In Which I Make Out With Someone Who is Not My Boyfriend

You guys!  Today was my outing with The Pedant, and things went more smoothly than I ever could have imagined.

I totally managed to work my “arrangement” with Minx into the conversation.  I was suave as fuck.  You have no idea.  The Pedant and I were sitting in a cafe and he was ranting about how most people tend to “drift with the current” in their lives and do things without questioning why – like his friend who’d never liked kids but had one of his own anyway.  I agreed, and said that the default cultural script of   find a partner –>get married–>buy a house–>have a kid  doesn’t make sense for a lot of people I know – makes them actively unhappy, even – but they still try to wedge themselves into that mold.  Take monogamy, for instance: how did that get to be the default state of relationships?  The Pedant agreed with me and said that monogamy is unnatural for human beings (and spouted off some evopsych reasons for this, which I found vaguely annoying and said so).  I asked if he considered himself poly, then, and he said no; he had an old flame who he really wanted to be with, and would happily have been monogamous with, but she didn’t want to be with him.  He can’t imagine finding anyone else he’d want to commit to, so he’s just kind of playing the field.  So now I knew that The Pedant was single and open-minded about different relationship styles.

The Pedant then said that being poly isn’t really for him because it takes a lot of time to nurture even one relationship, let alone more.  And I was all, “Yeah, that’s why I could never be poly.  Minx and I have discussed the idea of, like, making out with other people for fun, but we’ve agreed that neither of us would want to actually date anyone else.”  The Pedant absorbed this info completely neutrally (no victory dance, thank god – that would have been so presumptuous) and the conversation moved smoothly and naturally to topics unrelated to sex or dating (a sure sign of a boy who likes hanging out with women because it’s fun, not because he’s just looking to get laid).

When it was time for him to head home, I walked him to the subway but he was all “You live north of here, right?  I’m heading north anyway, so why don’t I walk you home?”  I said sure.  Along the way, he told me he’d had the hots for me in a major way that first night we’d met.  I was like “Oh, is that why you plunked yourself down next to me at the club?” and he was all “WELL DUH!  Have you seen yourself in the mirror lately?” and I said that I thought that might be it, but then again some people are just really friendly and gregarious with everyone so I didn’t want to make assumptions.  I said I hadn’t been sure of his interest until the end of the night, when we were riding the bus together and my stop came first and he said goodbye by kissing my hand.  That’s when the lightbulb over my head finally came on: “Ohhhhhhhhh.  He wants me!”  And then I was planning on hitting on him but I met Minx and the rest is history.  The Pedant said “I guess we missed our chance, then.”  And I was like “Well, Minx and I have talked about making out with other people, and he seems perfectly fine with the idea, so…”

At my doorstep, The Pedant said goodbye and gave me a hug that lasted longer than an ordinary friend-hug.  As we slowly pulled apart, I said “Can I kiss you?”  He said, “If you want.”  I hate when someone acquiesces to something with “if you want” – it makes me feel like they’re doing me a favour.  I briefly considered snarking back at him, but abandoned the snark and kissed him instead.

The kissing itself was somewhat anticlimactic.  The Pedant’s pouty-yet-sculpted lips had seemed so very promising, but felt mushy against mine.  Kind of limp or something.  And there was a bit too much saliva.  But I’m not gonna lie, despite all of this it was pretty fun.  It was absolutely thrilling to have a first kiss with someone again…the sexual tension and the leaning in and the moment of contact…yum yum.  I felt keenly attuned to his entire body; I noticed him give a little gasp, once, between kisses; felt his breath against my face; felt him shift his body in order to meld himself closer against me; felt what might have been crotch-stirrings but we weren’t pressed together tightly enough for me to be certain.

At one point he murmured, “You’ve been wanting to do this for a long time, haven’t you?” which…I’ve had guys say stuff like that to me before when we’re making out and I find it arrogant as fuck.  I don’t know if it’s meant as a twisted form of dirty talk or to show me how self-confident he is or what, hearing a guy basically boast about how hot I must think he is does not impress me or turn me on.  I was sorely tempted to snap, “I thought we covered that five minutes ago when I told you I was attracted to you from the night we met.  Do you need me to fucking embroider it on a pillow for you?” but instead I made a neutral “Mmm” sound and kept kissing him.  Turns out it’s easy to let the occasional stupid remark from a boy slide when nothing at all is at stake and you have a wonderful, non-stupid-remark-making boyfriend at home.

After five minutes or so (total) of making out, I gently disengaged and we said goodbye for real.  It was clear that The Pedant would happily have made out with me for longer, and I wouldn’t have minded (as long as he didn’t say more stupid things), but since this was the first time in my relationship with Minx that I’d kissed someone else, I felt I should take baby steps.   Better to go upstairs and tell Minx, “Yeah, so I made out with The Pedant for a few minutes” than “Yeah, so The Pedant and I were just frantically groping and kissing and dry-humping for an hour…”

And that’s what I did: went upstairs and told Minx “Yeah, so I made out with the Pedant for a few minutes.”

Minx was like, “Oh, how’d that go?” and seriously, his voice was just as casual as if I’d said “I went to the grocery store.”  Believe me, my antennae were on full alert for any emotional weirdness, and there was none.  I said it was pretty fun, but that Minx is a better kisser.  And Minx asked me if my mouth now tasted of Pedant, and kissed me to find out (verdict: possibly.  But we don’t know whether the sweetness Minx detected was The Pedant’s apple cinnamon tea or my aloe juice).  And…that was that.  We did some household chores together, then he started watching some Transformers cartoons and I surfed the ‘net for a while and then came here to blog.

I realized a funny thing: my brain is tied in knots over the kissing, not because I have any problem with what happened, but because I expected to have a problem and it felt weird that I didn’t.   I was waiting for the other shoe to drop.  Society as a whole seems to feel that partners are possessions, and therefore jealousy is a compliment because it means you’re an especially precious possession; I grew up in an environment where this idea was obvious and unquestioned.  I also grew up in an environment where relationships were always monogamous by default and sluts got shamed.  And yet today…I kissed someone and my boyfriend didn’t act like contact with another boy’s lips has ruined me forever!  And his uncritical acceptance of the kissing made me feel happy and loved instead of putting me in an angsty tailspin of, “Why isn’t he upset?  He must not really love me!!!”  This is all so trippy I can hardly stand it.  It’s like all my old fears and expectations and assumptions about relationships have been turned inside out.

For the first hour or two that I was home I felt fuckin’ wired, actually…a little high on my new-first-kiss experience and very much high on the fact that my boyfriend doesn’t place all of my value as a human being on what I do with my body.  Also, as someone raised in the aforementioned culture of monogamy and slut-shaming, kissing someone else was flat-out scary (especially since I was kinda-sorta waiting for Minx to get freaked out…there’s gotta be fallout, right?  No way will I get away with such audacious behaviour unscathed…) so I probably had a lot of adrenaline pounding through my brain.  I felt like I was vibrating. But now my wacky surge of brain-chemicals has settled and everything feels totally back to normal again.

In the Naomi Wolfe book Promiscuities, she interviews a bunch of women about how it felt to lose their virginity.  The vast majority of the interviewees said their reaction to having sex for the first time was “That’s it?”  Virginity (and its loss) had been built up into such a big deal – there were all these platitudes floating around about “becoming a woman” via having sex, or about virginity being a precious, precious flower that you have to save for someone special – yet in the end, the women didn’t feel any different.  Not more womanly; not debased; they just knew what a penis felt like in their vagina now, and that’s about it.  Which is basically how I’m feeling about the makeouts.  After years steeped in the  fetishization of monogamy and villainization of polyamory, and so many warnings about nonmonogamy ruining relationships and lives…it turns out that a kiss (even an extracurricular one) is just a matter of touching lips with someone else.  That’s it.  All the elements that make this act so fraught and charged and scary are all in our heads.  That should have been obvious, but for me it wasn’t…until today.