Estimated reading time: 15 minutes
Dear Professor DorkDesire,
I’m writing with a more general question today, about something that (like most topics, honestly) has more nuance to it than often depicted. There’s often a lot of shame wrapped up in being a “late bloomer”, and having had little to no relationship or sexual experience. The typical advice regarding this is generally focused on pointing out that the whole thing is mostly a construct, being a virgin doesn’t matter as much as society tells you it does, and that inexperience shouldn’t dictate your own sense of confidence in your value. All great stuff, and something a lot of people need to hear.
But what about the case where it IS actually meaningful?
I’m not trying to go all “but you see, MY experience is special and different”, but I’ll do my best to explain. I’m 32m, and I haven’t had any real sexual or relationship experience since I was around 17-18. I’m not on the aro/ace spectrum, and the reasons it’s been so long are more a topic for my therapist than an advice columnist. But I haven’t struggled as much as many do with the shame around “being a virgin”, or at least not in the same way. Rather than feeling like I’m somehow “tainted” or “lesser”, it’s more a sense of loss or grief. I’ve gone a long time without love or sex in my life, despite wanting and valuing that kind of connection and intimacy deeply. And while “the past is past, and everyone has one”, and it matters less to others than most people think, I still find myself struggling to process the grief of mourning that lost time.
Obviously there’s no time like the present to start, and 32 is not old at all, and CERTAINLY nowhere near “too late”, but it’s also true that there’s a real pain in having lost the opportunity to explore love and romance in early adulthood, to learn about myself and how I relate to others, and a little bit of uncertainty in how that history will be seen by others. I’ve seen the advice many times before that it’s not that big a deal, those that matter don’t mind, those that mind don’t matter, etc. But that perspective can kind of squash and minimize the real sorrow that an individual can feel at having lost that time. I know a lot of my experience has revolved around the feeling of alienation knowing that these things aren’t objectively a big deal, but caring about them deeply anyway, and feeling somehow “wrong” for doing so.
I hope that makes sense, and I’ll try not to ramble too much trying to make my point. Basically, I’m talking about dealing with the real sorrow involved in having gone a long time without experiences that others have had, that is generally expected by a certain age if you have a reasonable sex drive, and represents a very real developmental milestone for many. I can’t speak for others, but I’ve found a lot of loneliness in the advice of “don’t obsess over things like body count or experience, and just make real connections”, because while the actual binary of “have I had sex or not” isn’t important to me, the long nearly 15 years of hoping and trying to find something and not succeeding feels very real, and very invisible to those around me.
Hope that makes sense, and I understand if the answer is simply “work it out in therapy”, but I’m curious what you might have to say about this aspect that I think is very real, but not often talked about.
-I’m Not Mad, I’m Just Disappointed
You know, it’s not very often that I suggest someone get more into Marcus Aurelius, but I feel like it’s warranted here.
Marcus Aurelius is, to me, a case of “Jesus save me from your fan club”, as hordes of pop-psych-reading business bros, empty-souled Silicon Valley wanna-be tycoons, and red-pill popping masculinity-grievance-peddlers all seemed to discover Stoicism in the 2010s and took it to mean that the point of being A Real Man is to become an asshole Vulcan. Much as with the recent spate of Adult Catholic Converts, it’s popularity seems to be based around folks reading a bunch of reposted memes featuring cherry-picked, misunderstood or completely made-up quotes and assuming they’ve read the entirety of the canon; even the Cliff’s Notes version of Meditations would be more useful.
But the general point of Stoicism in general and Aurelius’ writings in particular is fairly simple: life sucks, what are you going to do about it? And while this feels a little callous, especially for a shallow (and incredibly boiled down) belief, it makes a good point: you’re going to have a lot of shit happen in your life that you would rather not happen, and you’re going to have to accept that it has happened or will happen, and you can’t change that. Some things are just out of your control, end of sentence. Expending blood, sweat, tears and time on trying to control those things is a fool’s effort and will only make life and suffering worse for the futility of it.
But that’s not to say that the point is to just lay down and take it with all the broken spirit of a mistreated puppy. It’s to recognize that while much of life is outside of your control, there is just as much that is within your control and to put your effort and energy there. And part of what’s within your control is how you choose to respond to the things that you have no control over. Among those responses is to recognize that often it’s our own expectations that lead to suffering… and those expectations are entirely within our control to change.
Now put a pin in that while I make a hard pivot, because I wrote myself into a corner and didn’t leave myself a clever segue for this topic change, and instead let’s talk about grief, mourning and disappointment.
It’s entirely natural and normal to grieve things that were lost. It’s perfectly normal and human to be sad and disappointed about things that you hoped would happen but didn’t. These are all parts of the human experience and as the wise man once said: macho men can show the full range of human emotions. But to quote a different wise man: “I love my cigar, but I take it out of my mouth every once in a while.”
Grief and mourning are a part of life, whether for the loss of people, loss of times of our lives or simply for dreams that never came true. But part of the point of mourning is to process the loss, come to terms with it and then move forward from it. That doesn’t mean that you don’t miss what’s gone or that you don’t care about the loss. It means that you accept it, you make what peace you can, and then you continue on with your life because time only flows in one direction and you can’t stop it or reverse it, no matter how much you wish you could.
Staying in a constant state of grief does nothing for you but exacerbate and prolongs the hurt and keeps you from actually living your life. You functionally put significant parts of your life on hold for no good reason while you sit in the pain. Worse, you often spend energy maintaining that pain, feeding it like adding fuel to a fire when it starts to go out, prolonging that mourning even further.
I’m not going to tell you that it’s wrong to have a sad over something you feel you missed out on; those feelings are real and you’re feeling them. There’s no reason to beat yourself up for having them, either. That does no good and serves no purpose except to make yourself feel worse and reinforce the negative emotions and self-image.
What I am going to do is tell you that your holding onto those feelings is also not doing you any good and is, in fact, actively hindering you in your life. Holding onto them has done nothing but lock you in a version of the past, where the only thing that matters is what you haven’t done, and that has come to define the rest of your life. A life that is increasingly about what you haven’t done and not what you will do.
Which drags us, kicking and screaming, back to Marcus Aurelius and the Stoics.
(Who will be opening for Cold Slither at Wacken this year…)
As I said: Stoicism is a philosophy, in part, about recognizing what is outside of your control and choosing to focus on what is within your control. While you can’t control many of the things that have happened in your life, you can control your reaction to them and your response to them. Hence: “shit happens, what are you going to do about it?”
You are focused on something you can’t control, and you’re letting it lock you in place. And to be clear, this is a choice. You can’t stop how you feel, but you can choose what you’re going to do with those feelings. Feelings, even sadness and grief, can be many things. They can be fuel and motivation, pushing you forward to make things better. Or they can be an anchor, holding you back and ultimately dragging you down.
You didn’t have the experiences when you were younger that you wish you did. At the risk of sounding cold: ok… so what? You can’t go back and change things, so what are you going to do now? The past is past; it’s outside of your control. Nobody can change it. What is within your control is how you respond now.
Right now, you’re beating yourself up over something that never happened, and part of the way you’re beating yourself up is to hold up expectations that ultimately only matter to you, and then blame yourself for not meeting them. This is very much a matter of presumption and projection; you are reacting to the imagined responses of people you have created in your mind based on your own beliefs. You are, quite literally, inventing someone to be upset at you. This does nothing helpful or useful and doesn’t even serve the purpose of making you happy. This is a prison you’ve locked yourself into, and you’re the only person with the key. And again, at the risk of sounding cold: you’re ultimately the only person this matters to. The rest of the world neither knows or cares.
So, what is the point of holding onto this pain and chewing on it over and over again? Continually reopening the wound so you can feel the sting again isn’t doing anything for you. It certainly isn’t opening a portal to the past that would let you alter your history. So why is it worth the effort to hold onto it, to ruminate on it and cry over it instead of making your peace with it and resolving to change your life now, instead of your life then?
You want love, you want sex, you want relationships. These are all good things to want. So what are you going to do to find them? Put aside things like “what will people think?” or “won’t people look down on me for not having had those things?” Leaving aside that no, most people won’t… if they do, then so what? Once again: you can’t control what they do or think; you can only control how you respond and react to those occasions if they occur. And among what you control is how much credence or care you give the opinions of those people.
And here’s something that I don’t think you’ve quite understood: “what you control” includes how you choose to see your past. You can choose to see it as a failure, or you can choose to see it as a simple fact, without judgement attached. Someone can’t shame you for something that isn’t shameful. It’s a little like mocking someone for having a nice breakfast; what’s supposed to be bad about that? Recognizing the absurdity and not taking the judgement seriously removes its power. So too does not recognizing the authority of the person to judge you. Would you feel embarrassed because a 5-year-old told you that your shirt was ugly? Would you give a damn what your least-favorite celebrity thought of your hair? Or would you roll your eyes and continue to go about your day?
You didn’t have X experience by Y age. And? You’re hardly alone in this, and you’re basing the shame you feel about it on expectations that are entirely arbitrary. Take away the idea that you were “supposed” to do something and all you have is data. A binary. This happened, this other thing didn’t. 1s and 0s. There’s no judgement in that. Judgement is applied from the outside and only accepted from the inside. Accepting it is your choice. So is rejecting it.
You can’t change your past, so you may as well accept it as a fact, without judgement, because it’s not something that requires or merits judgement. If you accept it as mere data, it only has the power you give it. Your lamenting what didn’t happen won’t retcon your life, so you may as well let it go instead of getting stuck in a neverending moment of grief. This doesn’t mean you never think of it again, but it does mean changing how you think of it and why. You can say “well, I wish I had done this differently”, but that only serves a purpose if you apply that lesson to the present and future and let it spur you into action instead of paralysis.
The only person holding you in this place is you. The only person who can free you from it is you. You can’t choose what you feel, but you can choose what you do with and about those feelings.
Shit happens; what are you going to do about it? It’s your call.
Good luck.
Hi Doc!
I need some perspective on a situation I’m (F) having with my boyfriend. I feel constantly objectified by him, even though I know he wouldn’t do that intentionally nor that he views me that way. So, I’m not sure how to confront him or where to go from here.
He constantly talks about how attractive I am, how much he misses my body, how much he wants to grab and touch me. This is all amazing, but the problem is that he can’t mention anything else about me. Even in the middle of normal conversations, he somehow manages to bring up something about my body or that he wants to grab and fondle me. When I’m made visibly uncomfortable from these comments, he interprets it as me rejecting his sexual expression. I want to be sexual… But I want to do things WITH him, I don’t want him to do things TO ME!
I also have a lower sex drive than him, so I worry that if I bring this up it will feel like I’m not attracted to him sexually because I don’t like this sort of attention. I’m lost!!
Thank you so much.
Sincerely
More Than Meat
I’m reminded of the words of Strother Martin: “What we’ve got here is… failure to communicate.” Your boyfriend believes that he’s paying you sincere compliments, ones that he believes highlight and pay homage to qualities he finds special and significant in you. He doesn’t get that this bothers you because your discomfort seems to be expressed physically, rather than verbally, and so he misunderstands what you’re responding to and attributes it to an entirely different issue.
Well, that’s a level of ignorance that’s easily fixed. The easiest way for him to realize that this bothers you is to tell him, MTM. It makes you uncomfortable and you’d rather he didn’t focus entirely on your body or in ways that make you feel like an object instead of a person… so tell him precisely that.
But this failure to communicate goes both ways. You’re worried that he’s going to conflate your dislike of his compliments because of your lower libido… but that’s also a matter of communication. When you tell him that you don’t like feeling like the only thing he cares about is your body, then you also tell him why this bothers you. It’s not about being attracted to him or not being attracted to him and it’s not about your sex drive; it’s about feeling like you could be replaced with an inanimate object without his noticing the difference.
This is the sort of thing that an Awkward Conversation is made for: to deal with a problem that needs to be addressed but that you have had a hard time bringing up for various reasons. You want to make time to have this talk and explain why this is a problem and why it bothers you. Then you follow it up with propositions and suggestions about what could be done differently and why you feel that this would help or make things better.
One thing that might help would be to ask him what he likes about you that isn’t based around your body, your sexuality or what he wants to do to you. Ask him about some of the other qualities you have that he loves and admires and let him know that you appreciate compliments and comments on those, too… possibly even more than ones about your looks and physicality.
There’s a phrase I like when it comes to compliments that I feel is appropriate here: “Praise the beautiful on their intelligence and the intelligent on their beauty”. That is: compliment someone on things that other people don’t often notice or praise. The things we hear often can lose their impact, but the things we don’t expect or hear often can have incredible power. Someone admiring a quality of yours that other people don’t often see or comment on just hits different, and often better. And that feeling that they get you in a way that other people don’t can be a huge boon to the relationship.
And as a bonus, having this Awkward Conversation can help the two of you make sure that you understand each other’s language. Sometimes the words we’re using and the way we’re saying things confuse or hide the underlying meaning that we’re attempting to convey. If he’s someone who expresses love through intimacy, touch and physical affection, that declaration of love can be lost if you’re hearing it as objectification. He may be saying he loves and cares for you even if and when your libidos don’t line up, but takes the discomfort not just as a rejection of sex but a rejection of love.
But again: he can’t know what you’re feeling if you don’t tell him and you can’t know what he’s feeling if he doesn’t tell you in ways that you both understand. It’s all too easy to mistake why someone feels a certain way if you don’t have the necessary context. Talking this out with him is going to be an important part of building a greater level of clear and open communication. And that will have a tremendous impact on the quality of your connection and your relationship together.
Plus it means that when you are in the mood to be treated like a piece of meat… he’ll know when and how to do so.
Good luck.
