Love Life Introspective: No, I am Not a Slut

So, I’ve been really quiet again lately. That’s because I keep starting posts and not finishing them. And I keep not finishing them because things are going really well, almost too well to be able to write about it in any meaningful way.

Most importantly, The Traveling Progressive and I have been seeing quite a lot of each other. He has made me a delicious dinner, taken me out for a fancy dinner, and put me completely out of my element by taking me out on an ATV.

And he told me stories of baby TTP crashing four-wheelers.

When I recently discussed this with my parents, the differences in their reactions were startling.

Me: TTP took me to the [little, fancy, expensive restaurant in town] last night.

Dad: Oh? How was it?

Me: It was really good. . .blah blah blah.

But later, my conversation with my mom was more like this:

Me: TTP took me to the [little, fancy, expensive restaurant in town] last night.

Mom: And is he expecting any reciprocity in return?

Me: [dumbfounded look as I try to decide if she is talking about my taking TTP out sometime]

Mom: Well, you know most guys expect something in return for taking you out to a nice dinner.

Me: Or. . . not. Because that hasn’t happened.

Mom: You need to play hard to get.

Now, I don’t necessarily want to discuss my parents’ disparate reactions, or how weird it is that my mom chose to focus on whether or not I was sleeping with him while my dad just cared how dinner was. I also don’t want to talk about my mother’s passive comments like smirking at me when someone mention’s “fuck buddies” or straight up asking “who are you sleeping with now?” when I try to get my family to make plans in advance so I can plan the rest of my weekend.

I know my mother doesn’t think I’m a slut, but these comments certainly contribute to one little problem: I have fallen really fast for TTP, I want to sleep with him, and I’m horribly afraid to because what if he thinks I’m a slut when I do?

This is not a way I have ever felt before in my life. This either means that things with TTP are very different than with other guys (uuugh, maybe a lottle) or that The Grad School Boyfriend really screwed with me psychologically.

Here is the story with The Grad School Boyfriend:

We met. He had another girlfriend. We flirted. He broke up with girlfriend. We kept flirting. He said he wanted to take things slow/didn’t want to be in a relationship. I told him that I would continue to see other people if the opportunity arose if we were solely casually dating because I was not going to sit around and wait for him to be ready for a relationship. He thought it was an ultimatum, but it was more a statement of fact. He could do whatever he wanted, and so could I. We started dating. He convinced me to spend the night on our first date, even though I told him multiple times I didn’t think it was a good idea.

We fooled around. That’s it. We eventually moved on to sex (after he had a meltdown about it the first time we tried) and all the other normal couple things. But after a few months, things got weird, and he started freaking out about the fact that I had slept with people before hand. The short version goes something like this: every time he would get drunk, he would call me a slut or a whore. Every time we would have a fight, he would bring up the fact that I hadn’t saved myself for him and claim that if we broke up, I would just go back to sleeping with whoever I could whenever I could.

The Grad School Boyfriend and I broke up for good last November. Almost a year later, his comments are still ringing in the back of my head.

I’ll be honest: before that, I’d never felt like a slut. Even when he said that, I knew I wasn’t one. There is absolutely nothing wrong with a girl enjoying sex and having it, in or out of a committed relationship. But now I really like this guy, and I all of a sudden care about whether or not he is going to share these views. This is silly because (a) I’ve known him for years and he already knows that I’ve slept with other people, and (b) I know that he has been with other people, including a girl who I was good friends with who would self-identify as “promiscuous.”

So, unlike my mom probably believes, TTP and I have still not slept together. It doesn’t mean I don’t want to. I’m totally wild about him. He is really excellent at turning me on, from the way he puts his hands on me to the way he kisses me to the kinds of text messages he sends when we aren’t together.

 

And that’s one of the more mild ones.

So, this past weekend I finally talked about this with the TTP. Because we send each other pretty racy/explicit text messages and we spend a lot of time with our mouths together and our hands all over each other’s bodies. I had recently told him that I was worried about our sleeping together ruining things. He told me that he disagreed, but he respected that.

Still, after kissing on each other for like an hour, I thought he deserved to know a bit more, which meant making myself feel very vulnerable and silly and ridiculous. And I do not like to feel vulnerable. I like to feel powerful and in charge.

Before I could really even say anything, though, he asked “Zadie, do you have an STI?” in the most exasperated tone he could have used. And I laughed so hard I could barely say “no.” I have to admit, it made me feel much better to know that not even having an STI could have kept him from being interested in me.

So I told him a little more about the Grad School Boyfriend and the way he reacted to my sexual past and how that was really weighing on me now, in the early stages of this relationship. His response was to tell me that my having had sex with other people would never make him think ill of me, that he was sorry I went through that and that my ex sounds like an asshole.

Then he showered me with compliments, made me laugh, and kissed me so sweetly that I’m pretty sure my heart did flips.

Just a couple of weeks ago I was saying how I wasn’t sure I was ready to be in a committed relationship again, but now I’m not so sure. It seems like the world just handed me the greatest guy I could ever imagine.