This is a sentence which—in the wildest reaches of my most heinous fantasies—I never thought I would type. That is an idea as radical and foreign to me as my ex-boyfriend becoming the Prime Minister of Uzbekistan or touring as the opening act for Insane Clown Posse.
To understand why I’m having such difficulty with this, imagine the following scenario: You were with a boy for two years. You were desperately in love with him. You lived together. Inevitably, as most passionate first loves do, the relationship broke under the strain of expectations and demands that you put on it. A long, long period of grieving and recovery followed. Eventually, after another two years, you’ve reached a point where you can talk to one another like people, can get together socially now and again—can even discuss current relationships. In other words, you’re over him. And then, one monotonous September day while you’re at work, operating calmly in what has come to be the status quo, he tells you that he’s become a porn star.
I am not the only one who, given such news, would be in something of a snit. After all, it’s hard to tell what’s real and what’s not anymore when someone who used to do your laundry and shop for groceries with you tells you he’s being paid to have sex for strangers on the internet. Talk about a world gone mad.
There are a lot of reasons that I’m freaking out about this. For one thing, there is that fact that when we were together, he wouldn’t so much as hold my hand in public. Apart from a few drunken make-out sessions in clubs [mostly his way of marking me as his territory and fending off legions of cuties] he seldom touched me in public at all. There is also the issue of a certain sexual reticence on his part, a waning of his passion which I of course took personally and which was the cause of a lot of contention between us. Now, for $19.95 a month, anyone with a major credit card can log on to the internet and ogle, in its most private and sacred state, the body of the person who will forever live in some cobwebby chamber of my heart as my first true love.
What is it, really, that bothers me about this? Is it that I object to the content of the website, or to the industry that created it? No. Do I honestly still have feelings of sexual jealousy concern- ing the boy? I flashed on the image of him as he’d looked on his most recent visit a year ago, and evaluating it, answered this question with an easy and emphatic: No. Was some part of me perhaps envious that he was experiencing what appeared to be a period of deliciously lascivious, devil-may-care, bacchanalian sexual frenzy? That one was harder to answer, but eventually I decided that that was a big No as well.
While such an energetic celebration of one’s erotic self and the hedonism of sexual adventure might sound appealing as a concept—I am, after all, only 25—I had to admit that that kind of thing just wasn’t my style. But then it came to me… what was bothering me was that the video proved, once and for all, that the connection between us, the almost chemical bond that had held us together for so long, was irrevocably, eternally broken. To paraphrase Stephen Sond- heim: I don’t know who you are anymore, and I’m starting not to care.
It wasn’t at all that I was still in love with him—I hadn’t been for years—it wasn’t really that I was hurt that he’d been unable to be as free and affectionate with me as he is now with his new boyfriend, it wasn’t even that I was horrified at the thought of someone I’d loved so dearly and a body that I had both desired and worshipped so intensely being cheapened for the basest sexual appetites of lonely middle-aged men poring over their monitors in the dead of night while their bewildered wives slept fitfully in other rooms [ha!]. It was that the person who’d done it had to be no one that I had ever known. And that was sad.
For most of us, the experience of truly knowing someone—knowing someone as profoundly and as intimately as you know yourself—is one we’ll have only a handful of times in our lives. For some of us, it’s an experience we’ll never have at all. Once we have known someone in that way, the realization later that they are not, and perhaps never were, the person we thought they were is, well, jarring. It’s far too complex, far too deep, far too overwhelming to wrap our minds around.
Once you’ve known a person on that level, at what Edna St. Vincent Millay calls the “inmost core”, once you’ve seen someone at their absolute worst, at their weakest, at their most vulnerable, at their saddest, at their honest-to-God, glorious best, you assume that, no matter how the circumstances of your relationship to that person might change, that immutable knowledge of him can always be counted on, regardless of what you choose to do with it.
Rely on it in times of need, reflect on it in moments of nostalgia, ignore it and let it atrophy in the unused synapses you reserve for things past, you at least know that it’s there. And this represents something of an accomplishment—because no matter what becomes of you, no matter how successful other relationships, of any nature, might or might not be for the rest of your life, you have known someone, and you have been known by someone.
And that is, I think we’d all agree to some degree, the zenith of human experience: to reach beyond the so- lipsism and isolation of your inner life and connect to another person. And when that is taken from you, it’s hard to know how to start over. It also throws everything you’ve taken for granted into question: had there always been an aspiring nudie-boy simmering inside the sweet kid who used to sing to me in the mornings to wake me up? It is thoughts like these that could lead to prodigious drinking.
Sad as it might be, people change. I dated a prude who chrysalised into a skin flick exhibitionist. This is what I’ve been thinking about in the few days since I found out about what my best friend has taken to gleefully calling “the sexcapade.” Today, my ex called me to announce that the clip has been posted and is ready for viewing. Did I want to see it? For a moment, I returned to that hazy state where I wasn’t entirely certain what was real and what my diseased mind was imagining as an elaborate means of destroying itself.
Naturally, having been raised Irish Catholic, I assumed the worst about what I might see, scenes beyond the pale of human decency flitting rapidly through my mind’s eye. I was caught for an instant in my heart’s mourning for the boy I used to know and the love we used to share. All the same, I was more than a little curious. I wrestled with myself for a few minutes, but finally answered him with a confident, unequivocal ‘No’. The person I was speaking to on the phone was a stranger to me, after all, and if a stranger called you up and invited you to watch them in a porno, you’d probably hang up on them, right?
So my boyfriend changed. People change. It follows that, since I am a person, I too must have changed. Perhaps not to the degree that I would put myself on shameless display for any slathering sex fiend that happened to come along, but certainly in some significant way I must be different from the person he’d once known, as well. And ultimately, that’s pretty cool, because I realized that it leaves room for the whole process to start over.
Change doesn’t mean that everything we knew about someone has become invalid—it merely means our memories have been adjusted, and augmented. We are only who we are from moment to moment, from experience to experience, and of course everything we encounter will change us.
I knew my ex as he was for our moment, and that boy is still inside the money-grubbing pornographer currently displaying himself to the world—he’s not lost. The knowledge is still valid. He knew me as I was in that moment, and now that I’m at least partially new, partially different, I might get lucky and start the same process with someone else. Someone with whom I will require full disclosure of all sexual proclivities and ambitions, in writing.
Kidding!
While he’s chosen to show this new side of himself in such a drastic and ostentatious way, I have responded in kind by doing something that the person I was back then would never have considered: I have told everyone I know, and as many people as I can that he knows, about the site.
I have also informed him that everyone in our mutual acquaintance, up to and including my mother, has heard this story. And if I know my ex-boyfriend—which, all on-camera sex acts and radical personality changes aside, I’m sure I actually still do—that’ll cut him to the quick. It might just turn out that change, after all, is good.
