An Expired Condom

I was just cleaning out the "stuff" drawer in the bathroom, and came across something rather unsettling. An unused condom. With an expiration date of "02/96". Considering that condoms have a pretty good shelf life (at least compared to milk), it's a safe bet that this condom is a full decade old.

I suppose it should be a little unsettling that I have stuff that old hiding in my bathroom drawer, but what's most bothersome about this is what it symbolizes: several years of not using condoms. Not because I've been unsafe, or because I've been in a monogamous relationship. It's because I haven't been having sex.

It hasn't been a whole decade, I hasten to point out. In the days of this particular rubber's youth, I was getting laid on a rather frequent basis, and although condom-requiring activities weren't involved every time, I never had a problem with them expiring before I got a chance to use them. This one just happened to get put away where I wouldn't find it.

But it has been... a while. It was eight years ago that my boyfriend Andy had a bleeding aneurysm in his brain, and I haven't been in a relationship since then. I did fool around a little after losing Andy... we'd had an open relationship previously, so it's not like I felt like it was cheating or being disloyal or anything of that sort. My then-new neighbor was a bit of a sex hound, and I became an occasional drinking and fucking buddy of his. That was kind of nice: no commitments or entanglements, but more comfortable and meaningful than doing it with a stranger.

But I was never very good at pursuing sex, and I reached the age where it no longer really pursued me, so it just... stopped happening. The neighbor moved away, and it's probably been about five years since I last had sex with anyone.

I miss it.

I still have a fairly active sex life, and I enjoy it quite thoroughly. You hear about morose masturbators, joylessly jacking themselves out of boredom... that's not me. I sometimes wonder if I'm bothering the folks in the adjoining apartments. But even as rich as my imagination is, I do miss the experience of doing it with someone else. The challenge. The relaxation. The surprises. The power. The intimacy. The exhiliration. The surrender. The satisfaction of a ___job well done.

I've thought about getting back into the whole dating thing again, and I did flirt with it (so to speak) a while after I lost Andy. But even with the additional options for making contacts available in the internet age, it's just not something I'm eager to dive into. Anonymous one-night stands can be fun, but I don't have the charm or the cash to pull that off. (Readers in - or visiting - west Michigan are invited to proposition me, however.) To be honest, I don't think I could manage a "real" relationship at this point; I'm too busy and too set in my ways to make room in my life for a boyfriend. To say nothing of finding someone who'd actually A) get along with me, and B) really interest me.

The usual advice in such situations is to consider one's friends as possible more-than-friends, but I seem to have found myself surrounded (at least offline) with nothing but heterosexuals. And I'm pretty much the only homo any of them knows. The obvious solution to that problem would be to get involved (as I was, once upon a time) in gay organizations or social groups or the bars or whatever, but remember what I said about being busy and set in my ways? Not likely to happen.

So it looks like I'm going to keep on missing sex. At least I have a fresh tube of lube.