is mostly fine.  Since I like either position; I'm entirely happy to be on the inside.

Mostly fine... the only time I can see it being a problem is, that makes it harder for me to initiate cuddling.  If you're awake, of course, I can simply ask.  Verbally, or by bumping up against you suggestively.  

If you're asleep... sigh.  I can bump up against you, but I guess my instincts were right; if you don't respond by turning and cuddling me, I'm better off not trying to get grabby in hopes you'll respond in kind.  However, I will remember that that's not a personal rejection:  "Socks!"  will be my watchword in such circumstances, in future.  And I won't cheat myself out of hours of enjoying your warmth and smell, unless the urge to write really is that overwhelming.... (Which, of course, it sometimes is.  Some needs take precedence.)

God I'm glad I brought these things up.

Huh.  I just thought of something else.  I think I've told you this before:  I grew up sleeping with my sister, and [my home state] is cold a lot more of the year than it's hot.  So I grew up casually cuddling; if there's a body next to me, and I'm at all cold, I automatically roll over and grab onto it.  Or she would.  And when one first gets into bed the sheets are cold, so we'd normally start off in each other's arms.  

Only time we wouldn't, is hot nights in summer when each of us was instead skirting the edge of the bed to stay as far away from the other's body heat as possible.

Unless, of course, we'd had a fight.  Then we'd lie rigidly next to each other, not touching.  Cold with anger.

So for me, cuddling is the default if I'm in bed with someone, unless it's hot out, or there's something wrong.

Whereas, of course, as a child you grew up sleeping alone.  Didn't develop the same reflexes....   

Your last observation, that you've engaged in these behaviors/reactions for years and your other lovers haven't commented.... Huh.  Well, we'd been physically involved for 21 months before I did.  So that leaves Debbie out.  And of course, re sex, none of them had my reasons to worry about possibly cheating you of your due pleasure through simple ignorance.

And then, you sort of invited me to.  When you wrote [about an earlier topic], "If you get to the point that you can forget about it for a while, that will mean you feel secure. And that will be progress."

That made me realize, right, I don't feel fully secure.  So I started to explore why, and came up with these two related issued that had been niggling at me.  

Okay, my love, something to think about:  would you like it if our next vacation were to a nudist colony?  If you don't like feeling things on your skin, you might actively like having NOTHING on.....  I understand most of the beaches of Europe are clothing-optional--what a great excuse to visit the Riviera!  Haven't been to a nude beach in decades; clearly I'm overdue!


Loving you always,
Your Marie
   

Marie's insecurities and Hosea in bed, part 2

Here is the reply I wrote to this letter of Marie's:

My love, my sweet, my very earthy Nereid,

Gosh, those are very interesting questions! And no, I'm not being sarcastic. Part of me wants to think about them for some time before I reply; but another part of me thinks it's important to get an answer in the mail right away. So let me see what I can do off the cuff ... then maybe I'll think of something better later and supersede everything I write tonight.

At a high level of abstraction, all of your questions have the same first answer, namely, that your observations are detailed and exact (as usual) but you go astray when you speculate that they are your fault or about you.

More concretely:

I think there are at least two issues that contribute to my sexual responses that you describe so carefully. One is age: my libido is a lot weaker than it used to be. I used to get hard a lot more easily and a lot more often than I do now; and even when I do get aroused today, "hard" is a lot softer than it used to be. Also I'm taking finasteride to try to halt a formerly steady progression that made peeing ever slower for me, and what I read on the Internet says that it suppresses libido. So already — whether it's age or medicine behind it — this is a bit of an uphill battle.

This means that my very first (smart-assed, irreverent) thought when you wrote, ...

I would like to believe that I could, like you, arouse my lover in minutes by my touch and words. That I, like you, could bring my lover to orgasm with my hands and mouth and (most of all) mind.

... was, "Maybe you better get somebody younger on the side" — not instead, mind you!! — "to practice on." 😊

The second issue is that over the years I have spent a lot more attention on studying female sexual response than on my own. My lovers in the past have done to me whatever worked for them before with other men, and I guess I've never had complaints, but that's never where my mind has been. My reaction with all of them has been, in essence, "If you enjoy doing this, that's fine and it gives me a chance to rest for a few minutes; but then let's get back to the important stuff" ... namely her. You may remember that when we first started talking about sex, I said that in my mind the woman's enjoyment is the Main Event. (It's certainly the noisiest. 😊) And the most reliable trigger I know to arouse me is the arousal of the woman I'm with. When I masturbate, I always have to picture myself with a woman who is already farther down that road than I am.

Is this an immutable, permanent fact? Hell, I don't know. But as a biographical datum, it so happens that I have not yet learned anything that works better for me. That might be just because I haven't researched the question systematically, but it is as much as I know today. And of course this is why it is so important to me to get you going and keep you going: that's what triggers me.

Maybe it will turn out that a ripe persimmon on the back of my knee (or whatever) works even better, but if so I don't know it yet.

As for sleeping....

Again, your observations are spot on. But it's nothing to do with you.

There are times that I become very aware of my skin — for example, when I am getting quiet to go to sleep, so I'm not distracted by other things. And when that happens, I often don't want to feel anything against it. My mother says that when I was in the crib I always used to pull off my socks, and then my feet would get cold. And you have surely noticed that I often untuck covers at the foot of the bed so that I can stick my feet out into the open air.

It all depends, of course. If we are having sex and I'm hard, I'm very aware of the surface of my penis but I also very much want to feel something against it ... preferably your warm and wet insides, my love. 😍 And if it's a cold night I surely want a warm blanket. During the day I don't mind wearing clothes because I'm busy and not paying attention. But in any event this impulse to free my skin from whatever's on it is one among others, and I am more likely to be aware of it as other distractions fade away.

Cuddling is delightful, of course. But for whatever reason, my skin is more likely to interpret it as "cuddling" if I'm on the outside; and more likely to think "What's wrapped all around me?" if I'm on the inside. I don't claim this is logical.

This is my rapid first pass at an answer. I have not re read your letter to see if I addressed everything, because I want to reply promptly. Doubtless there are things I missed or could explain better, and maybe in the next few days I will think of something important that escaped me tonight. But please consider it a first installment. And please understand that none of it is about you.

You know what is really fascinating to me? All of the behaviors you describe have been in place for years. But you are the first lover who has asked about them. Wife, D, Debbie ... none of them ever said a word. Were they not paying attention as closely as you? Or did they choose not to speak up? I could try to guess but really I don't know the answer. But it's interesting....

God but I love being with a woman who is both alert and forthright!


Now and ever, my dearest, unto ages of ages,
Your Hosea

Marie's insecurities and Hosea in bed, part 1

Marie wrote me a letter today. [Well, I mean on November 28; I'm actually posting this in mid-December.] I'll put it here and then my reply in an adjoining post:

Hey, my dearest.

Sorry, I tried a couple of times to send versions of this message, but the internet was not cooperative.

So.

One thing that I’m still insecure about, my love, is sex.  Quelle surprise.

Oh, I’m secure now, as I never was before, about one half of my sexuality, my love:  that I can be aroused and can receive pleasure.  Abundantly, even!  You've seen to that.

I’m still not secure that I can give it.

You are demonstrably good at arousing me, at stimulating me, and at bringing me to ecstasy, Hosea.
 
I… am not confident of my ability to do any of these things with you. 

Not that you’ve complained, and I believe your protestations that you enjoy your ability to bring me pleasure.

But I—have the impression, often, that you prefer to touch than be touched.  Which would be fine, because I absolutely love being touched by you, except I want also to return the favor. 

More, I would like to believe that I could, like you, arouse my lover in minutes by my touch and words.  That I, like you, could bring my lover to orgasm with my hands and mouth and (most of all) mind.

Right now it feels to me more like, I wait for you to initiate, and you take pleasure in your power to make me incoherent with delight, and sometimes (not always) my ecstasy kindles your own arousal enough for you to pleasure yourself with my reactions and on my body.

I don’t feel that I know how to touch you to bring you reliably either to arousal or to orgasm, and I feel that I should have learned more of such skills by now. 

That I’m not yet a very good lover, looked at physically.

And.  Non-sexually, too, my dearest, it seems to me, it feels to me, as though you generally prefer to touch rather than be touched, prefer to hold rather than being held. 

In bed, settling to sleep together, sometimes you hold me tightly.  But if I reach to hold on to you, often you shift so that, at most, my arm is draped over you.  Not clinging to you, not pressing us together. 

Maybe I’m imagining that, but it has seemed like a real enough response to me that I’ve adapted over time by trying NOT to hold onto you at night when I might like to. Because it has felt to me, it has seemed to me, that you might prefer that I didn’t. 

And at night, when you’re asleep—sometimes when I wake up a bit and butt up against you, spoon against you or try to cuddle—sometimes you pull me closer.

And sometimes you don’t.  Sometimes you do the opposite, my love. 

And, just as I utterly love waking stretching against you to feel you unconsciously pull my body more strongly against yours, my love....

so do I react (in the other direction) to waking to feeling you unconsciously repulse me.

That last night [last month]:  I didn’t realize that you woke up a couple of times and realized that I was gone.  (If I’d thought you’d missed me I wouldn’t have stayed away.)  And it wasn’t the coffee I’d drunk to keep myself alert through the performance that kept me awake. 

I woke up in the middle of the night to go to the bathroom.  And then when I crept back into bed, I tried to snuggle in beside you. 

And you flinched away from me, and pulled up the sheet between us.  Turning decisively from my touch.  Pulling up a barrier (the sheet) against me. 

I say "decisively,"  because that's how it felt to me at the time, but I didn't for a moment think your turning away represented a conscious response.  Only the truest unconscious one.

So I lay there for a while, bared and cold, and then I decided to get up and use my wakefulness in writing.  (On a story, as it happens, about a woman unexpectedly overwhelmed by the remembrance of the pain felt by her much-younger, besottedly-in-love self.)

So I wrote for a while.  Then, eventually, I decided that, regardless of your (unconscious) reaction to my touch, this was my last chance in a while to feel your body near mine, to enjoy smelling you and feeling your warmth and enjoying being near to your body. 

Even if I should not actually touch you. 

So I came back to your bed.  And lay myself down next to you, guiltily savoring your presence, and eventually slept until the morning.
 
So.  My insecurities, Hosea my love.

Any thoughts on how to address them?  Am I making all this up?  Do you have tips on becoming a better lover to you?  A chapter I should re-read in Joy?

Tips on sharing your bed?  Or—on not?  On how to reach out to you, and give you joy?  As you do me, reliably, when you choose to?

Tips on when to leave you alone?  On how to tell when I should?


Your Marie

Plato's Corner Deli

NOTE: I am back-dating this post to the month and year where it belongs. But in reality I am actually writing it more than five years later, the evening of January 13, 2023. I think I've got most of the details right, however.

Now that I've told you one really unpleasant story about our vacation in Greece, let me tell you a really pleasant one.

The day after Ohi Day, the day after my pocket was picked, we did a lot of things. We wandered around Athens. We went to visit the Piraeus. (Somehow in the last 2500 years it seems that somebody must have torn down the Long Walls, because we didn't see them anywhere.) And we took the bus out to visit Plato's Academy. As two erstwhile scholars, how could we do otherwise? 

Strictly speaking, of course, Plato's Academy was closed many years ago. But we know where it was located, and there have been archaeological digs on the site. Also, the site has given its name to a whole slice of metropolitan Athens, Ακαδημία Πλάτωνος (Akadimia Platonos), a grungy, working-class district northwest of downtown. So that's where we headed. We saw the place marked on a map, but weren't really sure what we would find.

When we first got to the district, it didn't look too great. There was litter and graffiti. (The photograph is one I took.) But soon we figured out that the Ακαδημία Πλάτωνος referenced in the sign here was the city district and not the site of the actual school itself. That was several blocks farther on, and so we started to walk.

And walk. 

It took a while to get there. When we did, we found that the site was enclosed within a metal gate that looked pretty uninviting. But there was an open door, so we walked in ….

… and inside the gate was a park. Yes, there were stone works that had been dug out of the ground. But nothing was off limits, and most of it was trees and lawn. (In fact we saw one person asleep on one of the ruined stone walls.) It was a beautiful spot; and if I were Plato, I would far rather be remembered by a gentle park where working-class children come to play than by the most perfect archaeological reconstruction of my school.

In the center of the park was a visitor center, which had some videos and instructional material. Everything was in both Greek and English. Presumably the tourist presence was not negligible. But it was also obvious that most tourists don't come this far out of town. The visitor's center was close to empty. And by mid-afternoon, they were ready to close.

That was fine, because Marie and I were hungry. We hadn't had lunch, and it was something close to 4:00 in the afternoon. So we wandered back through the park, and then—just across the street—we saw a deli (or something similar) that appeared to be open. It was called Ταβέρνα η γωνία του Πλάτωνα. Roughly translated, that comes to Plato's Corner Deli.

They had tables outside. It was still a glorious afternoon, so we wandered in and tried to ask if we could sit outside. We didn't find anyone who spoke English; but we made ourselves clear with gestures, and so found our seats. Soon a waitress brought us a couple of menus. But—oops! bad luck!—the waitress spoke no English either. However there was a party sitting at the next table over, who seemed to be regulars. She went and spoke to them, and they offered to translate. Working this way, we ordered a very plentiful lunch. (I'm pretty sure this served us for dinner as well.) And the food was wonderful. In general, during our whole trip to Greece, the quality of the food we ate was more or less inversely proportional to the price. This was close to the cheapest meal we had during the whole trip, and it was the tastiest and most delightful. It certainly helped that the waitress was charming and very pretty, though the food would have been great in any event. But the combination meant that the afternoon formed a warm, comfortable memory in the middle of the entire trip.

When we were done, of course, we did everything in reverse: walk and walk and walk until we came to the bus stop, then take the bus back into town to get back to our hotel. But we spent the whole evening in a warm glow from the afternoon.         

    

Pickpockets in Athens

NOTE: I am back-dating this post to the month and year where it belongs. But in reality I am actually writing it more than five years later, the evening of January 13, 2023. I think I've got most of the details right, however.

Two weeks after I visited Debbie while on a business trip to Sticksville, Marie and I went to Greece.

Neither of us had ever been to Greece, and we wanted to go somewhere together. And I've wanted to visit Greece since I was a little kid. So we decided, We're grownups and we're neither of us tied down by other commitments—let's go! (It probably helped that I went to Peru with Son 2 a few years ago … helped break my mind out of a rut, if nothing else.)

The trip lasted a little over a week. We spent five days in Athens, a day taking the bus to Delphi, then a couple of days in Delphi before coming home. It was a lot of fun. We did touristy things and ate well. Most of the photos show one of us or the other, so I won't include them here. I will, however, absolutely endorse George the Famous Taxi Driver for his firm's wonderful service: one of George's drivers took us from the airport to our hotel, by way of a beach where we stopped to swim in the Aegean Sea, and a restaurant where we had the best lunch. Worth every penny.

I could write a whole post just about the food, but I won't. And many of the sights we saw were normal touristy sights that you could hear about from anyone. But I'll tell you a couple of stories that are maybe a bit more personal.

One of them happened on Ohi Day. We spent the day wandering around Athens seeing parades and crowds, and finding a lot of places closed. By the end of the day we found ourselves at a national museum of antiquities, and immersed ourselves for a few hours. (Incidentally, the next time I go to Greece I want to spend less time with antiquities and more time in bars or restaurants.) By the time we left it was evening, and we wanted to get back to our hotel. We found our way to the nearest subway stop, and there was a train already boarding. So we joined the crowd to make our way inside.

The crowd was bigger than we guessed, however, or something. Once we were there I felt myself lifted up off my feet and pushed into the car. Then it felt like someone was grabbing at me, and I heard a voice shout, "He went that way!" (In retrospect I should have been suspicious at hearing English, but I wasn't thinking.) So I wrestled my way back off the train to look for a fleeing suspect; Marie saw me leave and bolted as well, to stay with me. Right away the train pulled away, and of course there was nobody on the platform running anywhere. I checked my back pocket, and my wallet was gone … on the train, obviously, in the hands of someone cleverer and more devious than I am.

Well, shit.

Marie's purse was safe. She said someone had grabbed for it too, but it had an odd zipper mechanism that made it impregnable when it was on her body, and it was strapped to her almost like a backpack. So that was good. It was just me who had been robbed.

What to do? It took me a few minutes, standing there on the platform, to clear my head of all the emotions and realize that there was nothing else we could do that night expect go back to our hotel. So when the next train came along, we got on it. I was taking hold of myself and walking through the logical steps. What was in my wallet? About €200 in cash, my bank card, a credit card, and my driver's license. (Thank God I had emptied out the slips of paper with all my accounts and passwords before we'd left home!) Clearly the cash was gone. The driver's license could be replaced; but since we weren't driving in Greece, I wouldn't worry about it until I got back to the USA. That left the bank card and the credit card. Fortunately, Marie had brought her laptop computer on the trip, in case she wanted to do some writing, and the hotel had Internet access. I was able to go online and report my credit card stolen. When I tried to do that with my bank card, I got the password wrong (just because I was so rattled); but I called the service number, identified myself over the phone, changed my password, and reported that card stolen as well. When that was all done we told the concierge at the hotel (who doubled as the owner), and he gave us a long, sad story about how pickpockets haunted downtown and preyed on tourists, and we had to be very careful. He also told me that the next day I had to go to the police to file a report, even though the odds were that I would never get the wallet back. (And I did so.)

Marie paid for everything for the rest of the trip. I asked her to keep an accounting, and we settled up after we got home. I was kind of dazed for the rest of the evening—stunned, shell-shocked. I think I managed a couple of feeble jokes. And then the next day we were back doing other things again.

But it's interesting … Marie said (some time later) that in a strange way, she was glad it happened; or rather, that if something bad were going to happen she was glad she was there to see it. Specifically, she said she was glad to see how I reacted to a crisis like that. She said she knew plenty of people who would react by losing it: by yelling indiscriminately, and by blaming everyone around them irrationally. And I did none of those things. It made her feel much more comfortable and secure about the relationship.

I'm glad she feels more secure. It's certainly not because I'm any kind of saint that I act like that. It's just that, when I feel truly threatened, I shut down every extraneous reaction so that I can focus on what to do; and I step myself through the situation rationally because I feel completely lost, so that logic is the only tool I have left. I suppose it's some sort of fear reaction, rather than any grand virtue. Or whatever. Anyway, that's what I did and what I do.