Q: I’m a 32-year-old, very
attractive, very fit SWM living in NYC. I’m well-read and well-spoken.
I march to the beat of my own drum. Friends tell me that my personality
is intense. It must be true—everyone concurs. I’m extremely
idealistic, and I count myself as a romantic. I’m interested in an
intense and consuming love affair with a woman. But friends tell me
that my approach to courtship and my energy scare women off.
I’m tired of fouling things up and making myself lonely. Yet, when a
lady friend of mine, in response to my most recent upset, suggested I
spend a night out with her where she would act as my wingman, I
recoiled. Prowling for random women in a bar doesn’t fit my sense of
romance.
Should I consider counseling to try to tame my personality? Should I
just be myself and continue being lonely and misunderstood?
Wild Horses Drag Me Away
A: You don’t give me much to
go on, WHDMA. It would help to know, for example, what exactly you’re
doing—besides being all intensely romantic and extremely idealistic
and physically fit and stuff—that scares women off. How does your
“intensity” manifest itself? Without that info, it’s difficult to whip
up some advice for you.
But I can do a little decoding for you: When friends say “your
personality is intense,” what they typically mean is “you are an
asshole.”
Assholes who have friends sometimes conclude that there’s something
wrong with dating or bars or all the women and/or men on the planet
because, hey, I’ve got friends—and if my friends can stand me,
why couldn’t my ex-girlfriend(s)? But friending, if I may borrow
Facebook’s proprietary verb, an asshole is easy; dating an asshole is
hard. (Or that’s what my boyfriend tells me, anyway.)
A friendship involves a smaller time commitment; a girlfriend, if
you could keep one, is required to spend much more time with you. Not
only that, WHDMA, but people who are romantically involved with
assholes come in for a higher degree of scrutiny. A person with an
asshole friend is regarded as tolerant and/or indulgent and/or foolish.
But a person with an asshole boyfriend is viewed as having a character
flaw. Or several: lousy taste in men, the wrong kind of masochistic
streak, low self-esteem, abuse issues, etc.
So, yeah, you should consider counseling to “tame your personality.”
Your alleged virtues—extremely intense! extremely romantic! extremely
idealistic!—may not themselves be the problem. But if the people
living outside your skull have identified them as impediments to your
professed romantic goals, WHDMA, then there’s something problematic
about the way you’re expressing them.
And that lady friend who offered to take you out and act as your
wingman? I suspect she was trying to pull the stick out of your ass and
trying to get you to see that dating—at least at the outset—is
about pleasure, not intensity. I assure you that bars all over the
civilized world are packed with “random women” as interested in intense
and consuming love affairs as you are. You might want to give them a
chance.
Q: A long time ago I
experienced, late one nite, roasted, drunk, blah, blah, blah!!! This
brother picked me up and drove me to his place and screwed me good. He
said I was hot!!! I really liked it, had an anal orgasm!!! It was
indescribable. I loved it!!! He gave me his number. But I was too shy
to call back. Never saw him again. So I bought dildos and proceeded to
fuck myself and get drunk or high (weed) every night!!! What does that
make me? Closet drunk? Closet English cigarette? I like pussy, too!
Whatzup?! Anonymously Me
A: I don’t have the faintest
idea!!!
Q: My boyfriend refuses to
have any kind of intercourse with me while my Aunt Flo is visiting. I’m
not asking to have sex when I’m on my heavy days, just at the beginning
and tail ends of my period. He says it’s disgusting, even if he wears a
condom, and that it makes his stomach turn to even think about it. I
find this terribly frustrating because my period lasts a good 10 days
(according to his definition), and I have to go without any loving the
whole time. And yet he expects me to blow him on a regular basis during
that time. I love him, and I’d rather not DTMFA over this. What can I
do?
Aunt Flo Terminates Erection Return
A: Only blow him on days
when he hasn’t used his penis to urinate.
Because really, AFTER, how can he ask you to suck cock on days when
pee comes out of his thing? That’s just as disgusting—it’s more
disgusting—than a little bit of blood on the condom. And any guy who
can’t handle a little bit of blood shouldn’t be asking his girlfriend
to ingest whatever trace amounts of urine might be lurking in his
urethra. But if he wants you to blow him—to keep him content during
your period—then he needs to find a way to do the same for you. If he
can’t bring himself to fuck you during your period, AFTER, then at the
very least he can help you get off with a vibrator, or engage in
outercourse with you, or mutual masturbation, or eat your pussy through
a wad of Saran Wrap.
If he won’t do any of that, reconsider DTMFA.
Q: I thought I knew what
teabagging meant: to dip a man’s testicles in and out of your mouth.
But during a recent conversation about the Republican teabagging craze,
my boyfriend told me that teabagging meant to put your balls into
someone else’s mouth. A person without balls, he insists, can’t do the
teabagging. But many people I know think they are the teabagger and
their partner is the one being teabagged. An internet search turns up
both definitions. So, Dan, I’m asking you—as an expert on all things
both political and sexual—do any of us hetero females have a chance
of teabagging president Obama?
The Earnest Aspirant
A: Let’s say you were in the
West Wing with Barack Obama’s sack resting comfortably in your mouth.
Perhaps you had done something meritorious—defeated the Somalian
pirates, sworn in senator Al Franken—and you were being awarded the
presidential Wattle of Freedom. The New York Times might report,
“The president of the United States and a Savage Love reader were
spotted ‘teabagging’ in the Oval Office today.”
But while you can teabag with the president, TEA, you don’t have
what it takes to administer a teabagging to the president. To teabag
someone, you need a scrotum with which to teabag them: The teabagger
dips sack; a teabaggee receives dipped sack. It’s a little confusing, I
realize, in that it’s the opposite of a blowjob: The person with a dick
in his or her mouth is giving the blowjob; the person being sucked is
receiving the blowjob. But language is funny that way.
Download Dan’s Savage Lovecast (his weekly podcast)
every Tuesday at thestranger.com/savage.
Email Dan at mail@savagelove.net.
This article appears in Apr 23-29, 2009.
“An Intense Sense of Romance” or “Neediness”
Wow, without “much to go on” you were able to deduce that WHDMA was an asshole who needed psychological help. That is sure to leave him with a better self-esteem the next time rejection comes around. But wait, self-esteem couldn’t have anything to do with this, could it? I subscribe to the same qualities as WHDMA except that I don’t scare women away, or if I do, I could care less. Call me an asshole then but I love who I am even if I am often misunderstood for being “hyper-aware”. In such a “me me me” culture it’s amazing the lack of healthy self-love and therefore self-esteem that is possessed by individuals. Once upon a time drama was called passion, and there are men and women still believe in high doses of it who as you said yourself probably populate all kinds of bars, however unable to find each other they are. Also, high intensity people are often turned off by others who meet them with the same flare; it’s too easy for such passionate rebels and they diffuse their own cause. There’s a good chance WHDMA has friends who don’t tolerate but love him precisely for his energy, and if that intensity were lost he would be somebody else. Maybe the problem isn’t intensity but a fear of how people will respond and a hyper-awareness of his own intensity that he unknowingly communicates as insecurity, which in turn results in his attempt to control how women receive his passionate approach to them. There’s a reason that women were attracted to him in the past, and it was other qualities like CONTROLLING and INSECURE that scared them off, not intensity. Be yourself WHDMA, just don’t project onto the people around you. If you’re going to be intense people will often be disconcerted, that’s just how it is. But if you’re insecure about it more of them will leave rather than sticking around to discover more about this mysteriously intense, educated, healthy man. You should be content to be a “hopeless romantic” whether woman run from you or not. In the mean time, start a revolution with that energy, fall in love with life, and share that energy with the rest of the gendered population, or you truly will be an asshole 3 months into the relationship when they cannot capacitate such narrowly channeled desire.
I dunno…the first thing I thought when I read his letter is “intense” is the tactful word I use to describe people who usually care WAY to much about stupid shit and corner you at parties with their wild-eyed stories about how everyone else is wrong and they are always right. The best strategy is usually to keep smiling and nodding until you can safely make an excuse and get the hell out of there. Hooray for being passionate about stuff, I guess, but you have to at least have some basic respect for how a conversation is supposed to work.