The Buttressing of Young Jz

I've had a couple of interesting conversations off-post about my interview with SP. One of the comments particularly struck me:

"the part I found most interesting was that he recognized things in himself so young, and that he accepted them as just "how he is",  just like you two accepted it was just "how you were". I was clueless about myself and my sexuality - so I find it fascinating that others are more aware."

These words caught my attention because, although I wouldn't say I was exactly "clueless" when I met SP, I have always felt that, in many ways, he saved me. (Mostly from myself but also to some degree from others.)

While not totally without experience when I met him in my early twenties, I wasn't very far across the threshold, either. I was a very late bloomer and when you put that together with being both quite shy and fairly particular, well, you get a woman with an extraordinarily empty dance card.

So I'd had a lot of time to think about how I thought sex should be - but not much experience to measure it against. Plus, what little exposure I had under my belt failed miserably at meeting my theoretical standards. I was starting to wonder if I'd just created a fantasy that could never be realized.

But then I met SP and the whole picture changed. With him, I learned that sex could actually be what I'd always imagined. Hot, sweet, mind-blowing, funny, and with a totally natural flow. We never worried about if something was being done right or wrong, we just played and had fun with it, no matter how it turned out. Performance anxiety or hangups never crossed my mind because there was simply no place for them in our world.

Instead, what I got was a solid foundation of sexual ease and confidence which served me well during all the not-so-good experiences I would be put through over the course of my life.

Had I not found that bedrock with SP early on, I shudder to think of the knots I could have tied myself into over the bad stuff. (There was a lot of potential for damage in some of my experiences.) As it was, however, I was able to shrug most of it off with, "Well, this obviously works better with some people than others." It just never crossed my mind to assume any blame, because I knew that with the right person, I was just fine. Any aberrations were written off as bad chemistry or poor choices, nothing more.

So, I'm not really sure the acceptance that my friend found so fascinating was any kind of innate knack on my part.
I think he just caught me in time.  :-)