Exposure Therapy
December 21st, 2025
I had oral sex for the first time. I didn't finish, apparently I am not the premature ejaculator I feared to be. In fact I've been death gripping my dick. I thought practicing edging would make me better at sex, but as I've learned it's more than just pleasing your partner. Your partner would like to please you too, and it makes me a little sad I wasn't enough.
Sex is a fun activity, but I don't feel particularly changed in any substantial way. Maybe I feel hornier and of wanting to do it again, but I don't particularly feel my world expanded substantially. Perhaps the want to have sex will wear off, I sure hope so. It's a distracting sort of feeling.
I enjoyed it with E. We ate dim sum and also helped decorate my place. I am a practical person, and I realize now that my place isn't particularly warm. She said, "Your apartment reminds me of a corporate office."
How did I get here? My friend J had locked my in a car on a Friday night and confronted me. He said, "You need to get used to laying your complete self bare to people. I promise you'll feel better doing so." He was addressing my fearful avoidant behaviours.
I talked with E about life. Her extroverted life revolves around her friends, not herself. I think it's admirable, but at the same time I am uncertain if that's the life I can help contribute to. My life seems to revolve around me, my fears, and my thoughts and ideas about the world. I am introverted, aloof, and detached.
I don't get involved with other people's lives, and perhaps that's what I find strange about the whole thing. I am a hermit in the most common sense.
I don't rely on other people, and maybe I compliment E in that way. I don't really know what to think of it.
I did bare myself to E, I told her about my tendency to go hot and cold and dissociate. Pulling back from intimacy and being close to someone. And that's scary for her. But I still dissociated nonetheless, and I feel bad for it. And clearly it feels bad for her. A guy you like just going silent and nonverbal on you while you're eating dinner is scary. It's sad.
I think this sort of fear and behaviour will only get fixed through exposure. You can't think yourself out of a fear of heights. You can't think yourself out of a fear of intimacy.
C
She told me she likes peeling her cheese sticks. She likes going on walks and holding hands. She likes arts and crafts. Her smile. I feel a bit infatuated. I think she'd like that very much if I told her that.
The way she talks to me, it feels like she really believes in love. She deeply believes in it, and she deeply cherishes it. And it makes me want to cry. It makes me want to cry and sob and cry and sob. She's going through a lot at the moment and she still believes in the whole lot of it.
I don't know what to do feeling about this guilt. I want this to work out well. I really do. This love she feels for me just makes me so scared and afraid. I am just so deeply scared. I am scared that I'll love her and she'll leave me, or she'll start threatening me to keep me close.
Roster Dating
I feel sick going on dates with different girls. Especially when she tells me that I'm the only one they're dating. When I see her rosey cheeks blush, and I see her eyes dilated looking into my soul, a pain burrows deep in my consciousness.
I hope that they are dating other people. Because I feel it'd only be fair. If they started to have deep feelings of infatuation, there is a part of me that wants to relinquish responsibility and say they are responsible for their own feelings, but I still feel that twisted knot in my stomach.
I am dating multiple girls because I want to meet people and understand my options in life. As I've realized the people you spend your time will determine the direction of your life. Your partner will complete course correct the trajectory of your life, for better or worse.
It's one thing to say that, but it's another thing to face the consequences. To be cowering in feel in the supposed "safety of your own home." It's another thing to be left crying and in tears everyday, and it's another thing to be walking on eggshells all the time. It's another thing to be afraid of going out because of what they'll think, and of course the things you'll get to do everyday become more open and more restricted.
Who you pick will have dramatic influence on your life. That's scary. That understanding of commitment is why modern dating feels so careful now. Because we all value our time, perhaps too much in some ways, but we can and we do.
Going on these dates with girls gives me insight to what people are like. What they care about. Who they talk about. What they talk about or focus on. Goals. Dreams. Ambitions. What is it? What do they want? What are they like?
And it's given me an interesting vantage to myself. What am I like around different dynamics of people? Do I talk more? Do I talk less? Do I smile more? Do I smile less?
The most wonderous thing I get to observe is how much different I act around different girls. Is it because I'm pleasing them? No, not quite. It's more like, different dynamics pull me in different ways. I don't have a dramatic shift in character or morals, but as far as how much I speak and what I speak about, it's quite different.
Imagining to spend the rest of my life with someone, it's a bit of a stretch. I am unsure of how to navigate human relationships, but at the very least the practice and communicating with people will help me throughout my life.
Wittgenstein famously said:
The world is the totality of facts, not of things.
Entities alone have no meaning, it is only on the context of a relational fact do they hold meaning. "Chair" doesn't mean anything without the physical context. To a baby, "blue" is meaningless until you point to the sky and say "blue."
The world is the totality of relations, not of people.