!!!!!*****WORKING DRAFT*****!!!!!
Howard finished law school that spring; over the summer, while he volunteered at the Cambridge law clinic as he studied for his boards, we involuntarily passed from being occasional companions to true friends. I still saw my therapist most weeks, so I no longer needed a boy – a man – to hear my confused feelings. With Mike, the combination of first love, innocent love, progressing to friendship, through intimacy, then butting up against our inability to fully say good-bye, had tortured us on the downslope of our relationship, finally preventing any hope of breaking through to a life together.
So one day that fall, I woke up and realised, Howard and I are now a couple, and that feels safe and warm. But not the same, it never could be the same, as before. A full employment guarantee for my therapist, I suppose.
Early November, she asked, seemingly out of the blue, “Why do you suppose we so often refer to sex euphemistically as ‘sleeping together’?” Almost as if she herself were struggling with the idea, and wanted help in understanding.
“Trust” floated through my head. Out loud, I ventured, “At work, I see all these people asleep all the time. It’s my job to study them, to observe and record. Sometimes I wonder, ‘How can they trust us, strangers really?’
“Trust?” she repeated.
“They look so…vulnerable. Unmoving, peaceful, but helpless as a newborn baby. We could do anything to them, before they knew it.”
“Babies. Hmm…”
“Yeah, so when we’re – when I’m – having sex, I am, I feel completely open, totally at risk. I have to trust my partner, in so many ways, before, during and after.”
She speculated, “And might a partner feel the same way?”
Inwardly, I startled, realising I’d always been so wrapped up in my own feelings, of vulnerability, anxiety, that I’d never considered he – whoever he might be – could have anxieties of his own. “It’s hard, thinking about this. It is wrapped up in babies, and there were are, usually naked, dependent, almost babies ourselves.”
“What else?”
I wondered what she meant, where she might be pointing me. “Love. It’s all wrapped up in love, isn’t it?”
“Is it?”
Once again I started, as I compared my feelings about those two very different men. Those feelings weren’t the same, for sure. With Howard, we worked well together, but the childish romantic passion I’d had with Mike simply wasn’t there.
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