I Took a Bath With a Guy Who Didn’t Know My Last Name

Maybe I should evaluate my standards but whatever.

Photo by Anthony Tran on Unsplash

Here’s the type of writer I don’t want to be: I don’t want to be the type of writer who uses sex to lure you in; I don’t want to be the type of writer who skates close to the promise of erotica. It’s cheap and makes for bad writing, and I want to be a good writer. And while I’ll happily open a vein and bleed on the page to tell you about my sad and lonely childhood, I draw the line at my sex life.

I’m open about sex, but I’m also a total prude. Men feel comfortable around me because I celebrate the fact that at their core, they’re animals who just want to fuck (that’s the openness part). But I don’t really color outside the lines of the love scenes in 1980s movies (that’s the prude part). No bells and whistles for me. My idea of sexting is something like: you’re in bed reading the New Yorker and I’m next to you reading Dwell Magazine and neither of us has socks on. If you put a gun to my head, I still couldn’t have phone sex. Honestly, I’d rather be shot.

Don’t get me wrong, I think I’m ultimately fun in bed, probably because I let men be complicated and weird. But the result is that I end up attracting complicated men in weird situations. Someday I’ll go back to therapy and examine this at an excruciating slow pace. But for now I accept this pattern, because a large part of the American population is comprised of fucking dumbfucks who won’t get the vaccine thereby allowing COVID to mutate again until it’s strong enough to kill me, vaccinated or not. So might as well screw complicated men in weird situations before the Omega variant comes to take me out.

Which brings me to the story about a complicated man who is in a weird situation, and who revealed that he didn’t know my last name while we were in a bathtub together. The prude in me doesn’t want to tell you this story, but I’m wrenching it out of me because this is an actual thing that happened to me a few weeks ago, and I fucking can’t believe it. I’m stunned, and I guess I need to process it, and you are all my therapist now. (Therapists? Plural? Whatever. Just make me feel better).

I met Dan about a year ago, when we were all pretzeling ourselves trying to figure out how to date during COVID…