You are being naive if you think having sex only once with someone else will be the end of it, says Annalisa Barbieri
I’m in a relationship of 11 years with a man I met when I was 17. We have had many good, fun-filled years and I am still very much in love. He was my first boyfriend, first love, and first and only lover. We are to be married by the end of the year, which is everything I’ve wanted, but I’ve suddenly found myself filled with a sense of loss for my lack of experience outside our relationship. I’ve never even really kissed another man: we got together just as I was beginning to find myself. And, while we have grown and explored together as a couple, I can’t help but feel I’ve missed out on a lot of life experience. Is it possible to grieve for a life I’ve not had? I recently started talking to a man I met online, and while I have no desire for an emotional relationship with him, I am overwhelmed by a need to have a one-time fling to get it out of my system. We seem to connect with our sexual desires (I’m into BDSM, and my current partner is not) and I know it would be amazing. I’m so conflicted: please help.
You’re conflicted because there is something deep within you that you are denying. That doesn’t make your relationship bad or wrong, and it doesn’t lay waste to the past 11 years. But, I imagine, like a lot of people who started relationships when they were very young, you’re realising you might not be the same person you were when you embarked on it. I suspect you’re making this all about sex because it feels useful to compartmentalise it, but I think it’s about more than that. Very few of us end our 20s as the same person we were when they began: it is a decade of immense growth.
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