It's 9:35 PM, Saturday night. I'm seven months single, dear readers, and the thought of spending a Saturday night alone still makes me uneasy. (I say "dear readers" knowing there may not be many of you left. I've wanted to write several times since May. Each time I got as far as composing an opening sentence in my head, but then my other writing life - my playwriting life - would interfere. The play is now finished - or as "finished" as any play can be - and opens in less than two weeks. And now I am back to blogging.)

This afternoon I professed my affection for a man by telling him, "I like you." Yes, I am a blogger and a playwright; I taught college English and now earn my living writing test questions, many of which concern vocabulary, and the best I could manage for this, my first post-breakup expression of meaningful, romantic feelings towards a fellow human soul, was "I like you." "I'm struggling with this. [Long pause.] I might as well say it, I like you. [Long pause.] I have feelings for you." William Shakespeare, eat your heart out.

I can't say much about the man in question. I've done a spectacularly lousy job of preserving my anonymity as the author of this blog, to the point where former students and even my own sister are now intimately acquainted with the details of my every petty, post-breakup thought, not to mention my randy ride on the (homo)sexual merry-go-round. I also made the unfortunate choice of posting the blog URL on my OkCupid profile. I told myself I was doing this as part of a larger effort to be completely and refreshingly honest with potential dates. (After all, hadn't OkCupid encouraged me to do just this by inviting me to post on my profile "the most private thing I'm willing to admit"?) I may have been gunning for honesty, or I may have simply been looking for new readers. In either case, common sense (plus some dating advise from friends) led me to remove it.

(Said one OkCupider who read my blog prior to the take-down: "At the very least, now anyone who has read it knows how you tick and the truth is, sometimes 'very ugly honest' is better than no honesty at all." "That's all well and good," I can imagine my friends saying, "but 'very ugly honest' is still, well, ugly.")

I can't say much about the man I "like," but I can tell you what I would have said to him had my English teacher's verbosity, my dramatic flair, and my nerves not failed me.

I told you I'm struggling with my feelings for you. I'm struggling because I'm embarrassed for having these feelings and anxious about how you will perceive them, and me, after I've shared them.

I'm anxious because you've told me that certain kinds of men objectify you, deliberately ignoring your complexity, spirit, and intelligence. (These are my words - "complexity," "spirit," and "intelligence" - not yours. You sometimes refer to yourself as intelligent, but in a grim sort of way. I mean intelligence in the joyous sense; the vibrancy behind your eyes that is its own kind of dancer.) I'm anxious because, whatever else you might think, I don't want you to count me among these male objectifiers. I'm embarrassed because, I suspect, the reason you told me about them in the first place is because you felt safe with me, and now here I go having feelings that could make you feel unsafe.

I'm embarrassed for other reasons, too (let's get those out of the way). I'm embarrassed for having these feelings despite our startling external differences. I'm embarrassed that I've drawn strict no-crossing lines in certain areas of my life, and my feelings for you cross them. I'm embarrassed that you said nothing in response to my confession; you simply smiled, paused, then returned to the subject of what we had been talking about before. (Trust. How sickeningly difficult it will be for either of us to trust a new man after feeling so betrayed by the last one.)

I'm embarrassed because I'm judging my feelings through other people's eyes besides yours and knowing how ridiculous it would look.

But most of all, I'm embarrassed for saying "I like you" when I should have said... I enjoy you. I understand you. To say "I enjoy you" sounds trivial, but I enjoy everything about you. Earlier in our conversation, I remarked on my astonishment that after sleeping with a dozen-or-so men since my breakup, I still hadn't found a lover who made me want to stare into his eyes for hours. True enjoyment can come from something as simple as this - looking into another person's eyes. I could beat you at any staring contest; that's how much I enjoy looking into yours.)

My feelings for you are strange and paradoxical. (Aren't you lucky to be the object of these affections?) Strangely, I do not lust after you. When I fantasize, it's not about us having sex but falling in love. This is possibly a result of our history; sexual thoughts had no place in it. (True, I found you attractive even then, and recently, when I told you this, you were kind enough to say the same. But we were talking about aesthetic, not sexual attractiveness. "You have nice cheekbones and two eyes." "Your nose - thankfully - is positioned roughly at the center of your face.")

I'm embarrassed and yet thrilled by these feelings because their existence means I'm still alive enough in my 30s to have foolish crushes like the ones I had on my best (straight) male friends in high school. I feel a strange, groping sadness at the thought that you are every bit as unattainable as those friends, yet I'm happy to be sad about something that makes me feel hopeful at the same time. If I can have these feelings for you, surely I'll be able to have them for someone else someday. It may take years before I find him, but when I do, I will show him this love letter (this love blog?) and point to this line. ("You see?," I'll say. "I was pining for you before I even knew who you were. I've always been a believer in preparing for what's ahead.")

To you, the inspiration behind my present pining, I have these words. I don't care how jaded you feel you've become, do not allow another man - not a single man more - to take advantage of you. You are complex, spirited, and intelligent (repeat after me). "I am talented. I will work harder than I ever thought possible to fulfill my dreams. And I will be kind to myself. I will forgive myself my wariness about love and allow myself to be wary without fretting that it will become my permanent condition, because I have been hurt, by others as well as myself. And I will use this, my pain, to learn more about myself and what I want. This will make me a better partner to the next man I decide to love, and it will teach me to demand that he be a better partner to me."

If it's love you want, you shall have it. You've sunken your hopes into a few jerks in your life (who hasn't?). In fairness to those jerks, they may not have been jerks at all, just not ready for what you had to give them. (The altruist in me is trying to give the jerks of the world the benefit of the doubt, including my own special jerk.) But leaving aside the question of other people's wants, know your own and pursue them with all the desire and urgency you can muster. If you can do push-ups every day (and you do!), if you possess the discipline to tighten your body into this ridiculously slender ripple of sinew and skin, then surely you can muster the urgency and desire to dive head-first into the realization of your dreams.

I'm debating whether to show you this post. I might boldly do so after not-so-boldly urging you to disregard the business about my feelings for you. ("That's not why I'm showing this to you," I might say, and I don't think I would be lying.) Really, I want to thank you. Thank you for stirring these foolish, funny, giggly-serious feelings in me. Thank you for being an unexpected source of support as I continue to come to terms with and learn to embrace my singleness. Thank you, this Saturday night, for bringing me tenderness and peace.

By now you should know that I'm a total Kate Bush "nutter." (This is the appropriately British phrase adopted by some members of the Kate Bush forums - which, yes, I visit almost every day - to describe us die-hard Kate lovers. Given her substantial gay following, I'm assuming a phrase like "Bush lovers" was a no-go.)

Bush released the first (and likely only) single from her new album last month. Of course, we all listen to music through the lens of our own experience. But sometimes a song speaks so directly to one's life that lenses become unnecessary.

Here, then, is the song, "Deeper Understanding." For regular readers of this blog, the overlaps between the lyrics and my life of late probably need no comment. But if you're new to "Diary of a Gay Breakup," here is a musical summary of the last four months, told in the form of a call-and-response between Bush's lyrics (below, in italics) and myself (in brackets beside them).

Press play now and read along...

As the people here grow colder [Ex dumps me.]
I turn to my computer  [And I start blogging.]
And spend my evenings with it 
Like a friend. [Writing my little heart out.]

I was loading a new program [OkCupid, Manhunt]
I had ordered from a magazine: ["I would use for promiscuity."]

"Are you lonely, are you lost? [I was.]
This voice console is a must." ["This web-camera is a must."]
I press Execute.

"Hello. [Said several dozen men.]
"I know that you've been feeling tired.
"I bring you love [Said none of them.]
"And deeper understanding.

"Hello. [Another dozen men.]
"I know that you've been feeling tired.
"I bring you love [Said none of them.]
"And deeper understanding."

Well I've never felt such pleasure. [Men want me!]
Nothing else seemed to matter. [Men I don't want!]
I neglected my bodily needs. [I'm still not exercising!]

I did not eat. [I wish.]
I did not sleep. [Micro-naps at work.]
The intensity increasing [Dom.]
Til my family found me and intervened. [Had my family "found me" with Dom, the song would have ended here with my dying of embarrassment.]

But I was lonely, I was lost, [Yup.] 
Lost, so lost without my little black box. 
I pick up the phone and go Execute. ["I turn on my cam and go Destitute."]

"Hello. [Say twinks and bears and Doms.]
"I know that you've been feeling tired. 
"I bring you love [This ain't no Match.com.]
"And deeper understanding.
"Hello. ["Hey..."]
"I know that you've been feeling tired.
"I bring you love ["That would be nice someday."]
"And deeper understanding."

I turn to my computer...
Like a friend.

A few days ago I did something on my webcam that I never thought I'd do: I cried.

Last week was a doozy. For starters, there was Ex. After two months of mostly avoiding all but the most rudimentary contact with he-who-shall-continue-to-remain-nameless, last week I found myself in his presence for hours on end during technical rehearsals for the college's spring production of Shakespeare's The Tempest.

I knew this week was coming; in fact, I brought it on myself. Shortly after I left teaching - and was left by Ex - I asked that he allow me to stay on as sound and playbill designer for the show, partly because I wanted the money and partly because I simply couldn't bear to quit the college and my old life cold turkey. But I was prepared, especially after reading an e-mail he'd sent me a few days before.

Dear Steve,

I really want to respond to the questions of a few weeks ago [Note from Steve: I can't remember what exactly I asked or when, but I'm sure you can guess what about.] I honestly still don't know how to answer your questions. What I do know, at this very moment, is I don't want some angry email in response to this email. [I'm good at writing angry e-mails. What can I say?] Also, I feel like there are just certain things I cannot tell you because I don't want to lead you on.

All I feel that I can tell you at this moment is I'm always on the verge of tears. You may think, as others have to, that everything is just honky-dory [sic] for me - that I somehow made some quick recovery. Truth is I have not. I feel as though I did the right thing for both of us in the moment; I believe I still feel that way.

Therapy has been brutal and continues to be so, and it is painstakingly slow. I feel torn to shreds and God knows when I'm going to be put back together. I'm not Humpty-Dumpty thankfully [note the fairytale reference here - okay, the nursery rhyme reference], so I know I will come back together at some point.

I'm trying to do the best I can within the circumstances I've created for myself.

I hope this email makes sense to you.

Ex

His e-mail did make sense to me, especially the parts about feeling "torn to shreds" and, clunky syntax aside, "trying to do the best I can within the circumstances I've created for myself." (In my case, substitute "circumstances I've created" with "circumstances that were created for me.") I was genuinely glad to learn he was in therapy and relieved that he hadn't, in fact, made "a quick recovery." It's not that I suddenly thought we were heading towards a reconciliation. I was happy and relieved because, for the first time since December, I recognized him. I knew the man who had written this e-mail, sympathized with him, even. My tango-dancing, twentysomething-chasing, biceps-measuring gay-bot of an ex-partner was becoming a Real Boy again.

Or so I thought. Over the course of three rehearsals, my sympathies quickly faded, as did my patience. Among the indignities I suffered those nights were:

1. Learning that Ex had brought Sven to a rehearsal to serve as "Lift Consultant" on the show. This meant Sven had worked with my former students - the same students I'd shared with Ex, the students who knew more than they should about the breakup thanks to Ex's extensive Facebook posts. I felt humiliated enough knowing they'd seen Ex's "hot" new boyfriend on Facebook. Now I had the pleasure of knowing they met him in person as he consulted on their lifts. (Lest you think I was snooping, I discovered all this when our Stage Manager sent me a list of changes for the playbill - changes that included Sven's name and "Lift Consultant" credit. Granted, Ex was kind enough to take me aside and prepare me for what I was about to see, but... Oh wait, that's right. Ex said nothing.)
   
    
2. Learning that I no longer had auto insurance. I was setting up at the beginning of our second rehearsal on Easter Sunday when Ex informed me that our insurance policy was being dropped because his license had been suspended for an unpaid parking ticket. "Don't worry," he said. "I took care of my license and got new insurance. Mine was only one-seventy a month, so yours should be even cheaper." How long did I have until I needed to buy a new policy? "Tomorrow." How many insurance companies are open for new buyers on Easter Sunday? Turns out, none.
   
    
3. Being caught offguard by a Sven sighting. Our Stage Manager - who is also my friend, and who apologized for having to send me the playbill changes, as she knew too well how I'd react upon seeing Sven's name - our Stage Manager poked her head out of the lighting booth and asked if I'd seen her phone, which she'd misplaced. I scanned my sound table, saw a phone, and held it up to show her - "Is this it?" My fingers brushed against the keys, causing the screen to light up. And there was Sven, shirtless, his underwear-model-abs on full display. It was Ex's phone, and Sven is now his wallpaper in addition to being his lover. Ex has a habit of leaving his phone unattended and/or entrusting it to a student, along with his keys, to prevent it from getting lost. My first thought upon seeing the "Sven theme" he'd installed on his phone? This man's torso will be the death of me. My second and third thoughts? How many of my students have seen this? How many of them are counting this as karmic retribution against a bad grade they earned in one of my classes?
   
    
4. Watching Ex give the world's most convincing performance of "everything's hunky dory." In his e-mail Ex wrote that "others have to" think he's okay, as if the vision of a happy Ex were so deeply important to so many people that for him to appear otherwise would crush their tender sense of the cosmic order. Imagine Oprah Winfrey confessing to being a child molester, or Kylie Minogue committing hari kari onstage during a techno-infused encore of "The Loco-Motion." Too many lives would be destroyed, too many worldviews shattered. Oprah's disciples would doubt the very existence of God; gay men at dance clubs everywhere would dissolve into tears at the first chorus of "la la la" from "Can't Get You Out of My Head." As with Oprah and Kylie, so too with Ex. Such is the curse of celebrity.

To use a term from my new test-development career, I had "black-boxed" this piece of Ex's e-mail the first time I read it - meaning I'd simply read past it without thinking. During rehearsals, however, I realized that however much Ex might have been crying on the inside, he was determined to chirp out his "Loco-Motion" to its effervescent end. So effervescently did he chirp that it was hard to imagine him crying on the inside at all. He "hardy-harred" with his students; he swung gayly on one of the swings installed on stage for Aerial; he gabbed with the nicotine-addicted among the cast and pulled a drag from one of their cigarettes, then giddily fled his Assistant Director, also a student, who called after him in delighted shock, "I can't believe you smoked!!! How could you do that? Oh my God, [insert Ex's name heeeere]?!" A less honest man might have dimmed the wattage a bit. But Ex would suffer no dishonesty on my behalf. As he's proven time and again, he is nothing if not honest.

(It occurs to me that I forgot to insert a kvetch alert at the beginning of this post. I promise to put it in the title.)

By the end of the second rehearsal, I felt powerless to the point of tears, as though every muscle had grown four legs and been kicked like a dog. That night I received a message from my Robert-Blake-lookalike, Manhunt "dom." Was I ready to continue our lessons in person, to learn how to be a good boy? Maybe I was a cutter aching to break skin. Or maybe I was a dog seeking the protection of a much larger dog. I honestly don't know what I wanted or who I was just then. Either way, I answered: "Yes, sir, I'm ready."

I took precautions. I said I would give his address to a friend so that someone would know where I was (I was lying, but he didn't know that). I had my trusty hangnail clipper in my pocket in case I needed a weapon. I made eye contact with the security guard who buzzed me into his condominium complex and even considered preparing an SOS text - "I'm at [X] address and need you to contact the police NOW" - to be sent at the push of a button should circumstances demand it. (I'm still alive and writing, so obviously Dom's resemblance to Robert Blake stopped short at the murder charges.)

The evening began tantalizingly enough: Dom instructed me by phone to enter his condo, proceed to the third floor, strip, then wait for him, kneeling in the middle of his living room facing the television. I heard him coming up behind me, his shoes making whispery footprints in the zebra-print carpet. He pressed his palms against my skin, dragging his hands and fingers from my ribs up to my neck. He nudged my knees apart with his foot, cupping me in his hand and stroking me. Finally he came round in front of me, showing me his face. Still on my knees, he ordered me to hug him - tighter, tighter. Did I want to be his boy? Yes, sir. "Show me." I grasped my arms around his waste as tightly as I could. Robert Blake or no, I felt protected.

This feeling changed, however, once it became apparent that Dom could not stay hard. He ordered me to "suck it" and I sucked it. It softened in my mouth. He said, "good boy," which was my cue to stop sucking. Then he jerked it until it stiffened again, thrusting his tongue down my throat all the while. Then, back to "suck it." And I sucked it. And it softened in my mouth. And he said, "good boy," etc. At one point during the sucking he shoved it so far down my throat that I gagged. By now I was beginning to feel like the cutter.

Next he commanded that I "eat his ass" and "suck his balls." I have no problem doing either, but one thing I learned that night is I have an internal timer, an intuition for how long I can tolerate spending on these activities. The same goes for blowjobs. I can suck cock with the best of them, but only for five minutes at a time. I can eat ass, but my fear of bacteria means I prefer to restrict it to a sort of sexual punctuation - an ass-eating exclamation point here, a salad-tossing comma there - rather than making it the substance of the foreplay. But Dom liked his ass eaten and suffered no slackening of my tongue. As for his sucking his stubbly balls, he would not excuse me from that until "my whole face was covered with my saliva." I gagged a second time when he said that. I gagged a third when he ordered me to hock a loogie on his dick and lick it up. (Here I drew a line, peering up at him squeamishly and cautioning that I would probably puke. Mercifully, he ordered me to clean up my spit with a towel.)

Between the ass-eating, the ball-sucking, and the "red light, green light" fellatio that dragged on long enough to outlast the royal wedding, I was privately thanking God in whatever Hebrew I remembered when he finally jerked himself to completion on my stomach. I didn't need to come. I was so grateful for his orgasm that my own would have been redundant.

I hung around for another half-hour as Dom showed off his collection of vintage film noir posters. The walls were covered with them. He pointed at one and remarked in his flat, nasally voice, "that poster is worth 6,000 dollars." Then he pointed at another: "that one is worth 25 dollars, but I bought it because I enjoyed the movie. I only buy posters of movies I enjoy." He said this to imply that most collectors are concerned only with value and are idiots because of it. In fact, nearly everything he said sounded like an insult. "I'm an arrogant person," meaning the humble among us are idiots. "I don't read books," meaning those of us who do are plainly stupid.

When it was time for me to go, he offered me a soda. I politely declined; he said I could show myself out.

The next night after rehearsal, I drove from the college back to my cousin's apartment where I've been staying two or three days a week. (He lives fifteen minutes from work, where he is also a test developer, and charitably allows me to crash at his apartment to cut down my commute.) Rehearsal ended at midnight; my cousin was asleep by the time I got back, and all was quiet and dark. I inflated my air mattress, kicked off my shoes, and plopped down with my laptop, logging onto Manhunt and switching on my webcam.

My memories of rehearsal were weighing on me, and my ass was still soar from the spanking Dom had given it. I was sad and alone in a dark, empty room, but I wasn't aware of this, and I didn't start crying, until I clicked into Manhunt chat and glimpsed this posting from one of the men in the chat room: "Jersey City guy looking to fuck or cuddle." My heart sank. How long had this man been trolling these chat rooms? Did he draw a distinction between fucking and cuddling, the one so stark, so easily anonymous, and the other so tender and intimate? Or had they somehow become interchangeable, one just as meaningful or meaningless as the other? He must have been so jaded, so lonely...

That's when I realized: I am that man, or at least I'm in danger of becoming him. I scanned the sea of profile pictures of the other men in the room - one extreme close up after another of hard-ons and assholes. Once in awhile, a torso. Once in a very great while, a face. Here we were, a legion of men 90-something strong, showing off our genitals via computer on a Wednesday morning. Before that night, I'd told myself I was here to liberate my sexuality, to expunge my shame. I was the male Isadora White Wing in a gay retelling of Fear of Flying, wresting my authentic sexual self from the jaws of a homophobic culture, fucking my way to clarity as I'd once scornfully accused Ex of doing with Sven.

On the one hand, becoming sexually liberated is precisely what I've been doing, and if you back-read even as far as a month ago, I think you'll agree I've made progress. At the same time, what became clear to me that night is I'm lonely, as are most of the men on Manhunt and OkCupid and Grindr. You might be thinking, "duh!," but somehow I'd managed to "black-box" this truth until that night, and once I finally realized this, I started to cry.

I doubt anyone saw I was crying. At 1.3 megapixels, my camera is too fuzzy to show tears. I didn't sob or gasp, didn't bury my head in the pillow or wring my hands at the heavens. I simply stared into lens of the camera, my lone physical companion that Wednesday morning at 12:47 AM. I imagined Ex with Sven - out dancing, perhaps, or sharing a bed in what used to be Ex's and my apartment. I decided to feel sorry for myself and for random, chat-room pleas for fucking or cuddling, and the tears simply came.

I haven't sworn off Manhunt or my webcam, but I'm conscious now not to overuse them as buffers against loneliness. The same goes for face-to-face sexual encounters. Dom was a mistake for many reasons, most of all because when I went to him I was lonely, angry, and sad. I can't say I've sworn off being a slut, but the next time I share fluids with a stranger, it will be because I'm horny and happy, not horny and sad.

Meanwhile, nature has finally stabilized. It was 78 degrees today, 67 degrees yesterday, and the 18 cats that live in the alley below my kitchen window are spending the afternoons sunbathing in the neighbors' backyard. I'm gradually surfacing from my "meh" (there's nothing like a minor Tempest to get the blood flowing). And I have a new auto insurance policy. It's a hundred and twenty dollars a month - in New Jersey, that's practically free - and written in no man's name but mine.

Ask almost anyone on the East Coast what they are waiting for and they will tell you, "spring." Not "spring" the season - that began almost a month ago - but "spring" the expectation, the idyllic promise of summer. In the three weeks since you heard from me last, the tri-state area has seen at least one 80-degree day and one hail storm. Nature has snowed, warmed, then chilled again. The sky has gone from cloudy grey to radiant blue to apocalyptic slate, all in the same afternoon. This has been a spring of extremes - a spring, perhaps, that's reeling from an unexpected breakup from winter. It storms and swings in defiance of change. It is pissed off.

Contrary to the weather - which is a surprisingly balmy 60 degrees today, perhaps as a result of medication - lately I seem stuck in a sort of internal, meteorological "meh." Not sunny, but not raining; not cold, but not warm. I am a tepid summer day in Britain, so "meh," in fact, that two weeks ago I set about writing a post describing just how "meh" I felt, only to give up after a few paragraphs and leave it unpublished.

During a session with Melanie, I described this as "an emotional vacation." After two months of swinging so far left and right that my pendulum made gashes in the walls, I am now just hanging here, spent. I commute my hour-and-ten-minutes to work, listing to NPR and tech-news podcasts. I arrive, write my test questions and score other people's essays, take 15 minutes for lunch instead of 30 so I stand a chance of beating traffic on the way home, then depart, get stuck in traffic, and listen to an additional hour and forty minutes of NPR and tech-news podcasts. I drop my retro-style briefcase on my sofa, make myself a PB&J sandwich, and boot up my new, quad-core laptop to OkCupid or Manhunt (yes, I am now a Hunter of Men as well as the Prey of Seraphim). Sometimes I watch TV; usually I chat with strangers on Manhunt into the wee hours. Then I go to bed, rising at 7:30 the next morning. Rinse and repeat.

On weekends I stay active socially by going out on dates. I stay active physically by having sex with as many of these men as possible. In the past three weeks, I've boinked a sculptor in his studio on a moving blanket (he came, I didn't); jerked off a freelance lighting technician in his bedroom (he came, I didn't); had phone sex with a 25-year-old former child actor who insisted he was too mature to date other 25-year-olds (he came, I didn't); made out with a lawyer on my sofa (no coming was involved); and danced the bedroom shimmy with a 31-year-old makeup artist and retired drag performer (miraculously, I came, he didn't).

In the interest of self-improvement, I am also taking online lessons from a Manhunt "dom" about how to be a good "sub." Thus far I've learned to say "sir" at the end of each sentence, be naked on camera with my hands behind my back (to show my dom I'm not touching myself), and smile big, bigger, bigger on demand. These lessons are to culminate in a live meeting, at which time, I'm told, I will be asked to strip, kneel, participate in some casual chit-chat (to ease my nerves), and then begin my formal training. As intrigued as I am by the idea of being the O to a stranger's René, I seriously doubt I'll be naked on my knees in this man's apartment anytime soon. For one thing, I have a bossy streak. For another, my would-be "owner" looks like Robert Blake, and even if Blake hadn't been accused of murdering his wife, I will always remember him as the creepy, pale-faced "Mystery Man" from Lost Highway. And no amount of chit-chat could make me feel comfortable kneeling naked in front of that man.

All of this might seem tame by some standards, but since my breakup I've had more sexual partners than, well, ever. Before Ex, there was Sam - he of the loft bed and pubescent frottage - and a guy I met in high school while I was working at a toy store. He went to the high school across town, which meant he was beyond walking distance, which meant I needed to get a ride from my mom to see him (I told her he was "a new friend" I made at work - little did she know). Once at his house, he proceeded to give me a blowjob in his bedroom. That is, until his mom's voice came blaring through the intercom (his house was so big it was outfitted with an intercom system) and one of his brothers started banging on the door. He gestured frantically for me to pull on my pants, then wiped his mouth and disappeared to tend to whatever it was his mom and brother wanted.

I figured this would put an end to the felacio, which was fine by me; I'd never had my penis in another man's mouth before and could have done with a little more conversation or at least more kissing. But my "new friend" was undeterred. He showed me to his backyard - the one place, he assured me, where we wouldn't be interrupted - and lay me down on the grass, picking up where he left off. He was right about us not being disturbed - not by any human members of his family, anyway. But the family dog refused to be ignored, licking my friend's face (as it bobbed up and down on my crotch) and slathering my lips with doggy kisses.

texting and chatting with me, and I had high hopes for the lawyer which were dashed when he called to say I was a wonderful guy but he didn't feel sexual chemistry. (Let it be noted that he initiated the make out session, not I.)

I'm having better luck with the former drag performer/current makeup artist; we had dinner in the city on Friday and he'll be spending the night at my apartment tomorrow. I have doubts about our long-term potential. (Case in point: he didn't go to college. It may sound snobbish, but a college education is important to me. After all, I was a teacher myself until only slightly more than a month ago.)

Regardless, I may have hoped for more from some of these men, but I allowed myself to expect only what I received. It's easier to keep from getting hurt this way. At the same time, it's harder to get giddy, feel butterflies in your stomach. I've felt those butterflies, to be sure. They are what drive me from one stranger to the next, their little, winged bodies whipping me into a smitten frenzy at each new bit of information I discover. His favorite musicians and films. His preferred sexual positions. His typical Friday night. What he does for a living. His name.

But this is the price of liberated sexuality married with pragmatism. No sooner than the stranger and I schedule our first date, I go from butterflies to a self-willed stillness. I encourage my mind to wander, or I chat up another stranger online as backup for the one I am meeting in person who may or may not exceed my expectations. If I know sex is likely, I will permit myself to get excited about that. Otherwise I stay neutral - a 55-degree afternoon, neither cold nor warm, cloudy nor sunny. But better to be "meh" than whiplashing between extremes - at least for now.

Outside my window, the wet grey smudge
of the afternoon waits
for spring.

I have a confession. As enticed as I am by the idea of indiscriminate sex, I am also completely terrified of it.

For one thing, as I've already documented, I don't like how I look. It's not that I think I'm ugly. In fact, given the right lighting and a kind angle, I think I can look quite handsome. But that's when I'm fully clothed. When the clothes come off, it's a different story.

My sense of physical self has long suffered from a sort of Goldilocks complex. Some parts of my body are too big (belly, ass, thighs), another part is too small (guess which one) and, in an unfortunate departure from the fairytale, none ever seem just right. As a reader/friend reminded me, I could always go to a gym and whip my marshmallowy bottom into shape (Ex would have liked this; it might have even bought us an extra few months). I appreciate the value of exercise; my body-image was never better than at the tender age of 20 when I devoted a half-hour each day to push ups and crunches. Last month I decided to carry on this routine. I got as far as 10 knee push ups and half as many excruciating crunches before I reevaluated my decision.

Thankfully, a technology exists for the marshmallowy, modern man - the man who craves sex but shudders at the thought of exposing himself directly to a stranger's judging eyes.

Two nights ago, I was chatting with a man on OkCupid whose profile photo broadcast the all-American good looks of a college football star or an Old Navy mannequin. He'd winked at me earlier and was now making small-talk; I, emboldened by the attention, flirted by way of my keyboard like a horny Mavis Beacon. At one point I teased him for having only one picture posted to his profile. He offered to show me others - possibly of the more lascivious sort - and suggested I do the same. Alas, I had no such pictures, I wrote. And I couldn't imagine him wanting to see them even if I had.

I thought wrong. My playmate wanted to see me, or at the very least my chest. He tried sending me a picture of himself as incentive but it "didn't go through," so he suggested we switch to Skype, where he was certain he could shoot me the file.

Skype has one feature OkCupid lacks: video chat. Surely I must have realized my playmate had ulterior motives; probably I was too high on hormones to care. In any case, switch to Skype we did. He sent me two pictures - one of him shirtless at the gym and the other of him, also shirtless, squatting in a half-finished attic. (He was a building contractor, he told me. Apparently building contractors have a tenuous relationship with their shirts.)

"You're shitting me," I wrote, gawking at his six-pack in the pictures. He responded with a question mark. "How can you possibly be attracted to me?," I asked, no longer flirting. My playmate was one mustache and a bottle of posing oil away from being a Village Person, and I did NOT look like that without my shirt on. My playmate replied that I was handsome, that it didn't matter. I'd spoken plainly, yet here he was, sticking to his guns. He wanted - truly wanted - to see my body. And I was starting to believe him.

Then he asked me to turn on my webcam.

I didn't want to break the spell, to supply photographic evidence that my playmate's shimmering carriage was actually a pumpkin. He sweetly pressed on. He wanted to see me. He'd shown me his chest; now it was only fair that I showed him mine. What did I have to lose?

I might have continued saying "no" were it not for that timeworn question. What did I have to lose? So what if my playmate didn't have a webcam? So what if I wouldn't be able to watch him while he watched me? So what if I were beginning to suspect he might not be the person he claimed to be, that the the 1950s Football Hero might have been his ex-boyfriend, son-in-law, or some random person he'd managed to photograph, shirtless, on three different occasions? (He'd sent me a third picture as extra incentive for turning on my cam, this one of him - or his ex-boyfriend, or his son-in-law - standing shirtless on a roof.) This wasn't about my playmate. This was about me getting over myself and turning on my damn webcam.

I clicked the "video call" button. He answered.

He asked me to take off my coat (I was chilly that night); I did.

He asked me to take off my checkered shirt. I had on a t-shirt underneath, so no problem; I did.

Then, as I knew he would, he asked me to take off my t-shirt. "I want you to stand up," he wrote, "and take off your shirt, and don't even think about it."

This was the moment of truth. I blushed at the camera, ginning dopily. "You're already thinking about it," he wrote.

I was. And though I never stopped thinking about it, I took off my shirt, stood up, backed away from the camera - far enough for a wide shot - and showed him my bare chest.

"Who doesn't like chest hair?!," he exclaimed.

"I've got that!," I replied. I was smiling, delighted, feeling as though I'd accomplished much more than simply removing my shirt.

Then I heard a bell, followed by an electronic blip - the sound of a Skype hangup. I glanced at the chat log; it said, "call ended." The green icon next to my playmate's handle had gone grey. I typed "hello?", hit "enter," and the text just sat there. My playmate was gone.

I searched for him that night and the next, poking around OkCupid and periodically scrolling through my Skype contacts. His OkCupid profile remains active, but the man behind the profile is gone. Could it be that the spectacle of my naked chest scared him off, after all? But then why did he compliment my chest hair?

I invent stories to account for his sudden disappearance. Perhaps he's married and closeted; his wife could have entered the room just after I took off my shirt, at which point he would have hastily switched off the computer. Or maybe this is how he gets off - by persuading self-conscious Jewish men to go bare-chested, then abruptly signing off, leaving them hanging, as a kind of power play. Maybe he has a torso fetish. Maybe I made him come. Maybe he hung up because I didn't make him come.

I'll never know what happened to him or even who he was; nor am I likely to encounter him again. Regardless, I have him to thank for introducing me to my webcam, for helping me take one small step and one giant leap towards exploring my sexuality in pixels. The next time a stranger on the internet asks me to remove my shirt, I'll think about it less. My pants, on the other hand... Those I'll hold on to for now.

"There is no such thing as the wrong man," says Marianne Faithfull in her song, "The Blue Millionaire." In 1964, when Faithfull first hit the British airwaves, her voice was a sugary but thin soprano. By 1979, four years prior to "The Blue Millionaire," it had undergone a staggering transformation - from stock songbird's warble to shredded baritone clef; a voice kicked down and rubbed raw by more than a decade of drugs and hard living. Few would call it a beautiful voice, but it's a deeply interpretive one - a voice that bruises even the sunniest of lyrics. In the "The Blue Millionaire," that voice might as well be saying, "there is no such thing but the wrong man." My life is peach fuzz compared to Faithfull's, but after three weeks in the dating pool, I'm beginning to agree with her.

Listen to Marianne Faithfull's "The Blue Millionaire."

I knew I wasn't ready for a relationship with Match Man. In fact, I'm not sure I'm ready for a relationship at all. (In high school I remember hearing that the period of recovery from a breakup lasts half the length of the relationship. If that's true, I certainly don't have the math on my side.) I had similar reservations about H and his love of Middle Earth, but in both cases I could have been wrong. Hadn't Ex resisted me in the beginning, sleeping with me (several times) but hemming and hawing when it came to actually making a commitment? I wasn't his "type." We didn't have enough in common. I had doubts, too, but we still managed to love each other for the better part of 12 years, no matter how fumbling or clingy that love sometimes was.

Why did we squelch our misgivings? The answer probably has less to do with overpowering romantic chemistry than extraordinary stubbornness. I wanted a boyfriend, damn it, and he was sick of calling out a new man's name every nine to eleven months. Our stubbornness was extraordinary, but it was also youthful, pure, tremendously optimistic - the kind of hardheadedness that descends from Mount Sinai, from total commitment and belief. This was the stubbornness that inspired hippies and poets to fight for free love and revolution in the 1960s. This was the stubbornness that resulted in a 12-year union between a self-fashioned swan and a book nerd.

Sometimes I still fancy myself a revolutionary romantic at heart, but most men my age - men in their 30s - seem less inclined to this particular breed of stubbornness.

Take Match Man. I treated him to dinner for our second date and, after dessert, planned to accompany him back to his apartment to return his generosity in the bedroom. But the meal left us both feeling stuffed and sleepy, so instead we parted with a kiss, he heading uptown on the subway and I, back to Jersey on the PATH. Over the next few days we texted skimpily back and forth. Then, last night, feeling guilty for not having communicated more verbosely during the week, I e-mailed him. My opener: "So - I haven't spoken to or seen you in awhile, and that makes me ansy. Are we doomed to the post-second-date doldrums?" His response: "I WILL admit I have been doing a lot of thinking about our dates this week. Both were absolutely lovely - I had a great time during both, and I meant everything I said, as I know you did. (And I don't just hop into bed with anyone, you know.) But I am starting to realize there are one or two things which mean we're not so compatible after all..."

The "one or two things" in question are 1. my smoking, and 2. "nothing [he] can really put my finger on, just a gut feeling." I know what Match Man means; I, too, had that feeling, but I suppressed it partly out of a sense of obligation (the man made me come, after all) and partly because the feeling in your gut can change. Once upon a time my gut craved Ex like food; now it turns at the thought of him. Throughout the relationship, occasionally it would insist on greater variety, grumbling for different men in unknown flavors. Less often it would call for a fast: no Ex, no relationships, just me sitting alone at an empty table, immersed in the introspective silence of hunger. I ignored these rumblings, and I'm glad. I can't remember if they occurred in the months leading up to the breakup. If they did, only then do I regret not taking heed.

I believe in the bubbling of the spirit, the fizzing of the blood, of a chemical reaction between lovers. It's the reaction I discovered with Ex, but not at first - at least not in its purest form. The distillation of our respective elements, the perfection of our chemistry, resulted from trial and error - from sex, embarrassment, laughter, hesitation, awkwardness, acquiescence; in short, from intimacy. Perhaps two people really can fall wildly in love at first sight, but the right combination of elements can also develop slowly, sometimes simply by virtue of the chemists' own stubbornness.

So says my revolutionary romantic side. The realist concedes there probably wasn't much worth fighting for with Match Man. Ditto with H. "Eh," shrugs my inner-realist. "Sure, there was a physical connection, at least on your end, but how much longer did you really want to pretend to be fascinated by Dungeons and Dragons?" Granted, in neither case do I recall hearing this voice until after I was rejected, but my inner-realist can be proactive as well, spurring me to do the rejecting.

Two weeks ago I had dinner with a Malaysian-American accountant at his Brooklyn apartment. To borrow Match Man's words, I couldn't "put my finger on" what exactly wasn't working. It may have been that he was too eager to please, or that he kept kissing me an inch below my mouth and grazing my chin with his teeth. ("What, no tongue on the first date?," he teased in his whispery, boy-man's voice.) For dinner he'd cooked pork tikka masala; I'd brought two bottles of wine and, to thank him for his cooking, a bouquet of miniature yellow roses. The pork was tender and the flowers sweet-smelling, but from the moment I laid eyes on him at the beginning of the night, I knew there would be no second date.

Were I all realist and no romantic - or were I simply braver - I might have said this. As it was, I tried to disregard my first impression - my "gut feeling." I even went so far as to joust tongues with him, probing for chemistry inside his mouth. But no amount of coaching from my inner-romantic could change how I felt. At the end of the evening, as I put on my coat, he asked if we could see each other again. I said I would call him next week, knowing full well I wouldn't.

I shouldn't have said I would call him. Match Man was honest with me - both in his affections and, two weeks and one date later, his decision to look elsewhere. H, too, was honest. He wasn't sure what he wanted, but ultimately he and his gut decided it wasn't me.

Perhaps I should give up searching for the "right man," at least for now. Perhaps, for now, I don't want a new relationship, just sex. Relationships I've done, but I've never had one-night stand, never played the role of gay Odysseus journeying homeward through the Land of the Zipless Fuck. Psychopaths and STD-carriers aside, perhaps only in the land of indiscriminate fucking is there truly "no such thing as the wrong man."