Making (the Most of Making) Out
A couple weeks ago I worked myself into a frenzy in my therapist’s office because I had a date with someone I was attracted to. I was worried that the very fact I was attracted to her was a sure sign that something would go terribly awry, that she was a Michelle Rodriguez (for those of you who’ve kept up with this blog), or that I’d clearly made a poor decision. I’ve been feeling burned enough to start seriously questioning my own judgment in these matters. Wrong about people too many times.
My therapist leaned her pretty white hair forward, looked in my fear-flustered eyes, and said, “We’re going to get practical here. Why don’t you go on some dates with some people? Ideally, more than one person. It takes about three months of dating to really get to know someone, so if you like someone, will you consider giving them two to three months, with an open heart and an open mind? You don’t have to make any decisions; you can just consider it ‘information gathering.’ Then you can decide whether it’s a good idea to keep dating them. Do you think you can handle that?”
This appeal to the information-gathering scholar in me was clearly a manipulative ploy, but, yeah, I said I thought I could handle that. Gather information now, pay attention, and make conscious decisions as I go. Sounds okay, I thought, to put a short-term goal on it. But hadn’t I kind of tried that before?
“Also,” she added, just when I was getting my head around it, “this is going to work much better if you refrain from having sex.”
“For three months??? With someone I’m attracted to? While dating them?” Excuse me Miss Vivian, but have you lost your mind? I’m also not so sure I can really handle dating more than one person at a time, I told her, but I guess I’d be willing to try if the opportunity arose.
“Well, you decide what works for you,” she replied, fixing me with that unnerving, neutral-compassionate gaze. “The point is to get to know the person before things get too intimate, the way they tend to with lesbians.”
Oh, you mean that. The reason the U-Haul joke (“what did the lesbian bring to the second date?”) is the only true lesbian joke on the planet. And why Vivian makes a killing among lesbians in Denver.
“Let’s try a month and a half,” I ventured, “which will be pushing it.” Cuz, see, this gal in question and I had been getting to know each other in little pre-dates and emails and whatnot for a month and I KNEW we had the chemistry.
“Ok, so a month and a half without being sexual,” Vivian summarizes.
“Wait. Does that mean no kissing?”
“Of course not! There can be kissing and being physical–it’s not as if you can’t touch each other at all–just no sex or sleepovers.”
Just no sex or sleepovers. Riiiight.
I should’ve said, “you mean, like in junior high?”
Because, pretty much, now I feel like I’ve died and gone to junior high. I mean the good part of junior high–what little there was of it–when we weren’t navigating being “trash canned” or dealing with zits or social stigma or the excruciating business of sitting in class. The tentative kissing, macking, mauling with clothes on, accompanied by rushing hormonal sensations, waves of glandular feeling that bring you to the brink of something but you’re not sure what’s on the other side. Your adult side, today, is sure what’s on the other side (in my case, great sex, intimacy, then disaster) but your inner seventh-grader really has no idea and just hopes it doesn’t stop, but knows you gotta get home by 4:45 and somehow live with what’s happening in your pants.
The person that comes to mind for me to summon such memories is Robbie Siegel, my seventh grade “boyfriend.” This guy was, in a way, the nerd of the school because he was 1) Jewish, and what you might call intellectual; 2) smart enough to skip eighth grade and get his butt straight to high school; and 3) totally confident about being smart. What saved him from utter ridicule was that he also played soccer well and was developing early, so he was a lot less twerpy looking, and bigger, than the more popular guys who might’ve made fun of him. Robbie invited me to his bar mitzvah–the first one I’d ever gone to–as his date. After that, we did A LOT of making out at his house after school getting out and before his parents got home. With a lot of Jethro Tull in the background. To this day I can’t hear “Aquaman” or a flute without thinking about Robbie.
I got a lot of crap from my friends about hanging out with Robbie, but the fact was that he was good at making out. We even went to third base, eventually. Awkward, but worth it. Until some kid called me out of algebra class on a hall pass to grill me about whether I’d gone to third base with Robbie Siegel. Can you believe? I, of course, denied.
So now I’ve been dating the special someone, with the “2-3 months, no sex for at least half of it” deal on the table. And this week we saw each other more than we would have were we both not going to be out of town until early January. It’s nice to do things together knowing exactly what the cap is on how far we’re going to go, and I’m discovering that when I’m not entirely lost in that intense rush of consummating the initial sexual attraction, all these great opportunities arise to actually ask and answer questions, get to know each other, and walk around doing stuff together. Interesting when something so old fashioned, tried-and-true feels like a real epiphany.
And during those un-scheduled times when we’ve found ourselves on a couch in a warm house with snow falling outside, we’ve taken full advantage of the making out option. It’s torture, yeah, but exquisitely so. I’m swimming in the rediscovery of kissing. Slow, soft kissing; explorative, meandering kissing; frenzied kissing–all without taking it in the direction we certainly would like to but opted not to. It’s heady, but somehow a lot more under control. Plus, I feel like I can see this person for who she is, and not just in my bed.
I like her a lot, but we’ll see.
This whole theme reminded me of a conversation I had this summer with two dear female friends of mine who are in long-term, committed heterosexual relationships. They were laughing about the ups and downs of partnered life and somewhere over the second martini it came out that the thing they both really missed was making out. “Yeah, making out is the best,” we all agreed.
So, dammit, I’m going to make the most of making out.
