I have to confess something: Sex on Tuesday has become like a personal diary for me.
It’s become a place where I can unload a lot of things that I’ve been carrying around with me for a long time. And you’re probably thinking that’s a good thing – and it is. I just didn’t think I could put it into a column.
My goal with the column was always to illustrate the more intimate things I experienced after my mother died, and how grief affects my perception of sex, love and relationships. But my involvement with Sex on Tuesday has led to important learning curves and key insights.
No matter how big or small, grief is incredibly common. Before I started writing Sex on Tuesday, I hadn’t experienced these feelings of grief in this way. I thought it was the most unusual and isolating feeling in the world.
I learned for the first time that we all experience grief in more than one way. In fact, grief may not necessarily be caused by the death of a person, but simply by the end of something good or by changes in life.
For example, two weeks ago I spoke about changes I had experienced in my own body. The grief in this case was triggered by my body dysmorphia. I was not grieving for a person, but for my former body.
The second and perhaps most important point is that a large part of coping with grief is learning to put yourself and your own needs above everything else.
I realized this a few weeks ago with one of my best friends. She came back to Spain with me after the final exams. The day we arrived in my mother’s hometown in the north of the country, I took her to one of my favorite restaurants. We used the time to make a wish list, eat too much and get drunk on Spanish cider.
As we took bites of the food we knew we couldn’t finish, she turned to me and asked me if I believed romantic love was real. I looked at her confused. How would I know if love was real if I’d never experienced it? I told her that I really hoped it was real, but that I couldn’t confirm or deny that.
Honestly, I thought she knew the answer. After all, she had received so much romantic attention growing up that I thought she would know by now whether love was actually real or not. She explained that she didn’t know yet because all the boys she had dated before “loved her in a way that she didn’t want to be loved.”
In response, I told her that I wanted to love myself before I loved anyone else. That, along with my fear of making my own happiness dependent on another person, is the main reason I’ve remained single for so long. After she said that, she looked at me confused.
“Why should I learn to be alone when I have never been with someone who I thought didn’t love me anymore?”
I didn’t know how to answer. I knew I could answer her question, but I couldn’t put it into words. So I just smiled. Part of me thought it was a joke, but I knew she was genuinely curious.
The following week, I met a boy at a party. A boy who I thought could help me answer my friend’s first question. He was just like me, I thought. I had never met anyone who was so introverted and showed affection in the same way I did.
We spent the last few weeks together; it was like a movie until it wasn’t. He stopped asking me out and when we were together, all he wanted to do was take off my clothes. If I didn’t share his desire, he would just avoid going out together altogether.
One night he told me he loved me. At that moment I believed him because I still didn’t know what love was. I felt like Julie Delpy in Before Sunrise.
How was I supposed to know that he would just stop calling and texting me the next day? When I confronted him about it and asked him to get in touch if he was no longer interested, he just said he didn’t have time for all the things we used to do, but he “still loved me.”
After reading his last text explaining himself, I thought about how I wanted to be loved. I thought about how important time together was to me, and I realized that I was perfectly capable of loving myself ten times more than he ever could – that I had gone on more dates with myself in a week than he had in the month I had known him. At that moment, I decided to end the commitment.
I was able to cut it off because I knew he would keep throwing breadcrumbs at me until he finished his bread. I cut it off because I knew the last thing I deserved was someone trying to tell me that my love was too much and that his crumbs were enough. For me, they are not.
I grieved the image I had created of that person in my head. The only reason I was able to step back was because I know myself and how much I deserve to be loved.
To answer my friend’s second question, I would say that learning to be alone teaches you how you want to be loved, and it gives you the strength to walk away when all you get are hard, cold crumbs and empty promises.
