Hello all -

An update.

My feelings for Goldenheart definately smoothed out for a spell there. We're both still without orgasms, its pretty bewildering to me, I don't exactly feel desexed so much as that I have put what I normally viewed as my sexuality in some sort of storage space and await another unfolding . . . but it seems life is very busy and I find it hard to savor the subtler enjoyments, so . . . . more or less we are living like a married couple who is fond of one another but who has no sex life. Both people have separate lives during the day and in the evening they are kind and generous to one another, without much to share or much in common except that they live in the same house and have a past together.

After about a week of being more flowing (thanks in large part to the exchanges), I've found myself feeling bored with the quality of our exchange and at times convinced it is clear that I do not want to reamain with him. Part of my struggle in deciding (and I appreciate everyone's patience in my process, I'm sure it can be boring as well!), is that I don't really understand my own frame of reference anymore if that frame of reference does not involve passion. So, when I disqualify him it is based off of a criterion that this approach seems to challenge. If I am to take this approach at all seriously, it does in a way demand that I suspend all former ways of navigating these things - maybe not all, but the dominant ones.

We still laugh a lot. I genuinely care about him. I think his body is sexy, tho his face still looks like a boy's to me, tho he is actually pretty mature as men go, or as men I have encountered go.

But on to the exchanges!

I won't go through each one - we've only completed five anyway, some nights we are so tired. I will say that the exchanges have certainly provided a level of basic respect and reciprocity that has been relieving, even as it does not cement anything, nor does it need to. It actually seems to me that through this process we may become more clear, and actually more MUTUALLY clear, about what is best for us. And, if it ends up that we do not stay together, I feel the exchanges will have provided at least some caring resolution to what is a large karmic attachment we may have been resolving for lifetimes, for all I know.

The exchanges have not felt ecstatic to me yet, but they have felt profound in many ways. Simply listening to one another's hearts was very deep, even for only a few moments. I do like finding ways to share and be intimate without words. Usually we use sex in this way but aren't so inventive with other ways to do this.

It has been fun and challenging to do to him what I like done to me, and still keep it non-sexual.

Overall I feel this is a very human practice. The emphasis is on the human connection first, the gender connection second. Since Goldenheart is already a very humane person, he is not really growing and expanding in new ways in that sense. In fact I think that is why I like him so much, because first and foremost, he treats me as a human. Always has. Whereas I treat him more in terms of how he does or does not exhibit manly behavior around me.

So, I think this could be very beneficial for a couple who has a history of hot sex as the glue in the realtionship (which I think is based more off of the contrast and thrill of gender difference rather than the more all-encompassing awareness of human similarities). Since my days of hot sex with goldenheart are from many years ago, that's not the dominant flavor now. I do miss it.

Simultanous with this exchange has been an increase in my fantasies about other men. I know they are fantasies. Of course crushes and attractions are always present, but when I was single I didn't fantasize as much, I treated crushes more casually. Now Goldenheart is living with me, it's like some part of me fantasizes as a way to maintain indipendence. I realize this could be a saboteur. I could simply be desiring what I do not have. On the other hand, my attraction to two men who I have been fantasizing more about has been longstanding, and it makes me wonder if there isn't something fundamental to it that is lacking with GH.

So, I seem to be in the thick of an age-old, but hopefully not timeless, romantic dilemma, and I feel a bit weary about it. Were I married, I'd probably keep my fantasies on some kind of leash out of respect for the partnership, but because I am not committed to him or even sleeping with him, the fantasies come on with double force because they are actually more possible, and represent my freedom from domestic predictability, which I hope I have not yet succumbed to.