“Did I tell you I lost my triginity last month when I was in Sweden?” I asked my old friend Chris in an IM last July. None of my friends knew what this meant. My friend Ivor thought maybe I was implying I had a divine sexual experience with the holy trinity. Otherwise, the phrase simply eluded my friends, rightfully, because I was merely referring to my third sex partner ever. Which under most circumstances, sits right up there with “my fourth apartment ever,” “my tenth dentist,” or “my second softball coach.”
There is this thing known as the “Interesting Numbers Paradox” which claims that when trying to logically separate numbers into sets of interesting and boring numbers, you will ultimately end up finding that all numbers, even ones categorically boring, are actually interesting. But my third sex partner? That’s pretty boring to anyone but me.
“No…? Your triginity? That… what exactly is that? Is that even a word?” “You know, like my third sex partner.”
I could hear his sigh even through my computer screen in the delayed response.
“Aimee, why is that even a thing?”
The third person I ever had sex with, I decided, would be reserved for the kind of person I was incapable of falling in love with and, likewise, who was incapable of falling in love with me. I had a painfully crafted list of criteria for who this person would be. My first (and probably only) time having sex with my third sex partner would be a momentous occasion marked by an aura of insignificance and nonchalance.
He would represent so much about me but very little about us. His job in my sex life would be as a time-altering lynchpin, only existing to warp my perceptions of all things past and all things forward. That’s not to say I wouldn’t care about him, like him, or want the experience to be memorable—I just didn’t want him to be the love of my life or even the kind of guy I’d ever want to do laundry for.
I wasn’t in any rush to find this. For as flippant a fling as this would be, I had a rather lengthy rubric for picking him, a far reduction from my normal “life partner” checklist. From February to June 2013, my male friends weathered a hearty blitzkrieg of my groaning about how all I wanted was friends. If you had a penis, doing anything with me was assuredly the most humiliating thing you’d be doing all week if not all year. The idea of the “friend zone” still annoys me today, but nowhere near as much as it did in those few months.
One night, I was laying on my couch in Austin with a bottle of wine, bored, when I clicked a link to a site that logged in through your Facebook account and let you mark which of your friends you’d fuck. It promised to not notify anyone unless there was a match.
Weeding out the married ones out of sheer awkwardness, I clicked on three of my friends before realizing that no logic would make this not awkward. It was too late though, because the site had already matched me up with Mike, a friend I met the previous summer in Paris who now lived in Stockholm. The thing is, when I clicked on the button under his name, it was sort of half-hearted and misplaced. I had just gotten out of a relationship and was still a bit intoxicated by the emotional confusion of that, to a degree where you see someone who you otherwise wouldn’t be attracted to and suddenly view them with wistful eyes.
I quickly closed the window and went back to other things, naively praying he’d never log into this site again. But thanks to Facebook notifications, it was only a matter of minutes before he messaged me on GTalk, asking me when I’d be in Sweden.
And it was out there, floating. I had plans to go to Sweden later that summer. We both knew the question was only half in jest and that something would actually happen.
There are two sides to Mike.
The first is a surface level composite portrait of a sweet small-framed guy with curly reddish hair. He knows a lot about programming. He works at Thoughtbot. He speaks at events. People respect his knowledge and actually want to hear what he has to say. He’s polite and you can see deep behind his eyes genuine interest when he listens to others talk. He’s a feminist but not in an outspoken sort of way. He’s open-minded and refreshingly positive about life. He is soft-spoken, but his words are sharp and unexpectedly with airs of optimism. He is the kind of guy who is always surrounded by people and he knows everyone.
The second side to Mike is buried under the covers, a living embodiment of that time you snuck into your parents’ bedroom and found lube and vintage hirsute porn. As time evolved, you grew more and more disconnected from that memory and every version of it grew worse in your mind. The lube went from being legit pharmacy lube to strawberry-flavored glow-in-the-dark truck stop anal lube. The magazines were suddenly cuckhold BBW fetish ones glazed in a film of mildewing ball sack sweat. And there was definitely a reader-submitted photo of your mom sucking off the mailman.
Where these two sides fold and meet is the slice of Mike that I got to know in Paris and Berlin on merely platonic terms. I never was sure if I wanted to dig into either side much more beyond the cursory glance I got through the hours we’d spend walking and talking on quays and through perplexingly large science museums.
Mike filled a world of youthful, sexual, cognitive dissonance. I knew he was into “weird stuff” through the tales he told of other girls, but I didn’t really have more than a relative understanding of what that meant, and in amusing retrospect, whatever it was about Mike that seemed so weird at the time no longer strikes me as being particularly weird. His weirdness was actually a measure of my own inexperience more than anything.
In Stockholm, we reunited over dinner and walked around town for a bit, heading back towards his apartment, which turned out to only be a block or two from where I was staying. Through the course of the evening, Mike would remark how negative I seemed lately. I was bored with my job. I was working on a side project, but feeling skeptical about where it was heading. And I was gallivanting around the globe trying to find something, anything to lose the numb feeling inside of me.
And, as a complete counterpart to that, I noticed Mike felt at ease in his new life in Stockholm. He had lots of friends and a busy schedule that I barely was able to fit my way into for this one evening. He was happy, but, then, he always was. And I felt odd because I didn’t feel a huge connection to this person who once I felt “got” me.
We stood in his living room, and I looked out the window to the neighboring apartment building. An obese lady was completely naked in her living room, laying on her couch, reading something on her iPad. Her windows had no blinds and you could tell by her body language that it wasn’t just that she didn’t know someone was watching her, but that she really didn’t care.
Mike got up and stood next to me, commenting that that was common behavior in Stockholm. He seemed aloof and very calm rather than apprehensive about our state of affairs. This might have been all for show, and I’ll never know.
After having sex, I had an overwhelming urge to leave. Between seeing the haircare products in his bathroom or the random books and CDs on his bedroom floor—Mike suddenly felt like a complete stranger to me. It’s like what I imagine it must feel like to have postpartum depression, that weird feeling where you feel no connection to the baby you just had. I felt like I was looking at Mike through a long tunnel. In some way, I felt happy knowing I was capable of feeling this way, happy that I could have sex with someone and not want to stay around, cuddling or talking. He waved his hand some and said we should get together again in a couple of days. I agreed, but I knew it was just empty talk. I went back to my place and told a couple of friends.
Interestingly, the first thing that one of them asked me was, “Are you okay?”
And I was. But only in so much as I was okay all through my time in Europe, where everything felt too fast and too blurry even as it was happening. And it felt like every moment was just me shoving more crap into my heart like an overpacked piece of luggage that you just know is going to explode later when you have to open it again. Every time something happened, I’d pack it up before I even had a chance to wear it.
Mike didn’t talk to me again while I was in Sweden. I never suspected it was because he was disinterested in me, but rather I think he felt awkward and possibly even rejected by how quick I was to pack him up too. And I never admitted it to anyone I knew, but those last few days in Sweden suddenly burned through me and I sat outside on a bench of a candy store, eating sour gummy worms and crying because I felt angry. Not angry at Mike or anything that happened there. Just angry at myself, angry knowing that no matter how far I fly on planes or how many blogs I write or how many crazy people I cross paths with, I can never get away from myself… or the way I feel about things.
There are no “life hacks” that will emotionally alter the way you see your past. Your view on your experiences changes when you change, not when the things you do—or the people you do—change.