Sigh…I actually just said that out loud…it’s Monday morning and I’m starting to feel better from a flu-like monstrosity that invaded me on Saturday morning and raged inside all day Sunday. I also just ended seeing a woman whom I really liked. The physical assault on my body by the viral assassins (of unknown origin) will fade relatively quickly while the mental echo’s of the woman I just broke up with will remain for quite a while.

I liked her very much. I could say VERY much…as her thoughts and ideas about life, art, living, etc. resonated with me at a molecular level…or so it felt…and we spent hours with each other at dinner, at bars and clubs…via text and on the phone (which, by the way, I detest…not talking to her, talking to anyone on the phone). I thought that there was something special there, something long sought and very rarely found; a connection.

I was right and wrong.

Everything was amazing when we were out and about in public places, on the phone even as much as it makes me uncomfortable, and definitely via text. It wasn’t until we were finally in private, when she came over for dinner, that I realized how divergent some of our most basic ideals were. It’s a long involved conversation but the specific and salient details were mostly centered around sex and emotions and the emotional investigation surrounding actions and reactions. While we were in agreement on the rough outlines of happiness, we were most decidedly not on the same page down in the details.

She told me that she had been hurt deeply in her marriage (long since passed) by his cheating and lying about affairs. This had a devastating effect on her self-image (both emotionally and physically) and kept her at arm’s length from others for a long time. Then, when she was back out in the mix, she almost replayed, frame by frame, the same scenario and outcome with someone she was dating.

I get that this had a lasting and deep effect…and likely something that will be dealt with for a long time. It made her views on sex almost inextricable from her views on love and emotion. She was highly suspect about men’s motivations and convinced herself that every man saw her in one way only; a sexual conquest and object to be used and rejected once done with. I totally understand that and I feel deeply for her, in all kinds of ways, but I also deeply understand that she is not someone I can be with.

And I feel just awful about it.

My own story, as messing and as complicated as hers, had to do with being in a loveless marriage at the end where sex was not even discussed let alone occurred. It has to do with understanding my internal requirements and seeing that love and sex were entirely different things. I was about sex being used as a behavior modifier and bribe in order to affect change. It was about sex becoming a detraction in a relationship…not the utterly amazing and intimate revelation that it can be.

I will never be in that situation again.

My views on sex, now, are so totally different than what they were when I was married because then I did not know I had a choice…that I could change how I saw sex; how I felt about it and how it affected me. The person I am now has set sex free from any regulated or accepted construction created by society in the sense that it is as important as touch, as smell and as sight, more so because it combines all of them.

But…sex is not love.

It is a component of love but it is not love and I simply refuse to become captive to that circuitous scenario of relying on one to prove the other. The idea that sex and love are mutual inclusive meaning that I must convince myself, like she has done and as society has helped her, that one cannot (or should not) exist without the other. I cannot (and will not) allow myself to fall in love without investigating and as deeply (as possible) understand the sexual component of a relationship because I have not done so in the past and it has never worked out. Once I’m in love, it becomes a very tough choice to leave a relationship if I find that I and she are not, after all, sexually compatible. It’s an internal argument I simply don’t want to have, as cowardly as that may sound.

I simply choose to not put myself in that position.

And I feel bad that I can’t be in a relationship with her because she cannot stop her internal battles from raging, she cannot divorce herself from emotions indelibly dyed by the hurt of traitorous deception. She cannot stop being herself…regardless that the “herself” at that moment would be quite different than the “herself” of the future.

My life is now, not the future…and I cannot ever go back to being a person that accepts the promise of future riches for the pain and sorrow of now.