Stupid Cupid: My Grandmothers Will Both Die Single

In an incredibly overly dramatic statement, I think I am going to be fine if I die alone. This isn’t because I was single on Valentine’s (nevermind single for New Year’s and Christmas and all of quarantine…) but I will be quite alright if I die and don’t have the version of love that I have gleefully consumed binging streaming show after show, even in the back-to-back movies of romance, from the romantic comedy to the tantalizing drama, the shelves full of poetry all about love, and I have proclaimed to everybody that I’m not downloading any dating apps in 2021. But then my ass was on SEEKING.COM as if I’m going to safely and finally find the sugar daddy of my expensive lingerie and vacations to white sand beach fantasies a reality in the middle of this pandemic. Sort of like how my OnlyFans is basically breaking even each month with the money I’m spending on Shein lingerie and clown makeup. (More on that another week.)

I got intimidated when a man asked if I’d be willing to roll a quarter across the floor with my nose. I am willing, to be clear. But I’d much rather do it for a Hot Mean Woman than this man who May Or May Not really want to pay for attention and sex. 

But I haven’t had sex since September, six months now, which in the last twelve years of having sex, might be the longest I have gone without sex. It’s strange too because sex and rather sex positivity and talking about sex have become such integral parts of my personhood – and my creative self – that not having sex I start to feel… less myself. 

 There’s plenty of masturbating happening. I have bought several new toys in the time of quarantine, but the fact of the matter is that I do not like feeling less myself when I want not in a state of desire or being desired. Before getting a roommate last month I masturabted periodically throughout my quarantine days, sometimes watching TV right after a shower or just standing in the kitchen waiting for the oven to pre-heat. Hm. I am horny thinking about an oven now. 

The problem is I struggle to cum when masturbating, partly because of being ~ sensitive~, partly because of trauma I’m sure, and mostly because some of my greatest pleasure comes from giving or being witness to pleasure. So in my dry spell (which if I’m more honest I define as since I moved to Portland in June 2019, because the sex I have had since moving here has been inconsistent at best) I have experimented with new toys. A suction toy. A suction cup dildo. Finally, the holy grail MagicWand. I had tried a hitachi for the first time with a man I call DJ Karl, while I was touring, and was in Portland. We matched on OkCupid. We met up for French fries at 10pm. By 4am, he’s blasting my clit with his Magic Wand from the Goodwill bins. Yes, the bins. He threw a condom on it and I just shrugged and starfished back into his SILK sheets. I was higher than a kite at the time, but I remember I came three or four times within minutes. But now I have my brand new cordless hitachi that I fall asleep next to at night. Truly, my roommate Oliver politely asked why it was tucked into my bed the other day and it is simply because I fell asleep and it was still straddled between my legs the night before. 

Me, bundled up, the day before Valentine’s Day, blissfully and ignorantly about to sit in the snow and attempt to call an Uber in the middle of an entire city completely shut down by snow and ice.

Now, I have already broken my dating app abstinence, first with Seeking.com then with reviving my FetLife, and finally to begrudgingly getting back on OkCupid. FetLife is wholly overwhelming, even for my insatiable curiosity, but I think once the world is safer to share air with strangers I will find it to be more useful. Coming back to OkCupid, old reliable of the interesting matches, isn’t something I feel great about but it’s on my Safari browser, so in some way I’m justifying that it isn’t quite an app. I have a few matches, gentle conversations with days between responses, and even gave my number to someone new! He’s poly, queer, super informed on consent and sexual health, and he has probably had more group sex than I have clicked the BISEXUAL MALE category on Pornhub. My fantasies are circulating already being some sort of sexual bean bag with two people kicking me around, so to speak or maybe a little bit literally. I’m deeply intimidated but playing it as cool as possible. We even had a video call phone sex! I got to see a person cum that knew my name! I had a dildo inside my body and in my mouth! It was great!

But after we hung up the call my stomach was in knots. I like anticipation, I like wanting, I love some good old fangled longing, and I absolutely still want passion and romance. I want to be an undeniable slut and I want to be wooed. I want someone to make me dinner and to put their hand around my throat. Here, we had a plan for a first date! He was going to make me chicken and probably beat the fuck out of my ass with a paddle, but two feet of snow fall and the consequential shut down of Portland kept me from waking up in someone’s arms on Valentine’s Day. And instead, I fell asleep that night our first orgasms over a screen. It wasn’t that I wasn’t satisfied or excited, the large damp spot on my comforter that night would certainly argue otherwise, but I also find myself  struggling with how to pinpoint this feeling. A distaste for the digital reliance in matters of how I love. Or rather, how willing it is I am to skip up the stairs to the orgasm -- to the pleasure and the passion, without double checking I’m at the right house or in the right company. This doubt isn’t even based on anything tangible, just fear of getting hurt by someone else or worse, by my actions and choices. By all means, this man and I are very likely going to have ridiculously good sex and I will be included on the Google Doc of his polyamorous lovers, and maybe I will watch Star Trek with him and not end up thinking about my dad.

However, a crux here is that Valentine’s Day evening, I watched with glee as a dear friend opened the gift I sent them. A t-shirt I bought with a card I had sprayed with my cologne. I watched her pull it over her head. Hold it to her nose and breathe it in deeply. Thousands of miles apart and all I wanted to do was light her cigarette for her. I think if we lived in the same city I would have already fucked it up, but it gets to be tender dyke longing because there’s a pandemic and several states to act as a buffer. 

The way I cherish my infatuation with this painfully hot and funny woman I befriended on Instagram is sort of like how I am now good friends with my friend’s ex, who I watched squirt for the first ever porn I witnessed and played filmographer too. It’s messy. It’s complicated without being complicated, like explaining directions with landmarks and buildings instead of street signs. A reverence to something I don’t understand but cling to, a desperate feeling of wanting to be a part of and also to kneel at the feet of.

And this is after I have essentially spent the last few years in some form of distanced longing. Leaving my husband and falling for another man simultaneously, one who went from lover to trusted friend and confidant. I watched him choose his Big True Love over me and I had to swallow my pride. (Actually this happened multiple times in the span of a year and was one of the roughest emotional yo-yo’s I’ve subjected myself to. But c’est la vie, que sera, sera, etcetera.) 

So, we’re back to me dying alone. These dramatics come from a call with my grandmother, as a lot of my dramatics do. My grandmother, Sheila, has been single the entirety of my life time, at least 28 years. She hasn’t had a boyfriend or girlfriend or date or romance or fling that I know of. We’ve spoken of her great loves and lovers, my grandfather Hal being the best. I even know, in mildly graphic detail, the story of the night of my mother’s conception. But I’ve watched my grandmother without a man all these years and never once did it cross my mind that my grandmother was lonely. Her mother, my great-grandmother Shirley, passed away seven years ago. My grandmother lost her best friend I think, and suddenly. One night she was alive and probably asking to go to Olive Garden, and the next morning she was cold. This fall, my grandmother’s sister-in-law my great aunt Diane, another dear friend of hers, passed after years of fighting cancer. Now I would say, as my grandmother lives alone in her 55+ community, that I am hearing of my grandmother’s loneliness. 

I also look at my mother. In her forties and single and truly with an incomparable work ethic. A drafter for an electrical engineering company that she’s worked for over half my life, and also running and operating an animal rescue full time, with a menagerie of dogs and cats in her home. She kicked her last boyfriend to the curb almost two years ago. My mother doesn’t speak to me of loneliness or rant about not finding a date. Occasionally, I wonder if she will be like grandma. Or if one day she’ll find the right one -- for his sake and sanity, I hope he already lives on a farm.

Conversely, my father moved in with a girlfriend last year and moved across Washington state. The last time he’d moved I think I was maybe twelve or thirteen. His girlfriend is a widow, a handful of years older than me, with my father careening to his 51st birthday. They will be married this fall, with their reception at Star Trek convention. My father, 18 years since his stroke, is deeply cared for and loved. I am finding the ways to be happy for him, which mostly involves taking my pride and setting it aside - albeit not tenderly. 

My paternal grandmother Judy told me she finished reading The Notebook this week. I suggested she rent the movie from her library. I picture her at night as the film credits roll, her long term partner Tom now a few months dead, also cancer. I picture her lonely. The lonely of loving and then continuing past love. The lonely of being a person who wakes up alive in a bed without someone else’s breath on their neck.

I am tired of my own practice and treatment of my loneliness, of hoping romantic companionship will absolve me of it. I look at how much of this last year I was alone and not lonely. How, for better or worse, my solutions are found on the phone in my hand. A phone call, a Facetime, a Zoom meeting. (Please, please, please one day I will figure out how to describe why I hate texting and continue to do it.) The way I sign xoxo on a postcard as if I will ever know what it would be like to kiss the person. 

I know I have capacity for great love, but I also know I can’t talk on the phone to the same person every day because I begin to feel codependent and when I begin to feel codependent I remember I keep putting off getting a therapist and when I remember that well, I usually end up on OkCupid.