Having a healthy sexual appetite seems to be the ultimate goal of men these days, judging from all the ludicrous emails I receive daily. These are reminiscent of snake oil days of yore, replete with exotic stories teeming with references to ancient mystics, jungle potions, far eastern secrets, and exotic plants. Certainly I would take any Chinese herbal remedy seriously, I mean, there are over a billion of them, so clearly they are doing something right. However, stay away from Chinese birth control methods, which are obviously less effective.
Let’s be honest however. A good, rambunctious sexual appetite may seem jim-dandy when you don’t have one or can’t seem to keep up with your partner’s acrobatic enthusiasm. But when you are the possessor of a tropical erotic interest and your mate is more of the boreal forest type, problems arise.
And so it was with me. I was a…well, to be blunt, a horn dog. I was forever pawing at my wife, and in a constant state of arousal. I took every opportunity to seduce her, entice her and arouse her. These advances caused her only to become irritated, annoyed and aggravated. I was difficult to have arguments with, as I would rush through the fight in order to get to the make up sex. I was intolerable on long car trips, as I would spend as much time trying to entice her with double entendres as I would on, say, actually not missing our exits. My success rate with both resulted in extremely long journeys, in both the very real and very metaphysical sense. Eventually, it became clear that this marriage was not going to work out. It wasn’t only because of our differing sex drives, but that factor certainly exacerbated the problems.
After the divorce, I spent a bit of time just enjoying being alone. I purchased a nice, small house in the country and found that I rather liked the freedom I had suddenly acquired. I walked around the house in my underwear, I ate whatever I wanted, whenever I wanted, watched porno movies with the volume up in the middle of the day, masturbated freely in whatever room I just happened to be in. It was liberating.
But eventually it grew tiresome. I began to long for the touch of another body, and my desires began to insinuate themselves with increasing urgency. There was nothing for it but to begin dating again. I of course had been out of the dating arena for quite some time and was understandably nervous about going back into the breach. I had the well-meaning but misguided help of the married women in my office, who were forever setting me up with single girls they knew.
Suffice it to say that most single girls that I dated were single for quite obvious and oftentimes, startling reasons. Some had personal hygiene issues or nasty habits. Others had all the charm and personality of porcupines.
For instance, Kelly from Human Resources seemed pleasant enough. She was a pretty girl with large doe eyes and a cute turned up nose. However when she laughed she barked like a hound dog and had a habit of cleaning her ears out with whatever utensil was handy, car key, pen cap, shrimp fork…
Alice was another delight. She was an attractive woman, a mere slip of a girl who wore clingy dresses that left just enough up to the imagination to keep the imagination in a perpetual state of distraction. She was, unfortunately, unwittingly bi-polar. Her conversation ranged from the hysterical antics of her cat to the tear-wrenching plight of the Sarajevo refugee camps to the seething rage brought on by her present employer who found her “a tad difficult”. All this before drinks. Later, after dinner when I gently rebuffed an invitation to go up to her apartment and gave no clear indication when or if I would be calling her again, she exploded into a tirade about the sheer stupidity of men who were too blind to see an excellent specimen of femininity standing mere inches from their eyes, apparently waving their arms frantically and expounding the frustrations of particular genders. I physically backed away from her and climbed rapidly into my car, accelerating away with a panicked chirp of my tires.
Darlene was almost the opposite. She was by far the most fetching of all the women I had dated thus far. She had burgundy hair cut in a severe bob, great big green eyes framed by bookish glasses, and she was probably no more than five and a half feet tall, one hundred pounds. She was an elfish thing, an innocent and delicate waif in a world of heavy-handed clumsy giants. The problem was that she simply did not talk. It was not that she wasn’t capable of the task; she was quite adept at ordering the most bird-like portions of food on the menu, a small side salad and a glass of water. I believe her entire bill came to just under two dollars. Her conversations consisted exclusively of one word answers followed by a break of eye-contact. She stared doggedly at her plate as if the nightly news were being broadcast from the china. Dinner was inexorably long and the pauses between conversations reached a point where it began to resemble sort of an auditory black hole, where sounds of other, nearby conversations were sucked up, unable to escape the sheer magnitude of silence between us. I decided that Darlene was clearly not enjoying herself and took her home immediately after dinner, thanking her profusely for a wonderful time. I was home by nine. Surprisingly, the lady at the office who had set us up approached me the following day saying she had received a phone call from Darlene just after I dropped her off. Darlene had apparently had a wonderful time and was quite taken by me and couldn’t wait until we went out again. Those words surpassed the sum total of words she spoke to me the entire evening.
In the weeks and months to follow I dated a bus-line quality cast of characters: a born-again Christian who wanted to tell me her testimony and did so, using breadsticks and the finger bowl to illustrate her baptism; a sales associate who couldn’t go three sentences before being interrupted by her cell phone, pager or PDA; an intense woman from accounting who grasped my hands meaningfully and asked me what a respectable length of time one should date before introducing the topic of marriage. (I indicated that one should wait at least until the salad arrived, which hadn’t); a butch girl from the mailroom who insisted that she was “not just another vagina”. When I attempted to pay for the meal, she began an oration of Biblical proportions damning me and my ‘ilk’ to an eternity of childbirth and subservience. We split the bill.
Of course the more I went out with these strange and quirky women, the more guarded I became. When I took Linda from marketing out for supper, I was so paranoid, waiting for some odd behavioural problem to pop up, a severe facial tic, an aversion to silverware, a tendency to recognize innocent passers by as celebrities and suddenly hound them for autographs, an unnatural desire to crawl beneath the table and curl up into a fetal ball, that I simply could not relax. Linda confided to a friend, who in turn confided to me, that she found me 'weird and unapproachable'. I had become so paranoid of quirky behaviour that it was manifesting itself within me as quirky behaviour.
This forced me to step back from my situation and gain a bit of perspective. I had to ask myself just what was I accomplishing, what was I benefiting from these dates? I still found myself going home alone at night. I still found myself rattling around my empty house, restless and jumpy. And then I realized that I was going to have to be honest with myself. I had to admit to myself that I was dating the wrong kind of women, with the wrong kind of motives. I didn't want what they wanted; I didn't have the same needs that they did. The women I was dating were looking for good, stable men to settle down with. They were looking for rewarding relationships that would eventually evolve into rewarding marriages.
I, on the other hand, was looking for sex. And not just Linda from marketing, fall into bed sex. I wanted really kinky, dirty, it's-a-good-thing-there-are-no-neighbours sex. I wanted the kind of sex you had to prepare for days in advance by upping your carbohydrate intake and marking out the load-bearing walls in your house. I wanted the kind of sex that, if you left the windows open, attracted rutting moose from miles around. I wanted the kind of sex that when you were done, you contemplated submitting the damage to the house as an insurance claim, citing a localized downburst. I wanted the kind of sex that left you so raw that the thought of going to the bathroom made you break out in a cold sweat.
And I just wasn't going to find a willing participant from the parade of women I'd been marching with.
