View this post on Instagram

 

Warning: obviously, there’s gonna be some naughty language here. 

~

“Yeah I wanted to play tough, thought I could do all this on my own. But even Superwoman sometimes needed Superman’s Soul.” ~ Sia, “Helium”

~

We talk about, read about, and write about sex, falling in love, and heartache.

But I’m not going to talk about any of those things here.

Instead, I’m going to talk about something that I think we don’t talk enough about: awe.

I think awe is actually rare. Sometimes in life, once in a great while, you get lucky and stumble upon a diamond in the rough. When you do, it’s something to stand back and marvel at. To try and figure it out while you’re admiring it.

So what does awe feel like? It’s like when something tickles you in an unexpected way. It surprises and dazzles you. It has the ability to make you feel safe, but it also feels wild and free—simultaneously. Most of all, it makes you feel optimistic and gives you a sense that everything is okay. It’s like reaching for a hand that’s there. It brings comfort. It’s reassuring and makes you feel good because it is good by nature. Being in its presence is like beholding true beauty, an inner glow. And it leaves you feeling like all things are possible.

Not every lover or boyfriend I have gives me the feeling of awe. In fact, most of them don’t. But once in a while I do meet one who does:

1. He gently nudges you from your comfort zone:

We chat every night since the first day we connected. I never do this with a man. As I walk toward you on the first date—filled with a little nervousness but mostly excitement—I don’t stop until we’re just inches apart, face-to-face. We kiss, and then I pause with a little hesitation before we kiss again.

I never do this on a first date greeting—but it feels natural to do this with you. Because somehow, I feel close to you already. I’m smiling as I’m taking you in and I’m pretty surprised that you look and sound older than I imagined from your pictures. I like you in the flesh…immediately. You have a surprisingly sexy, deep voice and you feel like a stranger that I somehow already know.

2. He is a refreshing change; he levels up the male species:

I can see right away that you’re also a totally adorable goofball. Okay—so we do not look like we’re dressed for a first date. Are we on a date, fuckboy? Actually, you look more like a bum. It amuses me greatly and makes me laugh. You’ve got big, brown, lace-up boots on, basketball shorts, a hoodie, a beanie, and a huge comforter wrapped around you—and you have an extra comforter laying in your shiny, black car that’s for me.

I thought about wearing high heels for a whole five seconds, but I’m thankfully dressed super comfy too, in flip-flops, tight jeans, a cozy, cream sweater, and I have a sexy, low-cut, velvet bodysuit on underneath—but I’m hiding it from you on purpose. We wrap me in the matching fluffy comforter and hold hands as we walk over to the beach to see if we can resuscitate a bonfire. We find a lot of sparks on the beach. And after the beach too. And, still, more sparks the next morning.

I already know after one week of talking to you, laughing with you, fucking you, staring at you, and letting myself fall asleep in your strong arms that you’re a beautiful man inside and out. Part of that beauty is that you’re a male feminist, and I continue to feel astonished at the things that come out of your mouth. When I ask you about your preferences when it comes to women, you say things like, “Whatever makes you feel sexy,” and you don’t lead with male preferences or male-centeredness. And when I make an observation about misogyny, you say, “That makes sense.”

And you’ve gotten my full and undivided attention when you candidly say that you’re learning from me, that I say nice things, and I’m really honest. So I tell you that honesty is a virtue and that it also increases chemistry and attraction, strengthening our connection.

A fuckgirl knows that honesty is how you emotionally fuck.

When I meet a man who lets me emotionally fuck him and physically fuck him, he gets to see everything fuckgirls do—which reaches far beyond the sexual realm. Imagine being so balanced that you take sex and emotions at the same pace, not valuing one over the other. Or better yet, imagine taking the emotions a little slower than the sex and really prioritizing the intimacy and all the feel-good fuckery because why wouldn’t you want to live there? It turns out, I’m learning from you as well.

I think it’s a man like you who brings out the best in me, and that puts the fuck in fuckgirl. You say the nicest things—you keep surprising me with thoughtful remarks that come out of your refreshing mouth.

3. He unconditionally embraces your womanly body—all of it:

Since I feel so comfortable with you, I have less of a filter and I pour more vulnerability into each moment. When a strong wave of butterflies passes through my pelvis and tummy when I fully embrace you, I tell you.

Jumping into intimacy post-vaccination has its unique challenges, but with you, it feels easy. Even hot. For one, I haven’t lost all of my pandemic weight and my normally gym-toned body is on the juicier side right now—but you really like it. The very parts of me that I want to fix and lose, like the extra inch on my waist, you delight in squeezing during sex and using to your full advantage to get me right where you want me. Electric thrills shoot through my core when you grab the parts that make me feel self-conscious with your assertion and raw desire. Little did I know that when I held your huge, rough, calloused hands how skilled they’d be holding onto me—and how much I’d delight in it!

You share with me, your #gainz goals, and I listen, but I think you look perfect as is and the proof is that I can’t tear my eyes off you when you’re naked and also when you are fully dressed. Another pandemic challenge is that we’re out of sex-shape—from not having it. Our sex stamina is weak. That unexpected position you got me in that felt so good that I exclaimed, “I have a new favorite position,” took a ton of strength on your part and we’re too tired and out of shape to keep repeating it.

Most of all…it’s just how fucking good it feels. We both feel it. We both talk about how good it feels. We won’t shut up about it. We communicate how good it feels, and in the moment, how it can feel better. You ask for what you want. I ask you to make slight adjustments. I think we like to please each other because we share a mutual respect for pleasure and uncomplicated fuckery. It feels effortless in the way that you walk over and plant a kiss on my lips while you’re in the middle of venting about something. How can the first time you do that to me also feel like the 500th time you’ve done that to me? Because ease in fucking can catapult us into depths of comfort if we allow it to. That’s what this feels like: ease and comfort.

4. He can decondition male aggression and slow burn with you:

You don’t put premature demands on me or have hostile reactions. You can disagree and keep your cool and your curiosity. When you tell me how quickly three months can go by at your job, I think you understand what it is to move at a slow burn. In fact, I tell you that other boyfriends have called me “too independent” or selfish because I get wrapped up in my own needs and full life with joys, interests, and responsibilities. I think about you being gone for long stretches of time and I think about myself and my introverted habits and routines and I tell you that I would miss you—but it would not kill me. And I like how you purrr and squeeze me when I say that. I don’t know when or how often I’d see you, but I can feel a little voice in me that says, “See him more than once—his energy is the kind you’d like to come back around.”

5. Around him, it’s all systems go: 

When you’re traveling to the other side of the world for work, when you’re not fucking me and I’m not fucking you, I think about what that would feel like. If I dwell on it too much, I burst out crying, which shocks me—I never do that either.

I take those tears as confirmation that I’ve met a man I can mesh with. I’ve met a man who fucks me in multifarious ways. I decide to honor that it’s a wonderful thing: physical climax, emotional climax—there’s a lot to feel here. And the thing is, experts can’t actually agree on what makes up the limbic system. Our masculine ways of thinking are obsessed with dividing and categorization, whereas the feminine way of thinking isn’t—it sees the world as more connected and cohesive. I think the limbic system is comprised of multiple systems that create a connected spectrum of sensation and emotion in the body. This is why we can connect emotion to sex or we can have sex with no emotion involved. If something moves us emotionally, the sex feels better. Emotional stimulation can deepen our orgasm, making it bigger, deeper, wider, more frequent, and more easily achieved. An orgasm can grow in the way emotion can grow.

It takes a certain flavor of man to bring that much decadent fucking to woman’s feeling system. You light up so many bulbs in me, including ones in my heart that I didn’t expect you to light up, but you do it just by being yourself. And like a child, I want to keep you. I wish you were a firefly that I could capture in a mason jar, take you home, and keep you—so I can stay in awe.

But as an adult, life and home are more complicated than that. Sometimes home is an Airbnb, or a ship, or somewhere thousands of miles away. In adulting, some lives are difficult to mesh—it’s difficult to even wrap your brain around the how. I think the answer to that is an individualized one: ask couples with seemingly insurmountable challenges how they do it, and the answer is, “any way we can.” They also tend to have more creative and unconventional relationships.

~

What separates falling in love and awe for me is this:

Even with a magnetic, strong desire, I’ve been known to end a love affair and run for the door because it came with too many byproducts that turn me off. It doesn’t light up enough of my bulbs, despite some red-hot bulbs being fired up!

With awe, I find myself running toward it, not away from it. It lights up nearly all of my bulbs.

If you’re ever confused about whether you’re in love or in awe, take a pause, do some energetic observing, and ask yourself: what direction am I running?

Awe is rooted in respect, reverence, and wonder, which are the kinds of gifts that this confused world needs more of. We should never turn down an opportunity to be in awe. And we must savor it when we have it.