This weekend I had the best dinner I ever had in my life.
And although I do not consider myself particularly knowledgeable in the field of gastronomy;
I am experienced.

On my mother’s side they learned me the nurturing qualities of home cooked food and they were pastry bakers as well, so I can definitely taste the difference between prepackaged and freshly baked cake and cookies.

And my father used to take us to fancy restaurants. I would not say “all the time”, but definitely as early as the 80s or 90s, special occasions were celebrated by going to a Michelin star restaurant.

And yet I did not get the best dinner of my life until this weekend.
Home cooked by someone who would probably be way too modest to ever agree with my assessment, and on a moment I was not chasing it. Which is a lesson in itself, obviously.

But something else also surfaced;
That a journey I have been on for 15 years, which was the quest to the perfect sexual affair, was completed six years ago. And has been enjoyed since.

Aside from the usual “it’s about the journey not the destination”- wisdom,
the journey really had been worth it.
My peak experience, or what I know to be sexually feasible, would never have been reached if it had not been for giving my sex life top priority for years, before I found the man who would “bring it home” so to speak.

If I would be with another man I am in love with, which did not happen since then (the being together part, the falling in love part does still happen every now and then), then I would give that liaison a very high chance of being an equally satisfying experience.
Or maybe not, but then so be it.

I still see my sexual savior occasionally but I never know if there will be a next time. We are not in an affair that has obligations. Every time can be the last time, and therefor every time is also the first time.
But there is a realistic chance it will happen again, so that’s great.
To have this sexual experience of the best dinner, on repeat.

But Darling!
Baby!
Lauren, Sweetie?
What HAVE you been eating the rest of the time?! Sexually that is. Because we all know that too little sex, is a dead ringer for overeating in the physical sense…

Sexually I have not been eating anything on the side. Just the high class fancy dinners.
So I have been starving.
Totally unhealthy situation.

My sexual malnutrition was also a direct result of the sex being so good!
I had found what I had set out to find, all those years ago…
And because I wanted to keep myself exclusive to only that, I had started identifying as someone who only had that sex. Just like Marilyn Monroe only drank champagne, I only had that type of premium sex.

“I am no longer going to do that again”, I would say
That referring to all the sexual experiences had been:
Cozy.
Nurturing.
An adventure.
A good time.

A gamble.
Taking a chance at winning but with the certain outcome of knowing you played the game!

And ever since I had found my preferred chef, I never even considered going back to having partners where sex had been about giving, way more than it had been about receiving.

Now I see that is no way to live.
To only go for the highest level of sex, with a partner that you are deeply in love with, is – in particular when  you see that partner only occasionally – not healthy.
A girl needs to eat!

Which is why I have decided to go on my second Sexual Odyssey, because I already counted my quest for the perfect affair that started in 2006 as my first sexual odyssey.
So this is the second; A quest to becoming versatile. Learning to nurture myself, and my physical sexual experience to whatever level it is I am comfortable with.

Even if I cannot or don’t want to, have “all the way”- sex, then that’s okay too.

The goal is not to be fully functioning sexually with a wide variety of men, but to find out how I can stretch my boundaries, broaden my taste.
To “acquire my taste”, even.
Acquired taste is a term used in gastronomy to illustrate some tastes need to grow on you, you can’t dismiss them immediately.

Olives, are a food that is an acquired taste for me.
But oysters and mussels and snails, are food I would never try.
So just like with food, the goal is definitely not to experience or try things that do not appeal to me. But to be less rigid in my self-imposed monogamy.

The goal of this second sexual odyssey is to actively start looking for ways to nourish myself, sexually.

And whether that is by real sexual experiences, like in those years before I found the man who marked the end of my first sexual odyssey.
Or whether I will find another way to stay nourished;
I ll find that out along the way.

But a girl has gotta eat.

~Lauren
An unexamined life is not worth living