No substitute for intimacy

I became aware, probably, at some point, that the fetish was being used as a substitute for intimacy. It was a safer avenue into extreme closeness. It put me in a position where I was opening myself up to the person, and feeling all those strong emotions that usually go along with love and intimacy, but it was not real love, not real intimacy. It was a placebo. A safe placebo. This happened in more than one relationship, and honestly, I think it is something I will always need to watch out for, because intimacy is "hard", whereas indulgence in the fetish is "easy", relatively speaking.

In around 1996, I had finally got out of the tailspin of relationships that included and fell in the wake of the KH infidelity extravaganza. I was not particularly happy, I was lonely, and not really feeling like I belonged to anything. It was a reasonably long period of "not in relationship" for me, which was unusual. I'd moved in with these new guys, and they had their own set of friends. I was allowed to participate in it, but I was not really one of them. And I didn't feel "cool" or "in". There were a lot of women in their circle, but I always felt like a sort of sympathetic or pathetic creature to them. I felt like I was weird, and that they wouldn't like me. Not sure why, but that's how it was at that time.

I was out one night with these housemates, going to see a band that was friends' of theirs. At the table next to us, there were some drunk giggling women. One of them kicked my chair or my leg, and apologized in a way that, in hindsight, was pretty obvious she'd done it on purpose to get my attention. She seemed rather ditzy. But I'd drank a bit too, and ended up following her to some other bar, where she was so drunk she could barely stay on the stool. When I saw her at this second bar (I'd gone there separately, following her on her recommendation), she was sitting at the bar, smoking. And it wasn't sexy, I can tell you that. Because she was wrecked. But... she smoked, and that piqued some sort of "idea" in my head, in no small part because it had been awhile since I had a girlfriend.

After a brief pursuit, that involved me needing to figure out what her name was, and find her number in the phone book (I actually practically read the phone book trying to find the name, since I wasn't sure what her name was), SH became my girlfriend for what would be about a year and a half.

She and I never really had that much in common, and she really should not have been my girlfriend. We did not come from similar backgrounds, we did not have similar beliefs. It was and is still not clear to me what beliefs she had, if any, because she was always in too much of an anxious or scattered frenzy of self-absorption to formulate concrete beliefs. If you asked her about any serious topic, she would always say something like "Who cares? I don't really want to think about that. It doesn't interest me!"

At one point, my sister actually said to me, "She's nice and all, but... is she really going to be smart enough for you?"

Of course, the answer was "no". But we stayed together in a very non-intimate relationship. And the fetish had a fairly central role in the intimacy. I wasn't that attracted to her, as a person, and thus, I think I was always using the fetish as a crutch to get myself to a place where we were able to be intimate. When we first started dating, she didn't know about the fetish. And she didn't smoke in front of me much, because like most women, she assumed that it would be a turnoff to me. SH was not a frequent smoker, probably only a few a day or less. There was little about the way that she smoked that was attractive to me.

I had sort of resolved not to tell her about it. Not sure why. But we'd dated for a couple of months, without mentioning it. And then, probably in the summer of 1996, there was a day where we had not been getting along that great already, for whatever reason (could be that we never got along that well) and it was raining really hard. And in the rain, I got in a minor car accident. And somehow, I lost my shit, and started yelling at her, and almost blaming her for the accident. It was absurd. She was not in any way responsible. But it really upset her. She should have dumped me right then and there, but she gave me the benefit of the doubt that I was just being emotional. We ended up taking the train to the airport to rent a car because my car was undrivable, and it was clear it would be weeks before it was repaired. So then we're back in town with the rental car, and I was feeling extremely exasperated and vulnerable. And this state of affairs caused me to grant myself the "indiscretion", if you will, of telling her that smoking turned me on. That violated my original plan, of not discussing it. And it also started a new dynamic. Because this was apparently interesting to her. And that was the first time that the fetish played a role in that relationship. And for the remainder of the relationship, it was always a sort of manipulation. She always liked to smoke when she was drinking. And she always liked to drink. And a lot of what we did involved going out and drinking. So it was a very non-intellectual, mutually indulgent interaction.

If I could just look at it as that; two people indulging in something that was satisfying to each, with no serious objective or goal, then I guess it wasn't that bad. The problem is, I think that my actions were molding my emotions and mindset around relationship and intimacy, via the fetish. So, I was getting further away from "truth", whatever that means. Again, in this relationship, the fetish brought out the worst in me, including dishonesty. There were a couple of occasions where SH (and in one case, her friend, as well) had been smoking in my room. Of course, my housemates confronted me about this. And, I lied straight to their faces, and said that no one had been smoking, and that it must have been on our clothes. It was so stupid and absurd. But my shame and secrecy around the subject made me willing to be embarrassingly dishonest. It was probably things like that which caused those guys to never really accept me in their group.

Right before we broke up, we went on a trip together to Cancun, which was kind of a shitty place to go, but I didn't know any better when I was 27. The trip was pretty much the last gasp of the relationship, already past one breakup. And there was nothing left except the fetish, and the mutual indulgence. She in alcohol and smoking; me in alcohol and the fetish. A fairly toxic combination. Again, if you were to say that it was just two people being hedonistic, maybe it was fine. But in my mind, I had the belief that I wanted a real relationship. And this was not that.

The relationship ended badly. I think that SH, for all of her lack of depth, actually had always seen the relationship for what it was: someone to "hang out" with. I kept trying to see it as something more, even though deep down inside no part of me even wanted more. I had a bad habit of always trying to see things as more. I think in that case, the fetish was a vehicle toward false intimacy.

This blog entry isn't really about SH. Or at least, I didn't intend for it to be. If I had the patience, I would edit it, to make it even less about SH, but she's a convenient backdrop for the real issue, which was substituting intimacy with fetish. The fetish brings about such incredibly strong emotions in me, which I may never fully understand. It mesmerizes. It creates vulnerability. It brainwashes. It can even give the illusion of closeness. I have to remind myself sometimes that to someone who does not have a smoking fetish, the observation of the act holds none of these things, and that there does exist a more objective reality that is not so incredibly "charged".

I don't think, as I have said before, that I will rid myself of the arousal that is associated with watching a woman smoke. That's unrealistic, and probably unnecessary. I may also not be able to decouple that feeling of intimate bond that occurs while sharing the fetish with my partner. But what I want to do, and believe can be done, is to have the fetish be more like the parmesan cheese that we occasionally sprinkle on our pasta, instead of having it be the pasta. Good pasta is good pasta. Gnocci, very good. Ravioli, even better. Sometimes, even when you're eating the best four-cheese ravioli in the world, you still shake some grated cheese on it.

There's nothing wrong with that, is there?