Below this January 14 post on experience and numbers, bmmg39 writes:
…my view is that, often, people with little or no experience in a certain thing — it CAN be sex but it could also mean romantic love, or kissing, or slow-dancing, or whatever — often seek others with the same low level or non-level of experience. Someone who’s never “soul-kissed” someone else might not feel comfortable with someone who’s done that with a hundred people already. That doesn’t mean the first person thinks that there’s something wrong with the second; it means that the first person would like to be remembered fondly as someone else’s first experience in that department — with all the wonderful awkwardness and nervousness that is said to come with it.
The bold emphasis is mine. What bmmg writes sounds innocent and sweet enough. But the problem is clear: when one of our chief longings is “to be remembered fondly”, to be “someone else’s first”, we’re placing our own desires ahead of our partner’s. We’re using sex as a way of leaving a mark on another person’s body or heart, hoping — as humans tend to hope — that we won’t be forgotten. There’s no question that most of us would like to leave an impression on other people; perhaps it’s the historian in me, but there are few worse fears I have, to be honest, than that I will be completely forgotten! But bmmg makes the mistake of assuming that “first” equals “most memorable.” Ask around. Legions of people, particularly women, would rather forget their first experience of heterosexual intercourse. There’s not infrequently a world of difference between, say, the first partner with whom you had intercourse and the first partner with whom you truly felt close and safe.
When my wife and I were planning our wedding, she was hardly unaware that this was to be my fourth marriage — and her first. (Indeed, I have been the first husband to four different women.) A friend of ours did ask her, on one occasion, if it bothered her that she was doing something for the first time that I had done several times before. My fiancee, sensible as ever, said, “No, because this is the first time he’s doing it with me.” She was focused, bless her, on the marriage we were building together. She didn’t deny the reality of what had come before, but she rightly saw no reason to believe that prior experience on my part would diminish the unique intensity of what we were creating as a team. She knew better than to see me as a three-time loser and a has-been. So when we talked about rings and dresses and bands and caterers, she was aware — on some level — that I had had all those conversations before. But she was also clear that passion is not automatically killed by repetition; she knew enough to know that past behavior isn’t always the best indicator of future action. Above all, she believed that most of the time, the axiom of “post hoc ergo propter hoc” holds true: my ability to be a great husband in my fourth marriage was in no small degree a consequence of all the mistakes I had made in the previous three. Some folks hit a home run on their first at bat. Others… need to be sent down to the minors a time or three.
When a good relationship grows and endures, it does so in its own memorable ways. There is very little, from a purely physically sexual standpoint, that my wife and I could possibly do together that we haven’t each separately done with other people in the past. But that has damn all to do with the memories we create together and the marks we leave on each other. For heaven’s sakes, when I kiss my wife, I’m not comparing her tongue to that of umpteen other women; I’m fairly certain that she isn’t comparing my touch to that of her previous lovers! The tapes of what was are stored away. Why on earth would it matter that I’m not the first to make the woman I love call on the name of God in a moment of pleasure? It would only matter if I allowed my ego to trump my love, if the need to be the first was more important than the need to be the now. Continue reading ‘The danger of wanting to be first: a reply to bmmg39, updated with lyrics’
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