I Want To Have Sex With Him, But I Want Him To Still See Me As A Person

Sex has always made me uncomfortable. It’s true that I write about love and sex for a living, but to be completely candid, I don’t have as much sex as people probably think I’m having.

It's easy to hide behind words about sex. But to have sex? Well, that's a whole different monster.

Sex with strangers, sex with friends, sex with lovers, sex with friends-with-benefits -- all are unique experiences, but they all end the same way: I turn into the "clingy girl" no one wants to date, a shell of the self-sufficient bad bitch I am.

For a lot of people, sex is predominantly a form of release. For others, sex is a way to follow up emotional intimacy with physical intimacy. For me, though, sex has always been a way to totally and completely, without inhibition, express myself with my body. The best sex I've had has always been with someone I’ve loved -- or, at the very least, liked. And I haven't had good sex in a long time because I haven't met someone I liked in a long time.

But recently, something changed. A couple of weeks ago, fate thought it would be funny to drop someone into my lap at the peak of my not-looking-for-love phase. Trust me: I wasn't looking. But now there's him. I like him, and he likes me. And I want to have sex with him, but I don't want him to forget why he likes me: because of my mind.

At the current moment, he thinks my work is great. He believes the hyper-emotionality of my writing is exactly what makes it beautiful. What he unfortunately doesn't understand is that all my feelings make me a great writer but a weak lover. I can pour out my passion into a piece, but when I do the same in love, I become "too much."

My biggest fear would be for him to minimize a piece of my work because he f*cked the person who wrote it. I fear the day when he no longer reads my work as an objective reader and sees himself instead as the muse for a mad girl in love. How embarrassing for me.

I've always found my greatest strength to be my mind. It's the one thing about myself I don't doubt (I can't say the same about, say, how I feel about the way I look). And I want to have sex with someone I'm capable of falling in love with, but I always stop myself from doing it. Because if it were to happen, he'd be able to puppeteer the way I think about the world and thus command the direction of my writing, which has always been my rock in life.

I'm a smart girl, damn it. I hate the idea of losing control of my mind.

This isn't just a writer problem; it's a people problem. Sex just makes things different. An unfortunate truth of deepening intimacy is that sex turns the most strong-skinned woman into putty.

When I have sex with someone I like, the dynamic between us quickly shifts. Pre-sex, he thinks I'm the most precious thing to have graced the Earth. Post-sex, he may still think I'm smart, but he no longer looks at me the same way he used to. He's gone from valuing me for my mind to valuing me for my body.

Before having done the deed, I would have walked by, and he might have tapped me on the shoulder and complimented me on my latest gut-wrenching article. After doing the deed, he wouldn't compliment me as I walked by. He'd stare at my ass instead, or maybe he'd look at the way my dress gets caught in the gap between my legs. Maybe he'd even smirk at the friend sitting next to him, gesturing in their unwritten language, "I f*cked that."

Still, sex awakens me. Listening to the needs of my body makes me feel alive, and I don't want to feel lifeless anymore. I'm itching to express myself with my body, to act out the things I don’t know how to say. Something inside of me is trying to get out. The things I'd do to lose myself in the ineffable moment of otherworldly climax! It’s something that can only happen between two people who are irresistibly drawn to each other. 

I'm torn, because I know if I have sex with this guy, the power shift will happen. He won't see me as an intellectual woman. He'll see me as a body. It won't be his fault, and it won't be mine; it's just what evolution has in store for us.

I want to have sex with him, but I want him still to see me as a person.