woe is me: the lonely girl who is loved from a distance

**this is more a character sketch than a whole story. not sure yet where this is going.**

Sometimes, when I watch my favorite tv show, the act of watching all my fictional friends question everything in their lives makes me question everything in mine. There’s always the sex element and the relationship confusion in the show, so of course the sex in my own relationship must be carefully examined.

In tonight’s episode, there was a couple who was having marital problems because the wife thought the husband didn’t love her anymore because they hadn’t had sex in 18 months. She took up extreme exercising as a way to burn off the excess energy, but the wife was still going nuts over the idea that she was “stuck” with her libido-less husband, who she was certain was cheating on her. Turns out he had a tumor on his kidney which was causing a hormone imbalance. Turns out she cheated on him the night before the test results came in.

In this week’s episode of my life, my dear, beloved boyfriend was in town for four days. I spent the night with him every night. I hadn’t seen him face-to-face in six weeks. over the past few months, I had to teach myself how to get past the mental block against masturbation just so I could relax when he was abroad on a mission. I don’t care much for masturbating, but he says I’m beautiful when he gets to watch me pretend to do it on the webcam. I love watching him do it, so I figure it’s only fair.

But when he is in town, I need the real thing. I need the hot and steamy and desperate slam-you-up-against-a-bathroom-wall kind of sex, just as much as I need the sweet and sensual and mending hold-hands-while-a-tear-dribbles-off-your-chin kind of sex. I love to wake him up in the mornings with blow jobs, but he won’t even let me kiss all the way down his stomach without telling me, with a sigh, that every morning, like clockwork, he has to pee. And so I never get to wake my honey with a blow job. Instead, I lay there, next to him, and hold him while he falls back asleep. I lay there and tell myself not to get horny, over and over and over, unable go back to sleep.

I love going down on him because of how good it feels to make him happy. I know that there are lots of other things that I do that make him happy, but it’s not the same to me. He only makes those sounds while my tongue is gliding up and down his penis. He only makes those faces while I swallow every last drop. He only smiles like that when the convulsions stop, and he looks down at me and I smile up at him. I need that reassurance. I need to know that I am so loved, and empowered by that love. I need to know that there is one thing in the whole world that will always make him happy. And making him happy makes me happiest.

I have to remind myself how lucky I am when he apologizes in the mornings, and sometimes wraps his arms around me, saying, “I just want to hold you sometimes,” or “I don’t want our relationship to be based on sex.”

I know, for a fact, that our relationship is not based on sex, or else we wouldn’t have survived 20 months of long distance. If all we had between us was sex, we wouldn’t have been faithful for this long; we wouldn’t have fought to stay together this long. If all we had was sex, there wouldn’t be house blueprints in my journal that he drew the last time he was laying in my bed, and there wouldn’t be an email in his inbox about how much it costs to get married on the beach in belize.

My dad was the last person to bring up marriage. In fact, just last weekend, he gave us… no, he told us to elope. Granted, we all understood that this event would not take place for at least another year or two—or however long it takes me to graduate—but still, my dad told us to elope.

My boyfriend is a wonderful, beautiful, loving man. I respect him more than any other person on this planet, and I love him with all of my heart. He knows this, and as a result, tries to protect me. He has watched his friends and coworkers in the military go through terrible, damaging relationships. All I needed was to watch my parents go through it, and I knew, like him, that I don’t believe in divorce, but it’s not just about belief with my boyfriend: it’s about prevention. He is so busy being so careful with us that sometimes I just want to scream.

I don’t want to scream at him; I know that what he is doing is the best course of action to him. I know that he is doing what he thinks is right. But I also know that he has more impulse, gut instinct and spontaneity in him than he is letting on. He lets those facets of his personality shine when he rides his motorcycle out into the desert just to explore the topography of the land, but he is much more reserved with me.

I know that there are much worse things that a person can be upset about in their relationships, and I know that I should be nothing less than incredibly grateful for having such a wonderful man cherish me. Yet I can’t help but feel like I’m missing something. I can’t help but feel like we aren’t living up to our full potential. We don’t always have to be so careful, and we don’t always have to tiptoe around our sexual urges. I guess what I am most concerned about, though, is that I’m the one with all the urges, and the last thing I want, in the whole wide world, is to feel alone in it.