Sex and Oxygen.

There's a quote floating around out there, along the lines of, "sex in a relationship is like oxygen, you don't think about it very much until you're not getting enough". Last Saturday as I was on my way to an event, I had to pass by my ex boyfriend's place and of course it brought back a lot of memories, both really good and also really bad. By the time we broke up, there were a lot of little things that had added up to that point, but the main issue was a lack of intimacy. When I first started dating Dan I was worried about measuring up. He had already been in two serious relationships and I had almost no experience with any kind of relationship, I was afraid of lacking in both emotional experience and sexual experience. I was really head over heels for the guy and I wanted to put every effort into making things work. ................................................ Little did I know however that I had found the one in a million guy who isn't all that interested in sex, to this point I had never really heard of a man not wanting to have sex, I mean straight or gay, isn't that the running joke about men thinking about it 24/7! Apparently though I would find out it's common. One of the things that would upset me later was that he kept this from me and let me blame myself. I found it odd when we first started dating that he would keep saying "we will eventually find our stride". I kept thinking how odd a thing to say, don't we just get undressed and go at it? What stride, we weren't practicing for Cirque du Soleil. ............................................. Later when he finally told me, I began to resent him. I know it wasn't personal, it's the way he was but I took it personally. It's also very hard to be in love with someone and every time you want to express to them how much you love them in an intimate way, you are brushed off. I soon felt what was the point of being boyfriends when we were missing the one thing that separates us from just being good friends. To me part of being gay was finally getting to have sex with a guy, like I had dreamed about my whole life. I had always had in my head, those naughty thoughts of making love on a rainy weekend afternoon when there is not a lot to do, or when the power goes out or there is nothing on t.v. or it's Thursday and why the heck not! Suddenly all those intimate fantasies were wiped away by reality. ......................................... Sometimes he made things worse, like when we were out in public with friends, he would pretend to be some kind of hot lover that couldn't wait to get me back home. I remember one of his friends saying I was red from blushing and everyone laughed thinking I was shy. The truth was I was angry and blasted him when we did get back, it wasn't so much anger as it was me being hurt. He knew the subject was sensitive between us and yet was acting in an embarrassing and immature way. I tried to to help him but he would shut down on me, then I found out about other things he was keeping from me and I finally gave up. During this time my Dad had passed away and I moved farther away from Dan, we weren't getting along very well and I started going less and less, which caused a cycle of him getting angry because I wasn't coming to see him, and I wasn't coming to see him because he was always getting angry. Until finally the end. As the saying goes, sex and oxygen, you don't really think about them until you are not getting enough, or sex is ten percent of a relationship and the rest of life is ninety percent, unless your relationship suddenly has no sex then the numbers reverse. I couldn't help feeling sad as I drove by, I know deep down he didn't tell me because he didn't want to lose me, but he certainly didn't try to help things. Any way that's life I said to myself, drive on, drive on.