My journey to intimacy

This is a follow-up to Iris’s two posts on intimacy that you’ll need to read to understand where I’m coming from:

Part 1
Part 2

I have a love/hate relationship with latex. I obviously like the stuff. Getting to that point wasn’t easy though, and even now, there are days when it brings back the feelings of rejection and inadequacy as Iris refused to not be a manwhore and stop talking to anyone with tits that were covered in latex, or anyone that would go along with his need to talk ONLY about latex, gasmasks, bondage, and objectification, all the while still telling me that he loved and wanted me, oh and also telling another girl THAT SAME LINE, and refusing to make the choice between us until I told I told him I was done being “one of.” He chose to commit to me at that point, but I’m pretty sure that I’ll never not harbor resentment that I had to basically give him an ultimatum to get to that point. Thinking about it still legitimately angers me.

So, one of the things that has been a huge source of contention between Iris and I is him looking at pictures of women in latex. You might think, “Well, isn’t that like any other dude looking at porn?” and that answer to that is, “Not really.” For Iris, his arousal was linked totally and completely to latex and giving up control. In his early kink discovery days, he would troll chatrooms for women who were into those same kinks, and engage in the grossness that went along with adult chatrooms (I know you know what I mean).

That was something that was hard to hear too, because that’s exactly what my ex-husband did. I can’t count how many times I caught him cybersexing late at night instead of going to bed with his wife, or that time my best friend and I walked in on him doing it. Any sort of cyber sex chatting thing is a hard limit for me, so to know Iris was doing it (even though it was a long time ago)  was a red flag for me, because there’s that voice in the back of my mind that asks, “What’s to stop him from doing it now?”

And therein lies the problem Iris has run into by having a girlfriend/dominant who was cheated on for her entire dating/married life – she’s learned that men can’t be trusted, because she’s never known a trustworthy man. Even both my male and female family members have all had affairs, or at the least tried to. You don’t really get over that in a day, not even with therapy.

Logically and rationally, I know Iris loves me. I know he wouldn’t meet up with anyone for sex, as sex is something he hasn’t enjoyed with anyone but me, and it’s something we both feel is special and intimate between us and doing it with others isn’t on our list of “fun things to do.” I still worry that his need for attention will result in him allowing women to give him the kind of attention that monogamous men shouldn’t be allowing. I’m not kidding when I say that he was an attention whore when I met him, and he really didn’t care if he flirted with one catsuit-clad girl where I could see it, then literally seconds later send me an IM telling me how happy he was to talk to me. (You can see why I was like, “Yep… fuck this. Keep this up and I’m out.”)

Bringing it back around to latex, even seeing that he has looked at pictures of girls in latex, whether it be on Fetlife or Tumblr or any other website that’s not a latex vendor, brings about an immediate feeling of anger that is tied into those feelings of being “one of” vs “the person he chose voluntarily” and that whole “You use to jack off in chatrooms focused on latex, and that’s fucking disgusting to me” thing. To show how much of an issue this is for us, I was on Tumblr tonight, and I clicked on a blog that posts latex pictures, and I liked a lot of the photos and almost followed that blog, but didn’t because my mind went to “That’s hot… but I don’t want Iris to see it because he’ll think it’s hot too and go through every photo because he has to see yet more women in latex.”

If Iris also looked at normal porn, or EVER looked at naked women, or any regular sex stuff, I’d probably be less phased by his latex interest, but it’s ONLY latex, and let’s face it – when your man only seems to get aroused by something YOU CAN’T BE ALL THE TIME, you really don’t see him looking at that as benign. While we have a perfectly normal sex life now, it’s in many ways like a recovering alcoholic – he’s fully functional, but you worry that one drop of alcohol would set off the addiction again. That’s exactly where I’m at with latex.