When love forbids sex and porn replaces one-night stands

You meet someone with whom you spend a blissful evening. There is sex, which by itself is not easy, but the experience around it makes up for this. For example, you keep looking at his face while you are at it, and you know that you will remember that look.

You return. Your life is punctuated by such moments. You meet someone and are satiated; then for three to four weeks it does not even occur to you that you are a sexual being; and then you have the urge to meet someone again. When that urge returns, it presents itself with a disturbingly strong force, and you grudge it its constant presence. You meet someone else.

You carry on like this until you meet someone who wants to take things forward. You have not had sex with him. Later, when you will think about it, you will thank yourself that you did not have sex with him not because it complicates things but because everything you have known about interacting with other gay men has been premised on sex. And you don’t want to start on love with that baggage.

Now you and he are not in the same city. So what you have is not exactly love, but something like it. You chat every other day and spend hours on Skype over the weekend. His presence has shifted something inside your mind. You feel you are answerable. That urge does not strike you with the same passion. There is something to look forward to; there is a narrative, and so you feel the dilution of that urge which seemed all-encompassing until the other day.

You are glad for this. For, while you enjoyed the sex, the painfulness of that urge, the suddenness of it, always weighed on you. You told yourself that it was nothing, that you had things under control. But the truth is you did not. You had nothing on the romantic/sexual front and so you had to steal those moments. But now you do have something, even if it's only on the distant horizon, and that has changed everything.

You worry that you are losing that ephemeral beauty that you kept close to yourself when you met someone, like, for example, remembering the look on their face when you were at it. But you also know that that kind of pleasure was nerve-racking. It was intense, but it did not fulfil your soul. You were always looking and you never returned to the same person. They did not want to and you did not want to, because returning is what you do when you want to make a story. But there was no story. So it was like expecting to build something with a ferris wheel that you had mounted on a drunken night.

Now when the urge strikes you, it is soft and you can handle it. You don’t have to answer it. If you are really lonely, you watch some porn and you are done. But the kind of porn you watch is also changing. You cannot stand porn that is only about fucking. You want tenderness, eye contact, kissing. You want romantic porn, at the end of which you come in a big burst of soul-filling satisfaction.

These moments of solo sex, you have discovered to your surprise, are more gratifying than sexual encounters with strangers. You have never experienced this before. When you were single, you watched porn and came, but you did not feel soothed by it. Now it overtakes you and forms a protective coat inside of which you experience a myriad of wonderful emotions. It's all you and you do not have to worry about what is going on in the other person's mind, whether things are going okay, where this is leading, et al.

And all of this stems from your being with someone, however slightly.

You now look upon yourself with less anger. Yes, you were angry before this. Because while that man whose wonderfully beatific face was a memory worth keeping, it was nothing more. You and he knew that that was it, and if you were younger and happier in other departments, you might have appreciated the nostalgia of it. But now you are in your 30s and meeting men for one-night stands has lost its benign appeal. All it does is leave a bad taste. Back then you had no other option. You wanted to be touched and held, so you played along. But now you do. You have an option which is distant to be sure, but it has still rewired your brain's chemistry. Now your sex is about love, and you cannot meet a stranger for it. It can only be fulfilled by porn which you watch loads of, and always of a certain nuanced kind and always with a sense of the transcendental.

That's what knowing someone's there has done to you.