An Elegy on Guy Trouble

I should’ve been finished with a new I’ll Show You Mine update by now. The chapter I’ve plotted out in heckn sizzling, with a whole bunch of teasing, taunting, and more than a few broken barriers (which I will not spoil here mostly in the hopes of getting tf on with it).

At bare minimum I should have a decent excuse — and since I wrote 10K words for my Reylo charity anthology entry last Sunday through Tuesday, maybe that’s a half-arsed one.

But the truth, lovely friends, is that most of my distraction this weekend came from 1) a sick D&D game with pals, and, perhaps more egregiously, 2) Tinder.

Really, it’s all Master’s fault since he was having so bloody much fun with the app and was so damn encouraging about me checking it out, too (ah, the curse of a supportive partner in poly-ness!). And it very quickly revealed itself to be a slippery — perhaps cumstained? — slope.

I was happy to see Master getting out there again because he’s an awesome, conscientious kink partner, and way more ladies need that in their lives. In the meantime, I figured I’d just throw myself into my writing, and have to worry perhaps a teensy bit less that I was neglecting multiple relationships, including the one I have with him.

But then he was so lovely and encouraging, and I figured it couldn’t hurt.

I’ll just download the app. I’ll just make a profile and poke around. I’ll just swipe around a bit.

I wasn’t going to meet an Elegy-flavored unicorn, right? Especially not given the almost microscopically narrow sliver of what I was looking for … and after recently breaking things off with my play partner of a year and a half, I was content to wait.

My first match was less than promising. This is only my own observation, but I’ve noticed there’s a fair-sized demographic of bottoms or submissives who are sorta dom-crazy when they first start exploring — and this guy seemed that way, to the point of not being able to communicate openly.

Was he on FetLife? No, but maybe we could take pictures for it together. Has he investigated the kink scene and munches in his local area, about 75 miles away from me? No, but maybe we could check it out together.

Hmm.

(Sidenote: wtf is with Tinder being super liberal with respecting the distance settings you enter? Defo not a fan of that aspect.)

My red flag here is that I need to be able to communicate with a partner in both vanilla and kink contexts — and my first Tinder match didn’t seem to be quite there yet. So that was pretty disheartening. I know I was pretty easily nudged into the ol’ sub frenzy zone early on, so I really hope that person finds their way to an awesome community to help them investigate their inner darkness, but long story short I’m not the right voice to help out.

I tossed my phone aside vowing to stay the hell off Tinder while I prepped for our now-weekly Dungeons & Dragons game with pals … so of course it pinged with another match alert.

And then, to my surprise, a message — about D&D, no less!

I cannot stress how violently my panties burst into flame at this point. Like, a dude who opens not with hEy cUTie but a cheerful acknowledgement of a shared niche interest? Insta-sploosh.

(I understand that I’m mixing metaphors with fire and water re: my ladybits’ reaction to this dude’s to-the-point message, but hey, that’s the complicated nature of being human. Maybe it’s the beginning of my own private A Song of Ass & Fire, who tf knows)

Pre-panty-wrecked, I swiped over to this dude’s profile, and not only is it both coherent and interesting, but this guy, y’all … he’s hot. Like, two-syllable daaaaa-yummmnnnn, or in the parlance of both Saint Motel and middle-school girls of the late 90s, he fine.

And therein lies an interesting problem for me, insofar as I have a major distrust of good-looking guys, especially when they might possibly want to knock boots with me, ideally on the regular.

My first actual adult relationship was with a swoon-worthy dude who pretty much ripped out my heart, hung it on a hook, and keel-hauled it for three years, merrily gaslighting me along the way (I guess this is a Victorian-themed metaphor; thanks for coming on this mental journey with me).

And since I was groomed for emotional abuse by an emotionally abusive parent, instead of being able to acknowledge that straightforward fact (which I can now at least sorta do after years if thurpee and meds and the whole nine), my stupid lizard brain said hot dudes are trouble.

To be fair, I’m not idealizing this guy. He’s human, he’s made mistakes, and as the BSG refrain goes, so say we all. But it’s not fair to distrust him because he’s symmetrical and cut and has all kinds of tattoos that I reeeeeally want to look at … right?

So why the latent fear that pretty dudes are players?

There are other factors that are huge points in his favor. He’s a reader — megaswoon. He didn’t like TRoS, and had a really cogent set of reasons why not. He seems like a caregiver, and holy hannah did that make my heart go boom when I found that out. After everything I went through and saw this summer, I have a pretty solid awareness of how hard it is to care for a loved one, what a thankless and unrelenting job it is. Being able to be someone’s port in a storm, even if it’s in an unconventional way, gives me a different sort of feels than I’ve ever had before, in addition to the aforementioned attraction based on his nerdiness.

So this is the conundrum of online dating/ hookup culture: maybe he’s what he presents himself to be, maybe he isn’t. Maybe meeting in person will be awkward and horrible and weird — and Cthulhu knows I’m still feeling dysmorphic as fuck from my hair being short in the wake of chemo — or maybe it won’t be.

(Sidenote: There’s really no feeling more fun than looking in the mirror and seeing echoes of your abuser. Thanks, genetics!)

Maybe I’ve actually found what Master found in his own long-term play partner: someone with whom I can actually be myself, and he’ll find me sexy.

And maybe I’m just overthinking all of this, and he’s just sorta meh about me while I’m crushing hard — or could be, depending on how things go. I legitimately have no idea. But I refuse to bestow a smexy nickname upon him. Nuh-uh. Not yet.

I guess the tl;dr of all this is that my lizard brain is making me goofy over a dude I barely know but am totally intellectually hot for (in addition to the please fuck me into the mattress physical side of things), and it is going to be a looong few days until I meet him.

SOS. Send memes.

And here’s hoping I can channel all this pent-up angst into something useful.

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