This post was submitted by corey

For the past six months, we’ve started your week with sex… or lack thereof. Enter the jungle of the newly out but no longer single in the final Sexual Disorientation.

My Block in Denver, August 2009

I awoke on Sunday morning to what was the worst hangover I’ve had in a while. I had thrown a small party the night before, a chance to show off my apartment and cooking skills, but consumed more gin than was my intention. As I stumbled through the house, the traces of the night before were all too evident: an empty glass on the nightstand, my Armani sneakers atop a pile of clothes in the living room, and my wine-soaked bamboo table runner still drying in the sink.

The one thing I didn’t see was the one thing I wanted to – The Boy I’m dating, who through our decision to see only each other had pushed me out of singledom and into some new and foreign land. He had come over the night before and met my friends, but didn’t feel well and thus took off early.

In the few weeks we’ve been seeing each other, we’ve encountered few of the stereotypical problems that can come with dating. I met his most recent ex-boyfriend, gave him a keycard to my building, and decided with him to go exclusive, all without a hitch or sign drama. But we have struggled at times with the difficulty that comes from having another person in your life, someone who thinks, communicates, and behaves differently than you do and with whom you have to learn to share your life.

All of which raised several questions, questions which I couldn’t help but ponder as I sat hungover in my empty apartment. Are we meant to coexist with another individual, to join ourselves to someone, to merge our time and assets and emotions? Or are women and men islands unto themselves who are too independently designed to be bridged together?

~~~

Earlier in the week I had an after hours-meeting with my director at work. She asked me how I was settling into my job, where my official duties had just begun. “Cautious optimism is the order of the day,” I replied. “I’m feeling good about everything, but I’m watching out for signs of trouble.”

Then she asked me how dating was going. “Still seeing multiple men?” she asked with a laugh, to which I responded that I had settled on one. “And how’s that going?”

“Same as the job,” I said – “It’s going great, which means I’m uneasy.”

Later, while we were each finishing things up on our own, I got a text from The Boy. He was saying that he wouldn’t be able to meet that evening as hoped, the result of my dinner party and his errands running too close together. While the canceled date was itself a disappointment, the true worry was how he had addressed me in the text – “buddy.”

The truth was, I didn’t know what to call him. He referred to himself as my boyfriend from time to time, but as far as I could tell, there was a step between “dating exclusively” and “in a relationship” that we had yet to take. It was a confusing spot to be in, and I wasn’t the only one there.

In fact, that more I talked to friends, the more people I found on the same boat. One woman told me that she’s been dating the same guy for a while, but never knows how to refer to him. “I just say he’s my ‘friend’,” she confided, “and it makes me feel like an idiot.” I noticed that another friend only ever said “the guy I’m seeing” and never “boyfriend,” despite the fact that they were facebook official and seemed fairly serious.

This issue of how much of our lives we wanted to share linked back to my question of independence versus coexistence. But even negotiation itself – at least for The Boy and me – seemed to be made difficult by the fact that we both thought and behaved in very different ways, ways that sometimes left us on different pages.

As I walked out of the office and passed by my director, I shared this troubling text with her. “He called you ‘buddy’?” she responded with shock. “What does that mean?!”

“Like I said before,” I replied. “Cautious optimism.”

~~~

On Thursday evening, for a reason I have now forgotten, The Boy asked me if I had ever been on a boat. “You Coloradans are hilarious,” I said as I began to crack up in laughter, pointing out that those of us from the coast have of course been on boats. And this led to a debate over home state supremacy, my heart still in the East.

It still seems surreal that I now reside in Denver, in a part of the country that was like an illusive mystery to me as a child in Connecticut. The mobility of the modern person is a phenomenon that continues to stun me even as I exemplify it myself.

I have, at times, felt isolated here. Whereas in the District I would regularly greet visitors from out of town, or by train glide through six states in as many hours, Denver feels like a tiny bubble miles from familiarity.

That feeling of isolation made it easy to be single here, for the few weeks that I was. I could walk the whole city anonymously and rarely received offers to socialize. Whereas in DC it always felt strange and unfair to not have someone after spending so much time on The Scene, here being alone seemed logical.

I escaped that feeling of isolation when I started dating The Boy, and I like this alternative much better – even if it means giving up some of my independence. I have someone who will answer if I call, who will laugh at my east coast elitism, and who will wonder in earnest if I have ever boarded a ship somewhere far from this mountainous isle.

~~~

Every change in life is monumental and yet minuscule. The smallest thing can make us feel as though the whole world has suddenly been altered, but the human form is a great survivor. It carries on much the same despite whatever life may bring us.

And so has been my experience dating. Seeing someone exclusively is perhaps no big deal, but there are times when having someone call me his own couldn’t feel more significant.

In the end, maybe this inconsistency is the greatest change that finding someone has caused. Although it seemed so disorienting, being single was binary, static and simple. I was independent, an island of a man who saw things exactly as I wanted to see them. But the world of sort-of having someone, of shared existence, is one of many shades of gray. It is this uncertainty that makes exiting the jungle of the newly out and single both terrifying and wonderful.

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