The Confusing Ambiguity of a Tinder Hookup
I wasn’t quite sure how to feel about it so I just felt strongly
The room felt stale and the walls were drab and bland. The beige paint on the inside of the Extended Stays hotel that I was in was dull but calming. Something about the place smelled like a faint hint of smoke, even in my non-smoking room. Her eyes wandered around the room, occasionally working her way back to me. She’d start from the floor and work her way up my clothed body until our eyes met. I felt a flinch of nervousness.
Make no mistake, this was going to be a hookup. But hookups are never unambiguous. Even if you just met two weeks prior on Tinder and you decided to meet up in a short period of time, you always go into it with this uncomfortable uncertainty, vagueness about the can of worms you’re about to open. You’re nervous about how things will play out.
You’re apprehensive but desirous.
“Am I about to open up a cocktail of emotions that take me on a roller coaster ride? Or is this going to be a quick hookup that leaves me empty and vulnerable?”
Such is the nature of love and sex — always.
We’re continuously forced to awkwardly strut through our own emotions, trying to figure out if we want to take the risk of opening up to a possible permanent relationship, or if we want to deal with the afterburn disappointment of having a fling.
Something about her was intriguing. Her fun, flirtatious, and lighthearted style matched mine. But at the same time, our lives were forged in two completely different worlds.
She grew up in a wealthy and strict family that sheltered her. I was poor and artsy, but I’d traveled a lot and seen the world. I’d experienced it all and she was only then beginning to see the light of day, breaking through the bottomless pit of the small world she’d inhabited thus far. Her parents never gave her a chance to experience much.
As we sat in that room, the flirting began to heat up. As her eyes stared deeply into mine. We each felt that undeniable spark of attraction. I kept my slight nervousness at bay, a nervousness that gnawed, but was understandable, considering how briefly we’d known each other for.
Soon our bodies came together in unison, each pushing toward one another like the opposing armies on the front line of a battle. We began to make out while clutching one another, wrapping our arms around each other like serpents swirling around us as we embraced. I pushed her back up against the wall gently.
Her touch was soft. Her breath was warm and nice on my face.
We soon moved over toward the be where she immediately got undressed. Off came her shoes, then jeans, then underwear. I stood up above her, looking down, and quickly followed suit. It felt like I couldn’t get my shirt off fast enough. Like my flesh was struggling to breathe with excitement underneath my clothes. Next thing I knew, I was in nothing more than my briefs and I bowed my head downward, was kissing her vulva softly.
My body went into overdrive. My hormones unleashed themselves into my brain and throughout my bloodstream.
After a brief moment, I came back up so we could look one another in the eye again. Nothing beats that fantastic moment before sex when there’s a deep, unbroken stare. It’s when the eye contact becomes so fierce that it would intimidate anyone not sharing the experience with the two of you.
If you haven’t tried staring into your lover’s eyes before and during sex, I suggest you get on that.
It had all of the hallmarks of a romantic encounter. Mystery, intrigue, wonder, uncertainty, attraction, and confusion. It was chaos wrapped up in two bodies that were wrapped up in one another.
It bore all the marks of a tender courtship. There was the “bad boy” from the wrong side of the tracks, a poetic dreamer who’d seen the world. There was the woman who was only now coming into her idea of freedom, tasting it for the first time after growing up in a sheltered home. Two people from different worlds letting their hearts speak freely to beat the odds imposed on them by a disapproving society.
We came from different cultures. We dressed differently and listened to different music.
These are two people who aren’t “supposed to be” attracted to one another. Yet, there we were. We were basking in the quiet storm of internal emotions flood through our veins like pure adrenaline after a shot of amphetamine. The spark we were sharing in that very moment broke down the walls of the cultural and personal norms that divided us. Human attraction refuses to be silenced by culture just as human love refuses to be tamed by any external force we throw at it.
Try as they may to stamp out our love, love always finds a way. As does attraction, in this case.
How Shakespearean…
But that didn’t stop the questions from floating through my mind. “What was the point of all this?” Is this going to be a short fling or am I going to genuinely continue this relationship and try to turn it into something more?”
I wanted to devour her. But were we a match? Probably not.
This is a common conflict in the dating world. You feel enough attraction for someone to lust over them, but you still know it wouldn’t work if you became an item. We decided to commence anyways.
We took turns on the bed at that Extended Stay, pleasing one another and caressing one another. We had established some hard boundaries so nobody would be caught off guard with something they didn’t enjoy. No crossing hard boundaries here. It’s always best to ask. You could feel it in the air that we both cared for each other, even if we’d just met. The deep tragedy of it all was that it was doomed to fail.
The sex was good. It was refreshing and I was just coming off of a long couple of years of travel with very little time for intimacy. The moment I felt the inside of her, my body overflowed with an emotional warmth that felt something like home. My desire escalated as much as her pupils widened.
This only further complicated the issue eating away at the back of my brain like a necrotic infection. I wanted it to be something more than it was. But I knew I had to keep those feelings in check.
I’ll never forget the way she felt clutching me and looking at me face-to-face. We started off missionary and then switched it up, with me behind her. I remember looking down at her soft back and beautiful bottom and thinking to myself how wonderful it was to be finally connecting with someone again.
After the sex, the intense rush of emotions subsided. We laid next to each other and made small talk. I came back to my senses a bit and we had a good chat cuddling.
When she left, we assured one another we would keep in touch. And we did. At least for a couple of weeks. Then things started to fizzle out.
I quickly realized that I was the exhilarating “bad boy” she was looking to have kinky and enjoyable sexual experiences with, but only in secret. But there was no way she was taking me home to mom and dad.
I was the stopgap, the stepping stone in her life, a person she could be hypersexual with on her way to finding Mr. Right, the guy in the khakis who went to church every Sunday. I had to swallow my pride and accept that this was the dynamic of our relationship.
People have the idea that men don’t have these kinds of experiences. We do. Trust me, we do. Most of us know the tortured feeling of being torn between sex and love. Most of us know the pressure to make up our minds about someone quickly or risk losing them forever.
I wanted to put it out there in the world that we men face these kinds of problems all the time. And they’re always headaches. It’s never fun. But we can move learn from them and move on with grace.
A couple of weeks went by with heavy flirting over texts until it fizzled out. She met someone more in line with her personality and I couldn’t even be upset about it. That was my cue to move on myself.
My next partner was a great match for me.
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