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