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Posts Tagged ‘sex after divorce’

  1. The Aftermath: Sex After Divorce

    March 23, 2012 by Nikki Blue

    Like Heather wrote in Busting Out, we had plans for when we were sprung from the joint. Big plans. And we spent hours and hours on the phone discussing them as our soul-sucking marriages crumbled around us. Our unholy unions seemed to mirror each other’s. We were both frantically clawing our way to the surface from the hole of unhappiness we were buried in, and we were covered in resentment and bitterness. But we were evolving. We still are and those conversations were our release, they were our hope. We perfected our diabolical laughter, and we schemed about all of the ways we were going to fuck when we escaped our self-made prisons. The explicit scenarios we rattled off sounded like scenes ripped straight from the pages of a hardcore erotica novel. We meant business. Wait, we weren’t planning to fuck each other. Well, not at that point anyway.

    Unlike Heather, I didn’t have the added worry of my kinky desires affecting the custody of my children so I created a profile on FetLife and OKCupid in addition to my Ashley Madison account. They became the gateway to getting what I’d been missing for so many years, and I admit that for a short time, the word “no” disappeared from my vocabulary altogether. I came (literally), I saw, and I conquered.

    And then one day, I abruptly woke up from my orgasm hangover and realized I had been thinking with my vagina and started thinking with my head. As I sifted through the trash heap of messages from men who claimed they were the solution to what I needed, things were suddenly different. I no longer felt the rush of planning my next orgasm. The outlets I was using to rediscover the deeply sexual being I was once upon a time transformed into more of a nuisance than an answer. Every day life took precedence again and I grew less tolerant of bullshit. I judged grammar and typos harshly, and swore if I saw one more LOL scattered throughout another trumped up profile, I was going to scratch my eyeballs until they bled profusely and stab the next man I saw with a rusty butter knife just for the principal of it. I knew then that I had reached the point where it was time to find my pants and delete my profiles.

    The harsh reality is that life doesn’t wait for you to get off of your back or sober up after divorce. It doesn’t change speeds according to what is going on in your world, and it doesn’t politely give you time to adapt. It punches you in the throat with the precision of a ninja and moves ahead whether you keep up or not. I had to re-prioritize my life without the security of a unaware husband backing me up. I got pickier. I chose quality orgasms over quantity, and I chose real life over a fantasy one. The day to day tasks are still there and new ones have been added. My book still needs to be finished, bills still need to be paid, and kids still need to be taken care of, now more than ever.

    I am now officially a divorcee, a single mother, a statistic. I’m the woman, the writer, the full-time student drinking coffee in a Barnes & Noble on Saturday night while my offspring pick out books to help them reach their reading goal. I’m a survivor, and I emerged on the other side of “divorce sex” a more judicious person. I’m happy, and I smile for multiple reasons. I smile because I’ve accomplished things that I never thought I could, I smile because I’m proud of the person that I am today, and I smile because I still have lots of orgasms.

    Category Divorce | Tags: ,, | No Comments

  2. Busting Out

    March 19, 2012 by Heather Cole

    During the final months of my marriage, Nikki and I developed a ritual. Every morning we’d talk on the phone, sharing the day-to-day details of being mothers and women coping with the end of their most significant relationships. Inevitably at some point in the conversation, one of us would start the list. As with almost every other person going through the breakup of a long-term relationship, we had a list of things we were going to do when we “got out.” Two items stood out in particular: we wanted to start this blog, and we wanted to fuck. Let me be specific, we wanted to fuck a lot.

    You’re surprised, right? Oh, hush.

    I was starved for physical affection. I would have given my right arm to sit beside someone and have them hold me, brush their lips over mine or squeeze my hand. I felt like the desert, parched and yearning for a single drop of physical intimacy. I promised myself that in my new life there would be openly affectionate partners who would love me just as I was. As I struggled through the final days, trying to protect my child and my heart, I dreamed about my new life. But that was the romance novel part of the list. The rest was more explicit. In my ivory tower of the guest room, I plotted and schemed about how to get as much penis as possible.

    Tumblr helped, as did upgrading my phone for a better camera. I had sexual fantasies about everyone who crossed my path, from the guy who bagged my groceries to the woman with the beautiful hair at the post office. Not my neighbor, Greg, though. He wore black dress socks with sandals. I can forgive a lot, but not that. At one point I entertained the idea of hanging a map on the wall, complete with little red pins, marking a road trip to meet all the people I flirted with on Twitter. That would have been a long damn trip.

    Around that time a close friend of mine predicted that I would go crazy after I separated. She told me that her other divorced friends went through a period of acting out, of fucking and drinking and doing all the things they hadn’t been doing while married. I remember the women she referred to and how I had shaken my head about their outrageous behavior. Then, suddenly, I became that woman..

    I was standing at the cusp of something big and wondrous and scary as hell. I was millimeters away from  beginning something entirely new, a life that was solely my own. The interminable feeling of waiting for that moment when every part of you is screaming to break free, the pressure of that contradicting action vs inaction, was a pressure cooker inside me. I was ready to blow. In more ways than one.

    I will not lie. After I separated, there was a man and a hotel room and the first oral sex I had in eight years. I didn’t know him well, but I was greedy and impatient. The room held the smell of clean sheets and a whiff of tobacco. I wore my favorite heels and panties the color of raspberries. As clothes were unbuttoned and hastily shoved aside, I reveled in the fierce joy of touching him. The texture of his skin underneath my fingertips, the taste of his kisses and the glorious sensation of his lips on my clit. As I lay there basking in an incredible orgasm, gazing unseeingly at the ceiling, I knew it was only the beginning of what I could have. Followed rapidly by the thought, “holy fucking shit what the hell am I doing?”

    The months afterwards were intense and there was a lot of fucking. There are still days when I am a big ball of sexual need. The key is not always acting on it. (Nikki, stop laughing.)  I have a child and bills and a new life that I’m creating that takes a lot of energy and attention. I’m writing a novel and honing my craft and settling into a new city. Real life and responsibilities often leave me with little extra energy for a Twitter road trip.

    To those women and men who go a little nuts after the breakup, I get it now. We all have our version of “crazy.” I empathize with what you’re going through, and I hope that you’re using condoms. Just don’t let it go on too long. At some point soon you should rehydrate, pull up your big girl panties and get on with real life. Because that shit don’t wait.

    Category Divorce | Tags: ,, | 1 Comment

  3. The Uh-Oh Moment

    February 8, 2012 by Nikki Blue

    When I was in high school, the idea of being affected by a sexually transmitted disease never crossed my wildly audacious mind. Sure I knew about them, I just didn’t put much stock into what had been so poorly preached, because like most sexually active teenagers, I thought I was invincible.

    Sex education was a topic that was buried at the bottom of our health class underneath nutrition and first aid. Our teacher did her half-assed best to make sure we were marginally educated on the dangers of STD’s. She did such a bang-up job teaching us how to prevent unwanted pregnancy that there were fourteen young mother’s-to-be in my ninth grade class alone. When their gestational condition grew too difficult to camouflage, they became the target of gossip mongers and were secretly shipped off to their great Aunt Opeline’s in Missouri for an extended vacation. Either that or they were forced into Alternative School on the other side of town. Their newborns were either placed for adoption, cared for by a grandma barely surviving on welfare and government cheese, or on rare occasions, raised by the very young newlyweds themselves.

    We didn’t think there was much to be frightened of, and if one of us became one of the unlucky statistics who contracted a venereal disease, it was easily cured. In our somewhat warped perception of reality, herpes was just unsightly cold sores, crabs were the equivalent of head lice and all it took to eradicate gonorrhea (The Clap) and chlamydia from our still blossoming bodies was a dose of good ol’ penicillin. As far as we were concerned, the most common repercussion from having irresponsible sex was pregnancy, and even that was curable, so to speak. We just didn’t hear about people getting VD. If it did happen, which I’m sure it did, no one talked about it. It was a dirty secret that was swept under the rug along with the rumor about you-know-who’s mom getting so hammered at the neighborhood block party that she fucked such-and-such’s dad behind so-and-so’s garage during the wheelbarrow race.

    As I moved into my twenties, the game changed a little as we were faced with a new and deadly crop of STD’s. AIDS reared its ugly head, and while it was mostly prevalent among the homosexual community and drug users who shared dirty needles, the number of heterosexual people who were contracting the deadly disease was on the rise. Hepatitis C also wormed its way into the party mix. Even then I was pretty reckless when it came to protecting myself. It seemed I was bullet proof as I breathed a sigh of relief every year when my test results came back negative across the board.

    Then I got married and the days of casual, hot steamy sex became the stuff of my masturbatory fantasies that carried me through the years of missionary style faked orgasms. I never imagined that one day I would once again feel the anxiety of waiting for those same test results. During the breakdown of my marriage, I made new friends. Friends who benefited me greatly, in many ways, multiple times. I was smarter this time, though, and condoms were mandatory for playtime. Pregnancy wasn’t an issue since I’d had my tubes cut, burned and tied when I delivered my second tax deduction, but a clean bill of health was.

    As my wedding vows were going down in flames, I began to notice some odd behavior that made me call my estranged husband’s fidelity into question. I didn’t care if he was fucking someone else. Honestly, I hoped he was. I wasn’t particularly worried about anything disease oriented either because I hadn’t fucked him in months and had no intention to ever again. I pondered all of this as I lay in my bed, alone in the guest room one night. As I grew tired, my thoughts drifted to the weekend of no holds barred fucking I’d experienced a few weeks prior when he took the kids on a trip. I couldn’t help but smile as the memories of hot, screaming orgasms flashed before my eyes like an x-rated slide show when reality slammed into me like a freight train. There was so much fucking that night, so many orgasms and even a little booze that it’s no surprise I didn’t immediately notice when my playpartner wasn’t wearing a condom, but at what point did it disappear? I couldn’t remember, and even though I’d made him put a new one on right away, panic set in posthaste.

    I wasted no time in scheduling a doctor’s appointment to either ease my mind or blow my world apart. As I laid there in my pink, paper dress, my feet in the stirrups and my vagina on display, I chewed nervously on my nails while I admitted to her that I’d had unprotected sex with someone other than my husband. I expressed my fear and my wish to be tested for everything.

    Again, I felt judged.

    She took the cultures she needed and handed me a prescription for bloodwork which I had done the next day. The two weeks it took to get the answers I desperately wanted was the longest two weeks of my life. I slept less than usual, barely ate and couldn’t shake the humiliation and anxiety that had settled heavily onto my shoulders. Distraction was futile and worry gnawed at my every thought like a tapeworm in my brain. Being the naturally pessimistic person I am only intensified the torment to epic proportions as I exhausted myself with research on how I would live the rest of my life with HPV, genital warts or even herpes. How one careless move would affect my future relationships, my future sex life.

    My doctor called me herself to give me the happy news that every test came back negative. I felt like I was fifteen again. I may have even rolled my eyes a little when she reminded me of the importance of condoms. I could finally stop worrying that I would be labeled a leper and move on with my life disease free.

    And I intend to keep it that way.

    Category Sex | Tags: , | No Comments