AND ONLY ONE MAN –

April 11, 2023 – Back when I was drinking, sex was easy for me. Without booze, I was modest, a chronic overthinker who flinched when she undressed, but pour a bottle of Malbec in me and I became an exhibitionist, all my windows open. It’s not that I didn’t care about being so vulnerable with another person; it was that I couldn’t feel: The self-consciousness that tyrannized me in daylight turned to an endless series of Why not?s. The high stakes of any erotic engagement — where this was headed, what he thought about me, what I thought about him — would suddenly evaporate. It was like sex happened to me, and the sex could be amazing or it could be lousy, but more than once I woke up with a blank space in my memory where the sex should be, lying beside a man with a five-o’clock shadow and a slight snore, and I thought, Damn, this again?

Drinking problems can be defined in many ways, but unmanageability was central to my self-diagnosis. By my mid-30s, I couldn’t manage my finances, and I couldn’t manage my friendships, which were growing weaker and more superficial as drinking took center stage. And I sure as hell couldn’t manage these sexual entanglements that were unpredictable and entirely predictable at once: a friend from college; a British line cook I met at a bar; a random guy in Paris, where I’d gone on a magazine assignment. Did I like them? Did it matter? I was never sure if I wanted these midnight tussles to turn into a real relationship or if I never wanted to see the guy again, but I did know I yearned for connection, a life lived side by side, and yet I was growing more isolated. I’d become a big-city cliché: the single woman with her overloved tabby, the most familiar men in her orbit being the ones working at the bodega or the wine shop. 

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