Desire, Reimagined
Back in my forties, I had a relationship that lasted several years with a man who delighted in bringing my fantasies to life. He had been in the swinging scene since the early days, when the main way of meeting people was through ads in the Loot newspaper. Back then, if you wanted to meet someone for casual sex, it was a slow-burning process: taking naked photos of yourself, sending them to a specialist film processor known for handling such images, posting them to a PO Box, and then waiting for a response. Months could easily pass, by which point my friend might be on the brink of climax before he even reached the front door of the arranged meeting place. It never ceases to amaze me how far some men will go to get their rocks off, especially for novel experiences like the ones he encountered.
As a result of these liaisons, and many more that followed over the years, my playmate built up a substantial address book of men and women who could be relied upon to turn up for some prearranged activity, whether that meant threesomes, foursomes, or more. I didn’t realise at the time how lucky I was to have found someone with access to so many nice, respectable, and usually well-endowed men, many of whom eventually made it into my erotic memoir, The Butcher, the Baker, the Candlestick Maker.
Nowadays, I restrict most of my activities to one-on-ones, because organising anything more takes a phenomenal amount of effort, and I simply don’t have the time or inclination to plan something with a strong chance of never happening. I’ve discovered that when it comes to fantasies, nearly everyone I chat with online would rather keep them in their heads than make them happen in real life. They think they want the real thing, but more often than not, they bottle it and come up with some reason why they’re suddenly unavailable. I suspect a significant number of them use our conversations to feed their ‘wank bank.’
And that’s probably for the best, because as I’ve discovered through research and my own experiments, manifesting a fantasy with a partner purely as role play, even when it involves another person, is nearly as good — and sometimes better — than making it happen in real life. The human brain isn’t especially good at drawing a bright line between fantasy and reality, which is why you can pretend it’s all happening without the risk of it going badly wrong. As I know all too well, fantasies, when played out in real life, rarely go to plan, especially when they move beyond one-on-one.
Last Friday, I was reminded of this by a man introduced to me by a female friend at an event we were both attending.
