I had some thoughts come to me in bed this morning, and I've been thinking about them all day, trying to make sense of them.

This will be a weird, long, meandering anecdote, and I predict some will wonder what the point is, but I really think there's something important here, that goes so much to what's going on with people these days, and what brings people to subreddits like this:

I'm a lonely island of a person these days, especially during COVID. I wake up with a bit of heartache basically every morning, but feel like relationships don't have much to offer me. Browsing r/gonewild doesn't offer the excitement it used to, and the way I would have put it is that certain fantasies aren't working for me anymore. Thinking about just having a person around for emotional reasons sounds appealing, but that doesn't connect at all to sex for me. I've felt this was a bit for years, but especially now.

In a dream I had this morning, I remembered a scene from the movie A History of Violence, where Maria Bello tells Viggo Mortensen's character "We never got to be young together", and proceeds to dress up in a cheerleader outfit for him, as kind of a fantasy treat.

There was something about that, something I had forgotten - Something to do with the intense desire for women to...just be nice to me. To want to do things for me like that. I've been walking around with images of old crushes in my head, thinking I wanted something with them, but entirely forgetting the pain of feeling like they didn't care. I remember once in an interest conversation years ago, someone going for blood told me "I bet you've never had a girl like you enough to want to show you her boobs." It worked - that struck a major artery, HARD.

I remember the flirting at parties from my college days - there's was some kind of understanding, and connection, that we were being each other's fantasy for each other. That was nice, and it feels like you don't see that anymore, and what's replaced it is almost this kind of interaction among aliens.

In the mindset I was finding, I started thinking of things differently. Instead of r/gonewild being a bunch of self-indulgent young girls getting themselves off, the idea crept back in of a different dynamic - one where you could think that some piece of that behavior wasn't purely selfish, where it was women wanting to make me happy, or to make viewers in general happy. They weren't literally 'dying to be fucked', so much as presenting a fun fantasy where we can enjoy the idea of 'imagine if you came into the room and a pretty girl was like this and told you she was dying to be fucked'.

As much pain as I might have gone through with women when I was a little younger, I was realizing my heart was open then in a way it hasn't been for a long time. I was open to someone possibly caring, instead of assuming they didn't. All of a sudden, relationships started feeling appealing again. I could imagine the possibility of someone who cared enough about me to give me what I needed, and how in turn I could care about them. A relationship where people do for each other and serve each other's needs...imagine that!

There are some wrinkles here. For one, this seemingly positive mindset doesn't quite gel, it seems to me, with the way modern society likes to address relationships. It features that old dynamic my teenage male brain used to inhabit - not that women wanted sex as much as me, but that they would let me have sex with them. They weren't dying to be fucked up the ass, for example, but instead they would like me enough to want to allow me to fuck them up the ass. The slutty girl at the party was a 'nice girl', she was someone who enjoyed making men happy, by being the fantasy they dreamed of. And I absolutely can't disconnect the noting of 'caring' from my need for sex and physical intimacy, and someone giving a shit about that need, and doing something about it. The idea of "yeah fuck you, that's not a thing that's going to happen, and you're a horrible male for wanting it from women" just closes me up emotionally again.

But this just HAS to be good, in some way. I'm remembering my heart being open again. Things that were killing me in life now seems not so bad. A bleak future seems potentially hopeful. I've found a reason to want to go on dating sites again. I kind of enjoyed this new mindset all day, and didn't want to let it go.

...of course, then when I got home, I went on social media...and it took about 5 minutes to feel all that openness start to just drain the fuck away. Maybe this shit is all poison.