Your Love is Like a Shadow on Me All of the Time

I recently started listening to podcasts, and I heard one by a life coach (Cheryl Richardson) analyzing the movie version of Sense and Sensibility. It was pretty interesting, and only about 20 minutes long. She made one statement about Marianne Dashwood's attraction to the caddish John Willoughby that resonated with me. She said that women are attracted to "bad boys" because they allow us to express our darker sides.

That got me thinking about what attracted me to Goose to begin with. I've never made a secret of the fact that sex scares the shit out of me. I've been a sexually reserved and selective person my whole life, but after being assaulted at 21, I pretty much shut down completely. At some semi-conscious level, my mind and body are trying to protect themselves from ever being harmed that way again by making me avoid sexual situations and freeze up when they are presented. Then, you can add to that initial defense mechanism my worries that it has been so long since I had sex with anyone that I won't know what to do or be any good at it. And on top of all that, until about eighteen months ago, I had a minor physical issue that made sexual activity painful (though that has now been resolved, I didn't know that it was just a little bitty physical thing that was creating this problem -- I thought there was just something wrong with me). So, there's a lot of shit going on here that basically makes the prospect of sexual congress a horrifying and nerve-wracking one for me.

Goose did two things for me. First, he made me feel safe around him. He managed to be both sexual and non-threatening at the same time, which is surprisingly tough to do. I've had a lot of male friends I found non-threatening, but I found them non-threatening because I completely lacked sexual interest in them. On the other hand, there are guys like The New Guy in whom I had a (brief and ill-advised) sexual interest but who intimidated me in a lot of ways. I don't know that Goose's particular formula here could be replicated in the sense that I don't think I could become unthreatened by or sexually attracted to men who did not make me feel like that initially. Second, he created a safe space for me to express my more sexual side without feeling threatened or judged. Mostly, we just joked around about stuff, but I felt like he thought I was funny and that it turned him on. Whenever I tried to be more sexually flirtatious with The New Guy, he acted like I was being a total whore and if I was being more aloof, he acted like I was being a total prude.

Goose has a lot of problems, at least with respect to trying to interact with me. Chief among these is that he doesn't tell the truth to himself, so he can't tell the truth to anyone else, and this leads to he and I not being able to have a relationship founded on truth or even one in which truth makes the occasional cameo. However, one thing that I must thank Goose for is that he allowed me to be this more sexual person for a little while. I learned from spending time with him that that person is still in there and that she can surface under the right conditions. Maybe I don't have to enter the convent after all.