Hard to Get. Leslie Bell
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they’d had sex, and they didn’t have sex again until they’d both returned from stints abroad. In the aftermath, he seemed to want less to do with her than she did with him. This left Katie feeling confused and hurt, and unsure of what she could or should expect from a boy with whom she wasn’t in a relationship.
Unlike many other women, who say they felt pressured to have sex, Katie’s own desires dictated her first sexual experiences. In short, her sexual history in college would have done the authors of Our Bodies, Ourselves proud.7 She felt no shame or even much inhibition about her early sexual experimentation. Instead, Katie felt her early sexual encounters to be straightforward, exploratory, and consensual.
Not so clear and straightforward was what Katie should do with the emotional desires that kept showing up once she had had sex. On the face of it, Katie was not yet really interested in relationships. She was focused on gaining sexual experience and succeeding academically. And she had the freedom (and sometimes pressure) to experiment sexually and remain rather uninterested in relationships in college and her early twenties. But the desire for something more than sex cropped up despite Katie’s best efforts to be scientific about it all.
Katie longed to be with someone she could get to know sexually, whom she could come to trust and feel comfortable with, and with whom she could be vulnerable enough to have an orgasm. These longings did not match up with her dismissal of relationships. As long as Katie didn’t pursue relationships involving emotional connection, she was unlikely to develop the trust and comfort that she craved. So Katie’s systematic acquisition of sexual knowledge, and her ability to orgasm while masturbating, did not guarantee orgasmic sex with casual partners.
This quandary left Katie with little practice at relationships. She had a decent number of one-time sexual encounters but not a lot of ongoing sexual experience; she feared depending upon a man; and she felt profound doubts about whether she could ever have both a successful career and a relationship—not a recipe for satisfaction from sex or relationships with men.
UNAVAILABLE MEN
The strategy of desire that Katie unconsciously developed as a solution, although it didn’t feel like much of a solution to her, was to pursue relationships with men who were already involved with other women. She got many of the perks of a relationship: closeness, passion, sex with someone she felt close to, and companionship. What she didn’t get were commitment, security, or any hope of a future. While disappointed by missing these emotional elements, Katie faced no risk that anything or anyone might compromise her ambition.
After disappointing sex in college, Katie continued to seek out ongoing sexual relationships that would help her to figure out “how sex worked.” She felt sexually inexperienced relative to her peers, and was eager to catch up to them in terms of number of partners and amount of sex. Katie was not, however, interested in developing committed relationships with men. She assumed those would come later, when she was ready.
In her first year after college, Katie traveled several hours away for “weekends of debauchery” with Mike. He and Katie had flirted endlessly in college, and they were both excited to finally sleep together. He had a long-distance girlfriend, and at first that was fine with Katie—she was after sexual exploration, not love. She described the appeal: “I wanted to know how it all worked, and how to make it feel good. And we were comfortable enough with each other to talk about that. So that was really the beginning of me starting to feel like, ‘Oh, my body is interesting to me. And even though I don’t necessarily perceive it as attractive, you know, he does. And he’s making that clear to me.’ ”
Despite the lack of a relationship or commitment, Katie felt comfortable with Mike and began to feel curious about her body when she was with a partner. Alone, she could explore her own body and knew what to do to reliably bring herself to climax. But Katie did not feel particularly at ease exposing her body and its pleasures to a partner. Mike and Katie’s time together was explicitly focused on sex, which early on felt like a welcome relief to both of them. Having no emotional complications appealed to both Katie and Mike. But as they continued to spend time together, she began to want a relationship with him, and was disappointed that one didn’t develop.
When she was twenty-three, Katie met Jim, and they fell hard for each other. He worked in the same lab that she did, and they spent the first several months they knew each other denying the sparks between them because Jim had a girlfriend. Katie was immediately drawn to Jim physically, and she loved his thoughtfulness and self-reflection. Jim’s relationship with his long-distance girlfriend was “very complicated.” He purportedly wanted to break up with her, but he didn’t want to interrupt her progress on her dissertation. Meanwhile, Katie waited in the wings. Yet Katie’s relationship with Jim was groundbreaking for her. It was the first time she had fallen in love, it was the longest relationship she’d had to date (four months), and it was the first time she felt really sexually intimate and could orgasm with a partner. Finally, Katie felt secure in a relationship, confident that Jim was interested in her and cared about her. This security allowed her to let go of insecurities about her body and her worries about whether Jim was enjoying himself in sex. She described sex with him as fun and exploratory: “And we would just say, you know, ‘Let’s go.’ And I think if I wanted to switch positions or whatever, it was all kind of just very happy, playfully, ‘Let’s do this.’ And it felt very comfortable to just express what I wanted, and when. And I think he definitely felt comfortable, too, doing the same thing . . . moving each other, just physically placing each other’s hands in different places, whatever. So, just communicating through words and through movement.” Because of the security and comfort she had with him, Katie felt confident that Jim would break up with his girlfriend and that they could build a committed relationship together.
As Katie’s departure for graduate school in California drew near, things began to fall apart with Jim. While Jim said he wanted to choose Katie, he worried that his girlfriend would be lost without him. Katie and his girlfriend eventually learned that he was lying to them, and he lost both of them. Katie felt deeply distressed that she had trusted him so much, and that she had believed that he would leave his girlfriend for her.
Having had a relatively serious relationship helped Katie to feel secure, but also showed her some of what she missed when single. She begrudgingly came to see that she actually wanted a man in her life, and that having a relationship could have a generally stabilizing influence on her. Katie expressed the sense, or perhaps the hope, that she’d feel better and more secure about her career and academic choices if she had a relationship as an anchor in her life.
Despite this realization, once in California Katie found herself having conflicted sexual contact with Dave, who, like Jim, had a long-distance girlfriend. This time, although it felt difficult to control, Katie tried to extricate herself from the situation. Dave was smart and attractive, and Katie felt an instant rapport with him. They talked well together and clicked physically—it was difficult to deny the attraction and the potential for a relationship. But he had a girlfriend on the East Coast, and Katie already had a string of relationships behind her in which she’d been the other woman. Dave seemed to need Katie, which made it hard for her to end it. He made half-hearted statements about their relationship being wrong, but somehow they’d end up in bed together. Katie would then stop in the midst of having sex and say, “What are we doing? This can’t happen.” If things were to end for good, someone needed to be firm, and it wasn’t going to be Dave. Finally, Katie put a stop to their relationship. She felt sad to lose Dave and disappointed in herself for getting involved with him in the first place.
Katie repeatedly chose to form relationships with men who already had girlfriends. But what had started as a strategy for gaining sexual experience—being a Sexual Woman who avoids relationships—became increasingly frustrating and unsatisfying. By being with unavailable men, Katie ensured that she didn’t develop an ongoing connection with someone with whom she could feel secure. She was struggling to transition from keeping relationships at bay to prioritizing relationships, and she felt herself to be woefully unprepared to do so.
WHY UNAVAILABLE MEN?
One might conclude that Katie chose unavailable