It’s been a long time since I had sex, with anybody. I’ve given up on dating for now. So, as I’m not up for one night stands, it will probably be a while.
I think about sex occasionally. I miss it occasionally. I fantasize occasionally. Oddly, I most often think about sex when my ex is around. And what I’m thinking is, “thank God I never have to have sex with him again.”
It is startling how extremely turned off I am by him. How, the thought of him laying naked on top of me makes me throw up in my mouth and how the thought of not having to be intimate with him makes me happy and even seems a fair exchange for all of the grief I’ve been through.
But there was a time, a fairly long period of time following my ex’s departure, that I longed for him desperately. I didn’t force myself to sleep with him in an effort to save our marriage, I genuinely wanted him. And it was a twisted dynamic. He was breaking my heart, we were falling apart but we would bypass all of the drama with hot, bad, great sex.
Of course, I thought we were reconnecting. That since these trysts were preceded by dinner or movie dates, we were rebuilding our relationship.
My Divorce Busting book told me not to discuss our relationship. Be the fun, mysterious wife, keep things light and easy.
I knew on some level it was a risk, that his ambivalence toward our marriage could signify that he was just getting some action with me because he could. But, I couldn’t accept that with all the women he had access to (in the rock n’ roll world), he would be so crass as to just use me, the mother of his children, for sex. Naive? Maybe. But I still believe there was more to it.
It doesn’t matter. The sex stayed hot and my libido sustained but my self-esteem and dignity were slowly, steadily declining.
After about 18 months, I ended it. For good. And, with my having full knowledge that our relationship was dead as a doornail, his advances failed to turn me on and failed to get him any action. Since then, my self esteem has improved and my physical repulsion has grown (though I think it’s peaked).
It’s a tough call, whether to sleep with the ex. Indeed, it is much debated on the Divorcebusting.com boards. I don’t really regret it. At the very least, our year and a half of great sex made up for the prior 14 plus years of mediocre to bad sex. And, I know I gave our reconciliation my best effort. But, it was also a headfuck and a rude awakening when I realized we could go on like friends with benefits indefinitely and he would be fine with that (more like elated with that). It’s called having his cake and eating it too (an odd saying but you get the drift)…
Thankfully, I didn’t catch any diseases or get pregnant (the very real yet often overlooked perils of sex with the ex).
What say you? To sleep with the ex or not to sleep with the ex?
