PART II: I Am No Longer Addicted to Male Validation and Now I (Still) Don’t Know What to Do With My Hands
I’m (still) so scared I’m going to have to get a hobby now or something.
As you may be able to tell from the headline, this is Part II of the essay that ran last week. So if you haven’t read that one yet, go do that before you read this. And if you read it last week but don’t really remember it, maybe go read it again.
Somewhere between 25 and 26, I mercifully burnt out on the cocktail of champagne and coke, men and money I’d been slugging for years. It wasn’t anything dramatic. I had a couple of bad nights, sure, but they were really only “bad” in that I’d suddenly realized I didn’t want to be there anymore and then slowly realized I maybe never wanted to be there again. So eventually I stopped going there.
In the meantime, I met a man who was not at all my type and yet to whom I experienced an almost immediate, insatiable sexual attraction. We fucked on the couch in his office more times than either of us could count and developed a delightfully harmless crush on each other that eventually fizzled as innocuously as it began. Meanwhile, I remembered how much fun sex and love and crushes could be for their own sake—how much fun they had been before I turned them into a risky transaction I needed to hedge my bets against.
For the first time in a long time, I don’t feel like I’m trying to fuck a fantasy or fuck myself into one, I wrote at the time. For the first time in a long time, I’m not fucking for money or status or validation.
And then I met another man and fell in love with him and got my heart broken and it hurt more than anything like that had hurt since I was 17—because somewhere along the line I seemed to have slipped out from under the anesthesia I’d been drugging myself with for years. But it was alright, because it felt like getting to experience life all over again for the first time. It felt like fifth grade, when I finally got glasses after years of needing but refusing them (for vanity reasons) and saw, with perfect clarity, just how much I’d been missing.
In recent and less financially secure times—when I’ve found myself not just missing but actively hurting for the cash flow of my sugar dating days—I’ve attempted to lure myself back into that lucrative side hustle by reminding myself just how addictive the money alone is, even if I no longer crave the high of the act itself. Even if the idea of a man wanting to fuck me so badly he’ll pull thousands from the account his wife doesn’t know about, once so intoxicating, now only arouses a slightly bored contempt.