When I was a kid, I would often find out one way or another that, psych! Joke’s on me! The boy doesn’t actually want me, he just wants to play with me–with my body or my words. As Eartha Kitt once told Terry Wogan…

“A man has always wanted to lay me down, but he never wanted to pick me up, and the men that did have real love and affection for me were the ones that never touched me.”

That one feels like a gut punch lately because, yes girls, it’s true. She has a crush. There’s just one problem. Having a crush makes you irrational and bad. Ok fine, it doesn’t, but it usually feels that way. I’m being facetious because my cheeks are red and I’m hoping you don’t notice. He’s very cute. IT’S A MAN?! I know. I’m going through a phase. LET ME FOCUS. Back to Eartha Kitt.

It seems irrational, as the animals we are, to prefer to be loved at first from an admiring distance. Shouldn’t we be making our romantic interests known immediately to ensure our best chances at love? Or is that too cringey? Too love-bombing? Well, I’m an average woman. Let’s look at what I like.

I swoon when someone tells me, “I noticed you the moment you walked into the party”. I enjoy flirty gazes across crowded rooms. I like when touching is off-limits, especially when we take those limits very seriously. In short, I like the pure intentions of those who simply want to be around me, without the physical contact that, at the end of the day, I desperately desire. What’s that about? Why do I dream of being together when I’m alone, but when it comes to real people with raw flesh, true intimacy is a Herculean task and I’d prefer some space to breathe? Where does my bravery go when I actually have to use it?

I should mention, sex is not intimacy. It can be intimate, but it is not intimacy. For most people I know, myself included, sex is a lunar event. Interesting for a night, but the world usually doesn’t change because of it. In “Last Words of a Shooting Star”, Mitski sings…

“You’d say you love me and look in my eyes,

but I know through mine you were

looking in yours.”

Mitski implies a sort of emotional masturbation on her partner’s account here, as if her partner is using her–her body, her eyes–to love himself. We hook up with other people, not because we want them, but because we want to feel some wanting. Intimacy is the opposite of this. It’s about taking someone in while forgetting you exist. Openly, together, you see each other. It requires presence and vulnerability. This can happen during sex, but it happens more often in a shared look, a remembered phrase, a song well-listened to.

All this makes romance complicated. I want what Eartha Kitt spoke of. Someone who offers real love and affection. Pure intentions. Time together. It sounds lovely and safe, but I also want to drop the facade that dating and intimacy are not made so much easier by the icebreaker of sex. Honestly, I can’t imagine looking him in the eye without first spilling all my anxiety out onto his chest in a dark bedroom (hell, I’ll take a closet at this point).

Maybe you don’t agree. Maybe you think sex complicates things. I think–at least, at first–it can be a canvas for intimacy. Sex can simplify and unite two reeling minds like nothing else I know (I am taking recommendations). Yet, after a couple of times, complications are guaranteed. This is probably the reason why a few men think I’m dead, or in some dark forest and very, very lost. I’m gone by the time they can ask where I went.

So, we’ve come back to me. Some average woman. I lose interest without sex, but more often I lose interest because of it. I want to talk about sex all I want, but I only want men to discuss it very quietly, and only with me. I want him, but I cannot have him. “It’s exhausting being a woman”; try being an irrational and bad one (joking)! Some of us are simply vacillators. Still, today, I’d like to settle on the middle bits. Eartha and icebreakers. Work and play. It takes both.

Written by Patty Castellanos