Mike Alvear's Urge & Merge

It was just after midnight and we were curled up on her sofa, making out like teenagers. The first date had gone unusually well; hours of scintillating conversation, intermingled with blatant sexual innuendo, had led to a cab outside her home. When I asked if she intended to ‘invite me up for coffee’, she rolled her eyes. ‘I know exactly what kind of “coffee” you want.’

‘I like my coffee like I like my women’ I replied. ‘Dark, and just slightly bitter. Like you.’

In the flickering candlelight of her tiny living room, hands, mouths and lips were moving in synchronous motion. She was astride me, her bra vanished, and I was flicking counter-clockwise circles with the tip of my tongue around her perfectly formed, eraser-tip nipples, when I deftly slid my fingers into her jeans and down the crack of her ass. She paused.

‘I don’t think we should, tonight’ she heaved. ‘After all, it’s only our first date.’

I cradled her face in my hands. ‘We don’t have to. You’re the woman; you have the right to say no at any time. But we are adults. We’re here. We’re worked up. What is accomplished by sending me home all hot and bothered? I’m going to walk out the door and one of two things is going to happen: either we’re both going to go masturbate alone, or you’re going to masturbate and I’m going to go make a phone call. It’s up to you.’

Several hours and broken pieces of furniture later, we both agreed we’d come, to the right conclusion.

I’m always amazed in this day and age when I encounter women who choose to postpone sex with a man they think has relationship potential, either because they think they won’t be taken seriously if they sleep with a man on the first date, or out of some antiquated notion that unless you make us work for it, we won’t appreciate it.

I’m here to call bullshit on both. Read the rest of this entry »

A few weeks ago my boyfriend dumped me. Perhaps boyfriend is not exactly the term to use here, we were actually more like acquaintances with benefits. There is nothing particularly unique  about my story, though I must add here that I am happily married with almost grown children. However, like some women obsessively collect china or Pandora jewelry, I collect men.

Everyone needs a hobby.

So my friend breaking things off with me was no big deal, I’ll just go get a new one. What was unique was the reason that he ended our affair.

He was tired of me using him for sex.

Seriously.

This all occurred on my Monday appointment setting time. At the beginning of the week I line up my appointments; nails, blow outs, personal trainer, chiropractor, fuck buddy. Tuesday and Thursday evenings are reserved for my encounters. My family thinks I am at a Hadassah meeting or the gym, thus cannot be reached via cell phone for a few hours.

However that morning was different. He was nervous when he called me back on his “special” phone line. I keep a Tracfone (also referred to as my “booty call phone”) for my monsieur du jour, so that way there is no chance of them showing up on my regular cell phone bill. He had apparently thought through what he wanted to say ahead of time and the tightness of stress in his voice was evident. Read the rest of this entry »

Raise your hand if you’ve ever survived a difficult relationship with a man and decided life surely must be better on the opposite side of the fence. I don’t know if gay men go through that thought  process, but everyone of my girlfriends has said it at least once jokingly after a horrendous breakup.

Being a literal sort of girl, I decided to go see if that pasture was any greener than the straight side of the field.

I decide to pole vault into girl-on-girl world in the summer of 1988. Having had at least a decade of dick behind me (sometimes literally), I noticed my lesbian friends seemed to be having a hell of a lot more fun than I was. I had already slept with women in college, so that so called taboo was out of the way.

Luckily I had my own personal guide to lesbian Atlanta to help ease the transition. She would show up at work on Mondays with blackened eyes and enormous hickeys from her weekend romps, sharing  her adventures with our co-workers during smoke breaks. Her pickups showered her with attention; sending flowers, taking her to lunch, giving her rent money. There was an endless line up of older gay women in expensive cars spoiling her rotten and that looked like exactly what I needed too. At that point in my life I had financially and emotionally supported an ever changing line up of would be rock stars, so a sugar mama sounded like a dream come true.

I started hitting up the gay bars with her on weekends. I chopped off my hair into a cute, shaggy little cut and found freedom in a cosmetic free face. I added some polo shirts and flat shoes to my wardrobe. I danced my Doc Martin shod feet off to “I Just Want To Be Your Lover Girl”  at the Sports Page  and Talluleh’s.

I discovered that picking up women is a lot more difficult than picking up men. Read the rest of this entry »

Since the dawn of time, all of mankind has been plagued with questions that distract and taunt us.

Why do bad things happen to good people? What is my purpose in life? Why is “The View” still on the air? Most of these types of questions are best left unanswered, yet they bob in and out of our minds on a daily basis.

Being single can be a bottomless well of unanswerable questions, triggering confusion and frustration rarely seen outside of a Physics class. While in the midst of a dating dry spell, one finds themselves consumed with thoughts as to why no one wants to go out with them. Is it because of what you do for a living, where you hang out, who you know, or because you look like an Ewok? These concerns turn out to be as insignificant as a Mosque in Alabama once you actually start dating someone. That’s when the real trouble begins.

Read the rest of this entry »

A hand-selected round-up of Postsecret’s best sex and dating-related submissions:

Love ain’t enough. 

That’s a bitter pill to swallow. Or as a slightly oversexed friend likes to say, a bitter pillow to bite. 

When you’re in a relationship you realize love has all the limitations of glue:  It can’t stick if the parts don’t fit. I thought about all this when I bumped into an ex-boyfriend, who reminded me of a column I wrote about our break-up.  It was the first time I had ever written about love, and I remember being startled by the emotional response it got:

Our relationship ended after six or seven years.  That I couldn’t remember exactly when we met or how long we’d been together was a constant source of irritation to him.  Enraged at my memory lapses, he would introduce me as “my boyfriend, Ronald Reagan.”  

We fought for all the reasons people fight-money, misunderstanding, lust, and trust.  At first, problems came at us with all the weight of mid-summer snowflakes.  They melted before we even had the chance to flick them off.  But winter crept in and suddenly nothing would melt.  There was no avalanche, really.  I guess the snow just built up and caved the roof in. 

We drifted into a trial separation.  He got more clarity and I got more distant.  One day the phone rang.  He looked at the caller ID. 

“Who is it?” I asked.  “You,” he answered.

Confused, I walked over and saw what the caller ID flashed:   “UNAVAILABLE.”

I wonder if men are really capable of working things out in a relationship.  We have what it takes to love but do we have what it takes to stay?  Straight men can barely stay with women; what are the odds gay men can stay with each other?

We want our relationships to last like trees, stately oaks with deep roots that last forever.  But our relationships endure more like perennials, barely scratching the topsoil, coming back again and again in bloom-and-doom boomerangs.

Our relationship boomeranged from one end of the spectrum to the other, but our love didn’t.  It was so palpable, so present.  But people who think that’s all you need to keep a relationship going are wrong.  And single, too.  Only the unmarried think you can save a relationship with more love.

My love never changed, but my dreams did.  And so did his.  The steadiness of our affection and the changes in our aspirations met like an irresistible force crashing into an immovable object.  The only thing left standing was our dogs.

In the final moments before he left, we hugged and cried for so long I didn’t think we’d ever let go of each other.  I joked and told him I was crying because I felt so bad for him, that I knew how hard it would be to live without me.  He said he was crying because I was holding him so tight. 

As he pulled away in his rented truck, I realized what happened in his rear-view mirror is what happened in his heart.  I got smaller and smaller until I was no longer there. 

I waved until the truck pulled out of sight.  Only once before, at my brother’s funeral, had grief overwhelmed me with such force. 

Now I’m single, at an age where I remember thinking “I could never date anyone that old.”   But I’m also at the point where I can appreciate the deal brokered between age and wisdom.  Life does not take youth and beauty away from you; you are released from them.  And one of the things this bittersweet freedom allows is the capacity to experience profound love.  Like I did, for six or seven years.