.

Eight months.
Eight months since my last post for this, quote unquote, series.
I only wrote two episodes and they were both neatly stacked into Lessons, of a Femme Fatale.

Regardless of when you read this, you can check all episodes here:
category The Way of the Femme Fatale

And suffice to say I do not intend to let another 8 months pass before the next episode. Because how could I?
How actually dared, I?

And it was even worse than not showing up for writing here, a more or less tongue in cheek study how to be a Femme Fatale.
The felony was worse because I actually lost my Femme Fatale card for a moment there.

My lover parting was NOT good, for my Femme Fatale identity.

In the backlash there was all sorts of mess, although not between him and me. In all likeliness that was the cleanest breakup in the history of lovers. Which is what you get if you’re both bringing your A Game.

No matter how bad I felt, I never did anything Femme Fatale unworthy. Or perhaps, in retrospect I did!
Because I let him go in peace, so it all depends on what your definition of Femme Fatale is.

If it’s a film noir “woman gets a man killed” or “gets revenge kind of femme”?
Then sure, I did not live up to the promise of unleashing revenge upon him.
As far as I know, he’s happy with his partner. Monogamous even, I don’t know and I don’t really care.

So he’s gone but during our years together, the whole me-never-meeting-anyone-even-CLOSE to what he brought to the table, had gotten out of hand as it was!
The problem was not that he left, the problem was he meant so very much to me.

Because of him, I learned who I was.
How powerful, sexual, unapologetic.
It was required in order to be with him: He created the Femme Fatale. It was that or being the domestic girlfriend type, and I have known my whole life, I was never that girl. Yet I had always played that role…

Most men I had met needed me to tone it down. The freedom I craved, the adventures I wanted, the ambitions I had.
Not just sexually, I needed to tone down EVERYTHING- if I wanted my sexual role of being what would have been called “a bottom” if I were a gay man-
If I wanted to have that dynamic in the bedroom?
Oh I needed to tone it down, Baby…..

Until I met my lover, I had largely been given the choice between a career, worldly power, dominance, money, God who knows what else.
Or sex.

Understandably, I chose sex.

But since our arrangement, although longterm, was a loose one, I knew I needed more lovers than one.
That one lover, is effectively, no lover.

If you have one lover?
Him deciding to go monogamous and not telling me.
Months without sex turning into way-too-long-a-time not seeing each other at all.
And finally, an indirect breakup.

There are still days when the grief just hits me like a brick, and I wonder how the actual fuck I am ever getting over this.
Over him.

But then I remember that the reason that got me here in the first place is because I failed to find another man like him, when we were still together.
I was hooked.
On him.

There was something about him, like I said, something that I had never experienced. Not even a glimmer, not a shred, nothing indicative of there being more fish like this one, in the sea.

The reason I have been going through the painful proces of feeling him drawing away, are because all the years prior to that.
I failed to take care of myself, long before he stopped taking care of me.

I failed to fix what I knew was a dangerous liability, and did not get a safety net in place.
One lover is no lover, take it from me.

So where was I?

No idea but I’ll take it from handing in “The Femme Fatale card”;
There have honestly been plenty of times I really thought I would never return to this series.
That the breakup had been so Femme Fatale unworthy, not because I behaved clingy or needy or angry or anything.
But because I was sad, and had lost him.

I felt powerless and that I had lost my license to write from this perspective.

But the last couple of weeks, I can finally feel her return, and last night was nothing short of an Awakening.
A Becoming.
An Understanding.

It was like I saw the future unveiled, and that the time without him had finally done its healing work.
Had brought me the clarity, that I had lacked when I was with him.

You see, I always KNEW I needed more lovers. Not just from a risk assessment point of view, where you cannot be relying on one “supplier”, in particular not when the goods he delivers have you hooked and begging for more on all fours!

No, I knew I needed more lovers, because I needed to give him space, competition, something to conquer.
I needed to destabilize him, just enough to keep him interested.
You do not keep a man like that by loyalty;
That’s how you lose him.

But if you keep him on edge?
Oh, there’s a chance his interest in me had never waned and we’d still be having sex summer 2024.

But you know how it goes right?

Just like people in relationships, I got lazy.

I loved not having to go out the proverbial door, and having all my sexual needs met, and by a man who was confident, smart, sexual, outgoing and who thrived on unpredictability and challenges.
Including sexual ones.
I loved having sex with him, but it was also because I wanted to be him. Socially, he could do tons of stuff I could not do, and will never be able to do.

So all that time I knew, KNEW (capital letters), I had to have more lovers, and that my faithfulness (or addiction) to him, could be the very thing that killed it.
Yet never made meeting other men and getting more lovers a priority.
And it didn’t happen by chance.

And last night the vision finally came, of me being that woman, that Femme Fatale, with multiple lovers.
And I understood how to get there, or what my way of getting there was.

I finally saw myself as the woman I had always hoped to be for him.
And yet it had been his presence, and all the things he represented which were in affiliated form then also available to me- through him, I had access to those aspects of his personality-that had blocked me from developing those traits for myself.

So here I am, not standing before you, but sitting at my desk, back at the Femme Fatale series I last wrote for in November last year.
Before the breakup.

And I am now a woman with a vision for herself as a powerful Femme Fatale.
Including the lovers to go with it.

Something needed to be broken, before she could appear.
And that something, was Us.

.
~Lauren
An unexamined life is not worth living