sleeping with ghosts

"I love sex," he said with a grin on our FaceTime call, just days after messaging me privately.

It could have been a red flag, but honestly, who doesn’t? Especially since walking the spiritual path, sex has become a sacred, powerful, even psychedelic experience for me.
I thought that was the page we were on.

My standards with men aren’t just high for protection. They are high because I want to be met with the quality of intimacy I am capable of.

The first time I looked deeply into his eyes, I saw substance and felt the edge of my own walls.

The next time—when he was suspended over me and those walls were gone—I searched his eyes for our connection and found nothing.
Just two black voids of a soul far away.

My heart sank into my stomach as it realized what was happening.
My mind immediately stepped in to rationalize it and give him grace.

Their negotiation allowed him to continue thrusting, while my soul shrank to fit the narrow container of the physical body it was being reduced to.

I do not knowingly date men who watch porn or keep other partners. As this one hollowed me, I began to suspect an external seepage.

He claimed to have entered a new relationship with his sexuality through expressiveness and indulgence.
Yet my body, the vessel of his liberation, yielded less and less.

His hands, once so desperate for the touch he called 'platonic', remained functionally on the bed.
My flow met an unchanging rhythm, as he rehearsed a dance I wasn’t cast in.

A man who “loves sex” but cannot attune to a woman is something I now almost expect.

In these cases, the act comes before the human.

The result isn’t merely disappointing; it’s a devastating loneliness I once mistook for shame.

There’s a difference between loving sex and knowing the depth of it.
When a man is sexually grandiose, that awareness is nearly always shallow.
Why?
Because he has already consummated the act a thousand times inside his own mind.

When the act comes, that's exactly where he retreats.
Persistent on the fantasy of a woman—because a phantom is simply more neurologically accessible than a real one.

I was guilty of it myself for years.

I didn’t yet have the experiential contrast to recognize it as dissociation. “Love” simply fit the same optics as sensation-seeking.

And like all indulgences, the more I fed it, the duller it became.

I didn’t learn how to be present with a partner until I learned how to be present with myself.

For all the grueling work that took, I’ll be damned if another man shows up to the temple and leaves a shadow in his stead.