Dear Joe:

First, I will summarize some of what you shared so far and then I will offer you my input.

You are currently in your mid 30s, a college graduate working full time. You met a woman online 10 years ago. The two of you emailed back and forth, instant messaged, and talked on the phone (“talked about almost everything”), exchanging photos and engaged “in phone sex nearly every night” for a long while .

The two of you met in-person only once, “but she was nothing like her pictures. She looked older and bloated”, and you spent “one fully clothed night together”.

Online and on the phone, you encouraged her to have sex with other women, with a young man, 15 years her junior, and with a couple (“I find their escapades very arousing even though I only can listen”). Your plan at this point, is to travel and meet the woman and the couple next month.

You “feel a lot of shame and humiliation” sharing all this. You “feel like a sexual deviant”, “a freak”, but you also feel okay about it most of the time. You want to meet the woman and the couple next month, three weeks from now, but you are conflicted: “I still battle it mentally and it is wearing me down”, you wrote.

You shared that you had “a few normal relationships with women” in the past. “Women want more of me than I am willing to give and then eventually get tired of me and things end poorly. I never feel the strong connection with any one I have dated and I never really commit”.

About your childhood you wrote that it “was normal”, that you were “very shy as a child and socially awkward”, that you always kept your parents at a distance (“I don’t feel as close to them.. have always kept them at a distance”). You weren’t close to your younger brother either,  and you “did not really have too many really close friends growing up”.

More quotes from you and my input: you wrote, “My parents are very warm people but I do not feel as close to them as I guess I should be”- maybe they are warm people now, but in the ways that matter to a child, they were not warm people with you, when you were a child.

If they were warm people with you when you were a child, you wouldn’t grow up very shy, socially awkward and distant and disconnected from the people in your young life.

As a young child, it was not you who “always kept (your parents) at a distance”- a young child never keeps his parent or parents at a distance. The distance is always created by the parent.

I believe that the reason you have not felt a strong connection to any girlfriend you had in real life is that your parents rejected you early on, in ways that hurt you a lot. The reason you did not commit to girlfriends, I believe, is that you don’t trust them, just as you understandably didn’t trust your parents growing up.

But you do trust sexual feelings, you can depend on those to feel good again and again, so you pursue sex, but without the human connection.

In other words, you trust sex but you don’t trust people. You want to connect with sexual feelings, but not with the people involved.

“I feel as though I am torn between two worlds. One where I just have a normal relationship with a woman.. while at the same time I want to explore all avenues of my sexuality”-

– part of you still wants the human connection, the deep, warm connection you are yet to experience.

You used the word normal twice: you wrote that your childhood was normal (“my childhood was normal”), and that your adult relationships with women were normal (“I have had a few normal relationships with women”)-

– I think that the normal in your childhood was social isolation, disconnection from others, awkwardness with others. Fast forward, this is still your normal.

If you want, let me know what you think at this point, and we can  continue to communicate.

anita