Sad

For a bunch of weeks in a row, TA visited and I would kinda-sorta start putting the moves on her and she would indicate that she wasn’t in the mood and we’d just snuggle and watch Bojack Horseman.

TA says she’s a “responsive desire” person, meaning she’ll often get turned on and get into it if someone else initiates sexytimes, but she doesn’t generally ever feel horny on her own such that she would be the one to initiate.

This is unfortunate because I used to be an “active desire” person – meaning I’d get horny and actively pursue sex – but my drive has become…maybe not entirely reactive, but muted enough that it’s pretty easy to ignore. Like I used to get so randomly horny that I thought I’d die if I didn’t orgasm right away, preferably with a partner. But these days it’s more like if I’m hanging out with a partner I might feel a vague interest in gettin’ it on but that interest isn’t usually intense enough to be able to overcome every possible issue or distraction anymore.

Oh you know what, it’s not that my sex drive suddenly fits the profile of “reactive desire,” it’s that my biggest sexual turn-on has always been reactions – if I start touching my partner and they moan, it amplifies my horniness like tenfold. The difference, now, is that my baseline arousal level is so meh to start with that a tenfold increase just bumps me up from “I think that I might like to have the sex” to “yay, yes, we will have the sex!” whereas in my 20s and 30s my libido was like a constantly burning bonfire and even just hearing someone give a sharp intake of breath because I’d touched them just right poured gasoline on the fire.

Anyway.

TA’s whole “reactive desire” thing kinda freaks me out because sometimes she likes for someone to respond to her initial “meh, I don’t really feel like doing kinky stuff or sexual stuff right now” with “well too bad because you’re an object I’m using for my own gratification” type things, and just start doing shit to her. Sometimes, a bit of force and objectification gets her past her ambivalence (and keys into her kink for being objectified) and then she’s turned on and good to go. But only sometimes. And if you think it’s awkward to ask for sex or play and be rejected, try putting on a persona that you’re an unstoppable force and soooo badass and you’ll just take what you want, and then being told “nah.”

Like, I wasn’t super comfortable pushing past TA’s ambivalence in the first place, but if she always happily played along with my domly-dom shenanigans then I could have gotten into it. But nope, it’s a shot in the dark every time.

And it was all just too fraught for me so I stopped taking that tack.

After that, my forays into trying to initiate sex or play looked like me affectionately biting TA or rolling on top of her and kissing her neck or something, and looking for signals that she was into it. When her kinky side wakes up, she instantly acquires a stutter and can’t seem to think straight; I used to be able to get her to that state just by tugging on a fistful of her hair or wrapping my hand lightly around her neck. But lately (for the past few…weeks? Months…?) she hasn’t gone to that headspace; she either doesn’t particularly respond to my overtures at all, or else she’ll explicitly tell me she’s not up for being bitten that day or whatever. And then I think at some point she told me that she just isn’t in a sexual headspace lately in general*, so I kinda resigned myself to the thought that nothing spicy was gonna happen between us for the foreseeable future.

Recently we had a discussion where she told me she’d never thought of herself as submissive per se – only a masochist – but upon reflection she thought she might be submissive but just never found someone worth submitting to.

It’s certainly not up to me to tell someone how they should identify, but I must admit I’ve wondered if she has a submissive streak. At the very least I think that if she decided to submit to me she’d do it in a way that rang all my bells, whether she got some big sense of fulfillment from it or not. I’ve bossed her around a bit in bed before and unnnnnf.

We’d actually talked – way before that discussion – about the possibility of her submitting to me for designated periods when we were together. And she had said she liked the idea of coming over and knowing that I would be the one making all the decisions.

So with that in mind – and also previous convos about TA sometimes being propelled into a sexual headspace by someone taking charge and demanding stuff – I asked whether she thought that me being the designated dominant for a day might get her past her ongoing sexual ambivalence. She said she’d need to think about it and get back to me.

This entry is getting long. To be continued.

*How can she say that she has reactive desire and also isn’t in a sexual headspace lately when she’s been going out to sex clubs once or twice a week and fucking as many randos as possible and also often doing kinky play? I am not sure. Does it bother me that she’s seemingly fucking and playing with everyone on Earth but me? You betcha.