Intimacy Blackout

[ehowton]

If there's a problem, yo! I'll solve it ~Vanilla Ice

I am, by my nature, a problem solver. I do this through communication. As one of the cornerstones of intimacy - of which I am exceedingly fond - when there is an intimacy blackout, there is also a communication blackout; the two go hand-in-hand. I've stated here before that intimacy can survive short term with three of the four pillars, but it is down to our specific priority as to which one we can more easily live without. Communication is not one of mine. Unduly exacerbated by my self-imposed exile.

An exile in which only one party knows will be longer than first agreed upon, due to scheduling. My fear? That upon discovery of the exile, it will be unnecessarily extended for the purpose of control, and twisted in such a way I will once again be the bad guy in someone's story for calling out the hypocrisy by not adhering to unreasonable demands. This bodes well for no one involved.

I assumed many of my other dopamine-triggering activities would increase during this intimacy blackout; caffeine, nicotine, alcohol, the occasional viewing of porn...but these things have not happened. In fact, I do the first two perfunctorily, without joy, given up completely the third, and haven't engaged in the latter in over a week as I have zero interest in doing so while simultaneously considering ceasing it permanently for the first time in my life. I need much, much more than visual stimulation. I need intellectual stimulation, the kind which comes solely from a deep connection with another. My daughter defined me as a demisexual, a term with which I was unfamiliar:

Demisexuality is a sexual orientation where people only feel sexual attraction to someone after developing an emotional bond with them. This means that demisexual people don't experience primary sexual attraction, which is based on physical characteristics like smell or appearance.

My daughter is wise beyond her years, as this pigeonholes my current iteration nicely (minus the pheromone-laced sex toy obviously). I would have to assume the inverse is also true, that one stops being sexually attracted to a previous lover once they cease the care and feeding of that emotional bond. This is the purgatorial landscape in which I currently exist; forcibly ejected from one, exiled from another. This confluence of events becomes difficult to easily manage, overcome only through time as my background processing tries in vain to identify patterns amongst the din of tangentially related points of information to manifest a picture of the current situation in order to then trace it back to its origin until the entire framework eventually fails. At that point I'm usually okay. But that point is miles away.

In absence of verbal communication, I write. This is only dangerous because in doing so, I also begin to wonder, to question, to think in an attempt to unravel the warm cloak of contentedness in which I surround myself to discover the flaws in its creation; introspectively investigating its individual parts seeking an answer. After discovering the blog where my wife very nearly word-for-word repeated the accusation of my ex-wife I asked my daughter, "Am I the problem?"

She admitted there was a propensity for correlation but it was far too soon to answer, Clonish a resounding, "No," while Geekfriend couldn't answer except to say I may be looking at things too logically. Which of course is where I always find myself - facing those who can't, don't, or won't. Its not that I am immune to emotion - I often feel very strongly about a great many things, good and bad, and let them flow through me so I can fully experience them; be carried away by them. But I also use that opportunity to catalog them so they don't surprise me in the future. In short, the most convoluted idea in the history of humans walking upright upon this earth: I endeavor to control my emotions - to be their master rather than letting them control me.

As is my experience however, it always comes down to an irrational ultimatum.