California Reaming - A Woman's Adventures In Polyamory

Oh, happy day when one can wake up to the subtle strains of NPR on the airwaves, in this case to imbibe the personal accounts of people who submit various opinions on various topics.

Today I heard a lesbian woman waxing poetic about her relationship with her lesbian partner. It all sounded lovey-dovey hunky-dory, until I got to the bit where some moralizing crept in.

Why would anybody want to put themselves through a heterosexual relationship in an attempt to find intimacy, she argued. She spoke about looking out the window of her apartment and across the way in other windows she would see couples sitting across from each other. Men and women couples. Surely, because they are men and women, they cannot have the same level of intimacy that I, a lesbian, can have with another woman.

Well, ok, maybe they can, she goes on, but it is more of a struggle because they are innately different, therefore the chances of finding true intimacy diminish. In case you weren't paying attention, Mother Nature just drove a stake through your aspirations.

Darn! And just when you thought it was safe to go back in the waters of heterosexual dating! Bummer!

But wait a minute here, why should I assume that because we are identical, as she puts it, on "a cellular level," that we therefore have an inside track on intimacy?

Hhmm, let me count the ways...I've had about a rough dozen female lovers in my life (and mostly rough it was, ruff ruff). More than the male partners by a good distance. Yet I would never presume to say we had good intrinsic communication skills because we both happened to be female. In fact, mostly the opposite.

So what's the deal here that lesbians seem to have this need to claim the higher part of the mountain for themselves? Do they regard men as being so low on the genetic totem-pole that there is little good any woman can wring out of their bloody hides? Probably, in many cases. You see, for many lesbians, it is not enough that you claim you are lesbian, you have to rain on the parade of the heteros as well. Especially the men.

There is a lot of this rather gratuitous chat that goes on among lesbians, I find. It is very annoying. It would be more annoying if it were true, and even more so if what the women claim for themselves were actually true.

But I would argue that mutual understanding is arrived at, not because you have reduced points of conflict, but because you may, God forbid, have more.

I would argue that you grow more as a person when you have a certain adversity flung at you every so often.

From personal experience, I can tell you that living with a man gives you that, as a woman. It has made me a lot stronger, as a PERSON, to live with someone who is quite different from me, biology aside.

Think of it as something akin to a roaring good tennis match. Roger Federer would still be the supreme player he is because he's Roger, but he will become even better if he has a Rafa Nadal around to push him, to get in his face, to rattle his cage. To bother the lad the way Dave has bothered me over the years.

Men do that with me, there is conflict; women on the other hand don't, it's too easy. And because it's too easy, it becomes, for me, rather boring.

To translate it into sexual terms, I also think one's sex life can be very interesting when the couple has a lot of issues going on. You patch things up in the bedroom.

In some lesbian relationships, the intimacy can be so complete and soothing that it drowns those instincts that can lead to hot sex. You end up with a lot of what they call Lesbian Bed Death. Or to put it another way, I think familiarity does indeed breed contempt.

I am realizing now why that topic fascinates me so, why some part of me feels anxious when I write about it. Because I want to keep the image alive in my head that I COULD have partnered with a woman. But I realize I never could have, because I required something different. I required a situation that had many points of tension built in, not that I tried to create that, or that I even wanted it. But once there, I saw how it worked for me.

Somehow being woven into a cocoon of lesbian intimacy was just too claustrophobic.

Quick, how do I get out of here???

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