The less than goodness is: I’m sick. Again. GRRRRRRRRRRRR This time it is sore throat/cough/congestion. Yesterday was the last day of the medical study and I was higher than a freakin kite and feeling crappy all afterwards. I passed out on the couch in the English Society lounge and slept through my classes. Oh well.

The goodness I can now talk about! I’ve been waiting on a conversation with the Noah. He is hard to track down at times. So I’m seeing a new boy. _shocker I know. This one is requesting *gasp* monogamy. I am going to give it a try. I’m having all sorts of weird thoughts go through my head about this situation.

First: I’m not really upset about not sleeping with other people. I enjoy it when I do it, but I don’t actually feel that motivated to have multiple partners if I have a partner who can keep up with me and wants me as much as I want them. I should toss in the bit of information here: I haven’t slept with this boy yet. I’m having some pretty significant emotions towards him already and I don’t want to just go to bed with him. I want to wait until it is more meaningful emotionally. Eek. Scary. He is already deeply emotionally involved. He says that he tends to fall hard and fast if he is going to fall at all. The last time he did this he married her. They were together for six years until she decided that she needed to find out what being single is like. They are now good friends. I think that bodes pretty well for his stability.

He has a lot going for him. He is working on his PhD in Chemistry at UCB. He is funny in that incredibly sarcastic, dorky way that I jones on. He is a gun-toting Libertarian freak. YAY!!! He is way cute and tall. Although he is too skinny. I will have to encourage him to eat. I can handle that. He is a significant pervert. Our kinks line up pretty well, though he has no real D/s experience. Given that he is really good at bondage, single tails, knows how to kiss me and choke me, canes…. yeah. I think that is workable. He is already adjusting to the idea of service. Ha. Little turkey. He was making me dinner and he looked up and said, “Hey–you like being used. Get busy on the dishes wench.” It was hilarious. But I did the dishes. And we had a lovely dinner and snuggle afterward.

We like the same movies, a similarly bizarre cross section of music. We both think tv just sucks. He is capable and handy in that butch/masculine way I jones on. He fixes things! *Swoon* He has traveled a fair amount and wants to do more.

I’ve been thinking a lot about love/sex in poly/mono of course. I’ve been vacillating a lot in the last few months on how happy I have been to be a secondary. I go through these phases where I am glad to not have the pressure. I still feel like I am not exactly “over” all the stuff around my relationship with Tom but I’m not sure I ever will be. I have been enjoying having steady sex and emotional support in the down time that has been unavoidable. But I kind of feel like with the exception of Noah, I haven’t really fallen “in love” with anyone. And there seem to be insurmountable issues with him. Thank goodness he is happy to have me still in his life in some vague undefineable way. I think that will continue with or without sex. I feel more and less strongly about my parters. Many are people that I would do just about anything for–but in the same way that I would do anything for Miss Jenny or BlackSheep . It isn’t about sex. It is about me loving them as a person. I will still want to spend time with them without sex in the equation. The reality of life is I may spend less time when sex is out of the picture, but it isn’t that I don’t like them anymore. Not that I spend that much time with most of the people I am sleeping with lately anyway.

So I’ve been thinking a lot about how easily I am willing to have sex with people. I kind of think that I treat sex like raquetball. I like doing it and it is more fun to do with a partner, so what the hell. But as soon as there is that emotional component there with anyone I am much less willing to do it with other people. I went monogamous with Tom because I wanted to, he never asked. Though he did make it clear that serious relationships were monogamous and I wanted it to be serious. So yeah. The first couple of years, you know–when he still wanted to have sex with me, I didn’t even look at anyone else. I’m sure some of that was the NRE, but I just had no interest in outside sex/relationships. Ok, once I became sexually frustrated it seemed like everything in the relationship went south. (So I negotiated with the Puppy that it is a deal breaker for him to stop having sex with me. I will not be monogamous if I am not freakin getting any; that isn’t monogamy–it is celibacy and I am NOT OK with that.) It seems like I don’t really bond super deeply with multiple people very well. If I were going to I probably would have done more of it this year. There was overlap between Tom/Noah and Noah/James but really… I was already significantly disenchanted with Tom by then and moving on emotionally even if I didn’t admit it and I think James was mostly about the E. Honestly, I don’t think I ever knew him well enough to fall in love with him–but damn is E powerful stuff. Bonding and all that. And things with Noah have changed enough at this point that I wouldn’t say I am “in love” with him, though I am far more attached to him than I am to other people I could potentially have the same kind of relationship with that we have currently.

But it hurts pretty regularly that I don’t come first to anyone and really it has been bothering me that I really don’t want to come first to any of the people in my life so far. They don’t “fit” like that. Pretty much all of the behavior that I have experienced has been above reproach. Though I have often felt like and described myself as just a fucktoy–I have never really been treated that way. People have tried to integrate me into their lives as a whole person, but I have resisted and I have never really understood why. With the Noah/Raven situation I wanted to be the “other girlfriend” because that was my comfort zone. That way I had lines drawn in my head of where I belonged. I didn’t know how to be on equal footing with her. I suppose that I was having the very un-poly thought of, “There can be only one primary” and it was her. If I had ever in any way felt like I was supplanting her as primary I would have hated that and felt bad for being a home wrecker. It’s probably one of the many reasons I bailed on the situation and hurt her in the process. I think part of my motivation was not wanting to hurt her: but I ended up hurting her anyway. Damn I just can’t win sometimes.

So now I have this boy popping up who wants me to come first to him. Wow, isn’t that remarkable timing. He wants to come first for me to, and that will be a shift cause I have been rather incredibly self-focused for quite a while now. I’m having to relearn some of those negotiation skills. I’m also walking into this relationship with a very different/better sense of boundaries than I had in my previous experiences with serious monogamous relationships. Letting him know what my plans are is not the same thing as letting him dictate my behavior. I am being pretty clear to him as I tell him (For example) that I am planning on going to the next BS because a friend has requested that I do so. It will be a sort of going-away outing. If we are firmly monogamous at that point then I will not engage in sex with anyone because that is what I have agreed to. I will engage in the level of bdsm play that seems like will be ok. I will not skip the party even if he doesn’t like the idea of it. (He has not indicated this in any way. I’m speculating and being paranoid.) He can come or not come–that is up to him. But yeah. In the past I would have simply cancelled on my planned attendence because I would have been worried about offending him. I wouldn’t even have talked to him about it. Yay for progress. I really miss being most important to someone. Because I’m setting up all sorts of expectations about this I am nervous about making bad decisions. I’m trying to step back and be less of a freak about it.

I have rediscovered some seriously huge insecurities. In monogamy there is the mindset of, “He can have me or her. So one of us has to be better.” I haven’t had that problem in the past year. I never worried about any of my partners abandoning me for “something better” because I knew I was pretty good and they could have both so why leave me? It allowed me a rather significant sense of security. The Puppy came to the Plough last Monday and immidiately all the Hot Young Things made a bee-line towards him. I swear to god I could feel the hairs on the back of my neck raise and I wanted to be nasty and possessive. I successfully stomped those impulses. But it freaked me out. I haven’t been like that in a long time. I was scared that if he even talked to them that he would decide they were prettier/smarter/better and I would be walked away from quite rapidly. I wanted to burst into tears from the instantaneous wave of “OHMYGODISUCKWHYWOULDHEWANTME?!?!” It was rather pathetic actually. It is going to be really hard for me to deal with these emotions again. I told him about them though–later, of course. I explained that just a little bit of reassurance went a long way. He held my hand as he talked to them. Then I felt like he was signaling that he wasn’t really available to them even as he was flirting with them. Any advice on how to handle this would be really welcome.

Last night Noah was doing his normal analysis of me. I do appreciate it. He really won’t allow me any bullshit. I appreciate it. He said that if I continue to follow my normal pattern that I will think this guy is God on earth for about three months as I mentally evaluate him for the role of life partner and after that I will either decide he doesn’t fit and ditch him fairly quickly or I will continue to think he is just the best thing ever for a very long time. I feel like such a lame ass girl. Oy. It is true though. I am basically auditioning him. We’ll see how it goes. Ok. No jumping in too fast. No doing anything rash. What would rash look like?