Throughout the course of my adult life, I have practiced many different relationship paradigms, from strict monogamy to all flavors of swinging to open relationships to full on polyamory. But I don't advertise this to the men I meet online - as far as they're concerned, I'm little Miss Traditional Monogamous.

So why is it every time I meet a guy who's interesting, attractive, intelligent, cool, and otherwise someone I'd want to keep around, he turns out ot be married and polyamorous?

Having tried all flavors of relationship openness, I've decided that (for me) polyamory is fundamentally flawed (as there is virtually always an imbalance that leaves one or more people involved unhappy and with unmet needs), and not something I want to do again. I don't want to fall head over heels in love with someone who will never be able to truly "be" with me in a long term committed living together kind of way (you know, because they already have that with somebody else). So for me... ultimately I expect I will end up somewhere between monogamous and swinger, depending on my partner's comfort zone.

In today's news it was announced that David Duchovny, X-Files' Fox Mulder, has entered rehab for sex addiction.  Rumors of Duchovny's addiction have swirled around for over 10 years.  In today's news, his wife, Tea Leoni, was quoted from a 1998 interview with Elle magazine, where she said that she found the notion "very exciting."

"David was accused of being a sex addict," Leoni, who had been married for one year at that point, said. "Which I always found very exciting. And then I found out it wasn't true."

"Men are like bulls," she continued. "They gotta get the new cow. Maybe you've got to get the bull after he's had a lot of cows, so you might just be the last new one."

Wow.  So basically, she was calling her husband a Barney and showing disappointment with their marriage and sex life.  She was saying "I thought I'd be getting laid all the time and I was thrilled, but as it turns out, not so much.  He doesn't want to fuck me all the time, he just wants to fuck anything with a hole and a heartbeat, it's all about the fresh meat to him, and once he's had it (including me) he doesn't want it anymore."

Awww...  say it isn't so!  If our hollywood hearthrob objects of lust can't be counted upon to be honest and faithful spouses, who can?

-Vixen

If you've been reading this blog for long, it will come as no surprise when I say that I am a very sexual person.  I love sex, I'm really good at it, and if I had my druthers, I'd be in a long term relationship where we were having sex several times a day on an ongoing basis.  But, as this blog evidences, I'm not in a long term relationship, so I'm not getting anywhere NEAR that - although I was, for a while, when I was seeing Nate.  So am I celibut in between relationships and 'testing the waters' with new relationship candidates?  Hardly.  I've been a swinger for most of my adult life, and I'm no stranger to having 'friends with benefits'.  As I've been on my dating adventures, my general attitude has been that I'm not looking for friends with benefits, but if I start dating someone and as we get to know each other we have good interpersonal and physical chemistry but there are factors that make us a poor match for long term romance, I have no problem with maintainting that friends with benefits situation.  But I turn down guy after guy after guy who contacts me looking expressly for that, because usually a guy who isn't even open to the possbility of a relationship with a woman should they find deep chemistry has issues (and is, in my experience, likely to treat women poorly).  And typically they're not truly looking for friends with benefits, they're looking for a warm hole they can fuck without having to give the resepct and decent treatment a friend would deserve. 

So, I've been single for the better part of a year now, but between guys I met intending to date but kept as playmates when it didn't turn towards romance and married friends in open relationships who I've known since I was a married swinger, my sex life has remained relatively active.  But lately, my stable of a small handful of friends with benefits in semi-regular rotation has dwindled.  It's not that the friendships have ended, but that schedules or other things going on in their lives have precluded getting together for any playtime (and will continue to preclude it for the time being).  As a result, I've been experiencing a bit of a dry spell lately.  I went from getting as much sex as I could handle when I was seeing Nate back to occasional dalliances with playmates to, well, pretty much nothing.  This will not do.  As much as I've been disinterested in meeting guys who're just looking for no strings attached sex, lately the lack of sex in my life has had me reconsidering starting to accept some of those 'no strings' offers.  However, I'm not thrilled with that idea for a number of reasons, so it's remained in the "considering" phase.

But, in life (and in my sex life), there is ebb, and there is flow. 

Today's story may not, on its surface, seem to have anything to do with dating...  but the more I thought about it, it kept reminding me of my dating experiences, like it was the perfect analogy for what I go through with men and their general asshattery.

So, I went to lunch with a friend today, to a favorite restaurant we've been to many times.  There's this one waiter who is so utterly all-around incompetent that we're sure he's only managed to keep his job because he's the owner's nephew.  We generally try to avoid getting him as our waiter, but today, alas, we were not successful.

Everything was going more or less OK until the end of the meal.

Barneys can't stand the thought of someone thinking that they're a Barney.  They want every woman they use to walk away thinking not that they were duped or that Barney only wanted them for sex, but that he WAS the great guy he presented himself to be, and she just didn't measure up to his standards to want to continue dating her.

I thought, after our last exchange, Barney #2516 and I were done.  After all, after I refused (repeatedly) to have sex with him and he backed out on our date, I called him out on his dishonest Barney Bullshit behavior, and told him off.  I didn't think I'd hear from him again. But he IM'd me again this afternoon.  He couldn't stand leaving things with me thinking he was just another Barney Slimeball, and wanted to make me feel badly about myself, tear down my self confidence, and leave me full of self doubt instead.  Of course he'd do it all in the interest of being a good guy and being "honest" with me about why things didn't work out between us (i.e. not because I saw through his bullshit game, but because I wasn't good enough for him).  If he truly were looking out for me as he would claim, would he really think being "honest" with me (at the cost of my feelings) was important enough to contact me again after I'd told him we were through?

Of course, once again, I saw right through him.   In fact, as soon as he IM'd me, I knew this was his goal.  I responded only for entertainment value and blogfodder.  I was curious to see how he would try to play it, and I knew the ensuing conversation would make for entertaining reading for you all.  Ahh, the things I do for my readers...

Barneys don't like for anyone to see through their facades and realize that they're Barneys.  They pride themselves on appearing to be a great catch that any woman would be thrilled to have, it's their bread and butter, it's what gets them laid.  I saw right through Barney #2516, and he didn't like that.  He wanted me to believe it wasn't his slimery that was the problem, it was me, he wanted me to second guess myself and wonder what I'd done wrong, what I could have done differently to make things work out between us.

PUHLEEEEEZ.

Let it not be said that I haven't learned anything from my adventures in dating.  Each adventure represents lessons learned.  Like back in April, when in the Lies Men Tell, I met a dishonest, disingenuous jerk that caused me to generate the term Barney, the breed of guys who, like Neil Patrick Harris' character Barney on the show "How I Met Your Mother", are womanizers who make a game of telling a woman whatever it is they think she wants to hear in an effort to get her in bed on the first date, and regardless of whether she sleeps with him or not, they never want to see or sleep with a woman more than once.  He wasn't the first Barney I encountered, not by a long shot, but it was with him that insight was gained and Barneys became a lesson learned.  So I'll call him Barney #1.  

Today's story, however, is about another man... 

I met a soldier a while back on SexSite.  He seemed outgoing, intelligent, interesting, witty, not to mention HOT (and hung like a horse).  We chatted online extensively for a few days before making plans to meet.  He told me he’d just returned from Iraq, and was in rehab for a head injury before being medically discharged. He said the effects of the head injury were very minor and not noticeable.  He was very disillusioned with the military and the war and was very socially aware and all around cool.  Oh and did I mention he was hot?  Hot enough that he could have had the personality of a twig, and as long as it was a charming twig, I’d have taken him to bed. 

He said that he’d only been home a week or so, and had not been with a woman since his last trip home to the states several months earlier.  Normally I would have found this sort of desperation unappealing, but he was super hot and seemed super into me, and somehow I found the idea of rocking his world and giving him a great homecoming very appealing.