THE HARD COLUMN

THE HARD COLUMN

CLOSET IN TI MA CY

SEX IS LIKE PIZZA EVEN WHEN ITS BAD THERES SOMETHING ABOUT IT THATS STILL PRETTY GOOD SO IS INTIMACY THE ULTIMATE TOPPING ?
DOMINIC CADDEN

THE BEATLES HAD IT RIGHT when they said that you cant buy (me) love and they shouldve known (better OK, Ill stop). Despite enormous wealth and thousands of screaming girls throwing their vaginas at them everywhere they went, they all married by their mid-20s. Its true, though, that youll get a fair approximation of love for about $180$400 per hour, depending on whether you want a dinner date and/or backdoor action. The dierence is intimacy. There was a story going around about Charlie Sheen, who was out at a restaurant in LA and, as classy as ever, Sheen ate his food, drank his wine, then ordered a hooker for dessert. The waiter asked, But why? Just about any woman here would go to bed with you. Sheen answered, I dont pay for them to go to bed with me, I pay for them to leave afterwards. Sheens like the many men who dont go for the intimacy thing, or at least take a long while to come around. Or, as was probably more the case with Sheen, theyre afraid to let intimacy get in the way of the next eshy discovery and lets face it, for a time Sheens bed was so busy that he had runway lights installed on it. But maybe all the big talk about numbers and conquests is just overcompensation for pain from a lack or loss of intimacy. And when was the last time you heard a guy talk about that? Sex without intimacy is easy to nd and the same goes for love without sex (just hang out with any woman who says you are sweet or cute). Sex with intimacy is another matter entirely. Its something that we often forget as men because theres a little piece of Charlie in all of us (not that piece, I dont think hes bi), so we all hanker for that new discovery or conquest. Men have always had a thing about discovery and rsts, whether thats being the rst person to ride a scooter to the South Pole or being the rst to discover an overgrown rock in the middle of the ocean. Men do that for themselves. Women couldnt care less. Theyre just happy if a man discovers her clitoris and it doesnt matter if hes not the rst. Its OK to feel lust it comes standard with your penis and cant be removed like a shop security tag. The thing to remember when youre with a partner is that the two of you went through that lust and conquest stage together. The new challenge is to not only relive it, but relive the sense of oneness that made your bond dierent to the many other lusts youve had. Perhaps nothing will ever match that rst rush of adrenalin that occurs early in a relationship which, lets face it, is often fear. But it will be a dierent feeling when you revisit your saucy internet chat sessions, steamy lunchtime encounters, hackneyed pub pick-up, accidental dakking in the surf or however it all started. Go back to those occasions when you made

your rst discoveries about each other, the places, the activities and have fun making those discoveries new again, even if its just nding out that you need to use milder chillies if youre going to have oral after re-enacting the fridge scene in 9 Weeks hey, it was funny (well, for one of you). Just as in sex, something is only kinky the rst time you do it, this will only be corny in the initial stages. You cant recapture that initial lust and excitement fully, but its balanced out by the intimacy and experiences that you know you went on to share its kind of deja-vu, but in reverse. Plus you know youre bound to get lucky. Some couples whove been together for years try to gee-up the excitement through third parties, such as swingers get-togethers. You can see the whole thing about trust and discovery but its kind of like trying to commit suicide by wetting your nose and inserting it into a light socket: theres some logic, but there has to be a better way. Ive heard stories of some couples who will visit a sex worker together for their birthday on his they go to a woman and on hers they go to a man. It just sounds like a recipe for months of resentful and sardonic comments alternated between the pair of them. The mistake is instead of looking inwards we keep looking out for a more intense experience, struggling to hit that new peak and it all tends to take us away from that goal of intimacy. On paper, no man could see himself choosing to listen to someone whinge about their career when theres a double episode of the new 24 on TV, but you do because where theres intimacy, the pleasure is often in the giving. (FYI Jack got captured, escaped, shot 31 people, slapped Tony down like a bitch, and the head of CTUs dead, so Jacks the boss again.) When you give enough, and make someone feel loved, desired, trusted entirely, they feel like a sex god, no matter what they look like or how messy their bedroom is. Apart from major physical transformations and creating multiple partners (maybe in the future lets get freaky tonight darling, bring out my clone!), an intimate partner can be anything you want them to be lover, whore, porn star or sexy stranger. That letting go and deep merging of two people who fully see and understand each other should bring out new discoveries in your sexual range, surprising even yourself. And if your partner can feel that too, then youll both make love like a train, but without the random whistles or stopping inside tunnels for no apparent reason. But its the deeper discovery of yourself and your partner that can lead to what SkyDancing Tantra teacher Margot Anand calls the orgasm of the brain, in which the body, mind and heart all participate. There you go thats a threesome right there. Pretty kinky, eh? FG

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IMAGE APL

volume 2

issue 2

2006

115