Hello and welcome back to The Overthinker’s Guide To Sex, a sex and relationships newsletter by journalist Franki Cookney.
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Welcome to April’s Big Think, a longer-form piece, in which I examine an aspect of sexual activity, culture, or behaviour in more depth. Got a suggestion for something you think I should cover? Let me know!
I promised I’d write something horny…
This is a subject I’ve been thinking about for a long time. It’s inspired, in part, by a relationship I had some years ago in which I just never felt like I really knew where I stood. I’m sure we’ve all been in that situation. At the time I found it agonising for two reasons. The first was that I felt deeply, deeply vulnerable. I really liked this person, you see, and I just didn’t know, couldn’t be sure, if they felt the same way. I felt so powerless, so completely at their mercy, and that was unbearable for me, at that time. But the second was that I felt frustrated and angry with myself for being in this situation. As a *relationship expert* I should be able to communicate myself out of this mess. Why couldn’t I just ask “what’s the deal between us?” like a grown up. What the hell was wrong with me that I had ended up in such a pickle? The relationship eventually came to an end and in the intervening years I’ve thought a lot about how it made me feel and why, and I now understand that to some extent the uncertainty was part of the draw. The precariousness was what made it so erotic.
These days I find myself courting the liminal space between knowing and not knowing. I am less interested in defining the relationship than I am in how not defining it makes me feel. I’ve begun to more consciously observe those flickers of doubt, the feeling of being exposed, the emotional risk, and I can actively enjoy them. I’ve realised, too, that this goes hand in hand with my love of anticipation, of drawing things out. I like to be on the cusp: On the cusp of understanding, on the cusp of a collision, on the cusp of surrender.
The “you” I address in this piece is not an individual, it is an amalgamation of experiences. But I like the idea of drawing you, the reader, into it with me. Am I talking about you? Maybe. Maybe not. And that’s precisely what I’m getting at. That frisson of uncertainty. The squirm of discomfort that could also be pleasure.
I hope you enjoy it.