Dress you up

Although “Start before you’re ready” is one of Lauren’s favorite sayings, she has serious doubts about her double booking as a secret mistress.
Does she really want a second lover?

“Of course he comes into my life right now!”
It took me at least a day to put two and two together after my former lover Salvatore and me hit it off on chat, and arranged our date in a carefree fashion.
I m not too big on writing out affirmations, in order to change my mindset or manifest things. However, I do create entire worlds based on my imagination, and often use a version of my past self (whether real or made up, that is completely irrelevant) to live up to.
To BECOME.
Usually I’m only interested in becoming her body, or recreating the level of success “she” had or has. And that’s how I was currently using the 2009 version of me!
It was a quite a new thing, and I hadn’t written it out in my journal. The vision was still fairly rough.
But it felt real all the same.
And then, out of the blue, Salvatore sent me a chat, and I replied, and within ten minutes we were completely excited to see each other again and set a date.
I thought back about our time together, and vividly remembered not just him, but myself in his house, in his bed, looking at myself in the mirror..
My beautiful thin thighs!
My trained yoga body!
“Oh wow,” I softly sighed at the thought of that.
“I would give anything to be like that again.”
But it took me a day to realize that Salvatore was THE man of 2009!
Of course I had manifested him, if I was so focused on recreating 2009. I had the 2009 thighs in my mind for over a week, before he contacted me.
When we met we reminisced on old memories, and he remembered vividly how fragile I was. He even used the word “broken”.
I said he had been my first time really good sex, without some major drama happening after.
He broke up with me, and I was sad for a few weeks.
But it was nothing compared to the major emotional breakdowns I had after Great Sex With Great But Totally Unreliable Men.
Maybe because Salvatore was not unreliable, maybe that was the big difference.
We came to the conclusion that although he had been the one to break it off, he had actually saved us both a lot of heartache.
And I had a spree of short but successful affairs, all within months of us parting.
“It was like I owned it,” I told him. “As if you had taught me everything I needed to know.”
Salvatore came pretty close to banging his head to the table to express the unfairness of it all. He had gotten the fragile, broken version of me, with whom he had to be very careful and really sweet.
He was also the first to be dominant in bed. I think that was the secret ingredient that elevated me to a level where I was suddenly a little Sex Goddess.
And those men after him benefited from my newfound joy in sex.
Yet if I had been that lighthearted with him, he probably would have married me!
No, it wasn’t fair at all.
But yet I thought it was very funny.
2009 had been divided into two parts:
The first half belonged to the first years of being single, which were marked by getting my heart broken twice, barely living to tell the tale, and having a lot of trouble getting my love life on the road.
And then came Salvatore and tadaa!
I was healed.
Or at least, doing way better, and I was certainly a lot more “mobile”.
Salvatore had marked the beginning of a new era then, and he could be the beginning of a new era now.
He made this clear in the days after our date: He could be my second lover, if that’s what I desired.
And I knew he was serious because he added:
“I have a lot more to lose than you do.”
But still, I could lose my lover Big.
Either because he didn’t want me anymore.
Or because I became such a mental mess from having two men, that things between us would just turn sour.
But Salvatore could lose his whole family.
So I knew he was right. This made it even more important to have a serious check-in with myself, if I really wanted this.
The stakes were way too high to just wing it, and see how it would go.
And I know it is superboring, and not good for storytelling or writing this blog; but I knew it wasn’t right for me.
And once I knew WHY it wasn’t for me, I realized that this whole idea of getting a second lover, was incomplete and it wasn’t me.
It didn’t reflect what I valued.
You see, the idea to get a second lover was sparked by a combination of two separate events.
So two circumstances that were working in conjunction – not one.
The first circumstance or event was that Mr.Big didn’t want to see me as often as I liked.
This was way more than a sex thing.
We had platonic dates occasionally, but it wasn’t like he was throwing those around like candy. I usually had to work or wait, just as long and hard for those, as for the real ones that were long and private enough to have sex.
But in all fairness, Mr.Big and me had seen each other almost sporadically from the very beginning. It was nothing new. And although I had toyed with the idea of getting a second lover, at least once a year, I had always put it aside.
It was not for me.
I was a monogamist, and although I liked Mr.Big to have adventures, I knew that having them for myself would seriously jeopardize my relation and sexual experience with Mr.Big. I was sabotaging the pleasure of surrendering to Mr.Big; both sexually as well as calendar wise.
Not knowing when he wanted to see me, was in essence a pleasure enhancing experience.
Which I would lose if I would start having sex with someone else in the meantime.
But this year, the second event happened.
And I think it was this second thing, that suddenly gave the hypothetical idea of a second lover momentum;
I fell in love.
And it happened without me even noticing it, at first!
The only thing that in retrospect gave away something was up, was because I started rearranging my business (teaching yoga) and my second business (this writing) in a thousand ways.
It was madness I think.
But I was externalizing a restlessness inside of me.
I may not have consciously noticed my feelings for Christopher; But on an emotional level I was desperately trying to make that pain of longing go away, by controlling the things I could control.
All in vain of course.
No new business model is capable of solving being in love with two men.
Once I realized what was going on, the cat was out of the bag.
Christopher was the first new man I felt attracted to, ever since I fell for Mr.Big. His monopoly on my heart, was broken.
After this revelation that I could and did have feelings for other men, my “Let’s get a second lover” phase got a lot more serious this year.
And even brought me face to face with Salvatore, who would be perfect as a second lover. I wasn’t in love with Salvatore, but considered that a good thing.
It would be a drama free experience for both.
But then I thought about Christopher, and how I had felt about him, in that short time when there was a chance that he would become my second lover…
If he had said yes?
Man! I would have dived in head first!
Without any reservations and without coming up for air.
I would have gone all in.
And that’s when I realized the real reason I wanted a second lover didn’t have anything to do with sex. It had to do with love.
I was in love with Mr.Big and with Christopher.
But Salvatore had made it clear, maybe even back in 2009 really, that he didn’t want me to fall in love with him.
And I understood that.
And it was all I needed to know, to make up my mind.

<3LSH
An unexamined life is not worth living

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Dress you up is the twenty-first chapter from Project M.
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tenth anniversary of the book that changed my life!

Summer 2008 I started writing in English.
Dutch American Diary
Just like now, I was in love with two men. And just like now, they were both taken.
And – yes, just like now – I had no idea where life would take me.
This 2008 diary became the only thing that offered stability during a time where I had just left my partner after fourteen years and the two new men were driving me crazy.
A book about starting over in your mid-thirties and reinventing yourself as a lover;
As a woman;
And as a vengeful fury from hell.