Miles, 44, broke down his sexual history to GQ: From being ready to settle down from an early age to an unexpected evolution in his relationship.
Source: GQ.com.
USA – Sex Lives chronicles the evolution of one person’s sexual history. This week: Miles, 44, Philadelphia.
I didn’t lose my virginity until my junior year in college; I was 19 because I started college early. I went to a school where it was, like, three guys for every girl in the student body, so it was sort of a weird, stilted sexual environment in terms of a lot of people not having partners. I didn’t have a girlfriend in my first two years, but I did in the beginning of my junior year and it lasted all of a week. We went on a date and then came back to my dorm room, and I remember her asking if I was sure that I wanted to lose my virginity to her because it was something special and she wasn’t sure if she was special. I was head over heels for her and I think in retrospect she wasn’t comfortable being adored at that level. So she broke up with me and started hooking up for an extended amount of time with someone who was a friend of mine.
I feel like I have been ready to get married and settle down and start a family from the time I was 15. That was sort of my approach to sexuality and sexual relationships—very long-term focused. I’ve been married now for 15 years; it’s a good marriage, strong and everything, so I don’t think I was deluded in that way. That’s what I wanted. But it’s sort of not what society expects anymore. Maybe in a different era I would have just found someone who’d get married at an early age. There wasn’t this drive towards exploration for me. Not that I wasn’t interested in people, but I didn’t feel a fear of commitment or a desire to sow my oats or whatever. A somewhat funny story is that my parents split up when I was six, after my dad had invited his girlfriend to live with them. Which was… not entirely okay with my mom. It’s never been entirely clear to me exactly how that situation evolved, but it wasn’t an open marriage per se. That’s how it fell apart.
I had a small meaningful thing in between [college and meeting my wife], a very intense relationship with someone I worked with. Classic mistake. She hooked up with a friend of mine and they lied to me about it. A bit of a pattern I guess. It was really hard for us to keep working in the same place. We worked in a lab together and she was a grad student and I was a research assistant and we were in the same department and she sort of started to sabotage my applications to go to grad school there. She didn’t want me in the same place as her, but then we did end up still kind of working side by side for a while after that. It was difficult.
My wife and I met online. She was the one who contacted me, and we chatted for two weeks or something before meeting for a brief first date, and then it was Christmas break and we didn’t see each other for a little while. When she went home over Christmas, she saw her grandmother who died shortly thereafter and she told her grandmother that she thought she had found the one she was going to marry after just that first date. She felt very certain from the beginning. I dumped her about a year into the relationship. Very briefly! She won me back. It was a situation where I was feeling a bit commitment-phobic because she wanted to go to med school but then started saying maybe she’d go to nursing school instead so that she wouldn’t have to move away and maybe lose our relationship, and that freaked me out. And she called me and said she wanted to chat and she told me she was applying for med school and we ended up getting back together. I guess because I didn’t feel like she was changing her life plan to fit me. She’s sort of blamed me for her massive medical debt ever since.
Some of the best sex I ever had was with that woman I worked with. She had a boyfriend from before and when we started being sexually involved, but not explicitly monogamous, her ex came to visit and she slept with him, and I was upset by that. I remember going over to her place and we argued about it all night. Not yelling, but like we talked and talked about how we were feeling and everything and then there was just this incredible sexual tension that was built up there. And she ended up suggesting something like why don’t we just have sex again and everything will be fine. And I remember carrying her up the stairs, putting her on the bed and having sex. It was just a super intense thing because of the release of tension, I guess.
It took almost 15 years of marriage for my wife to be comfortable revealing the degree to which she has always had submissive fantasies, and sadomasochistic dominance and bondage fantasies, and for us to start acting on them. It actually started with her getting out The Story of O and asking me to read it with her and then us talking about it. Some of the sex we’ve had in the year or so since then has been intense and incredible.
Part of what made me want to do this interview is just wanting to tell someone anonymously about the sense of shame I have that I had never made her orgasm during sex for the first 14 years of our marriage. She never wanted me to focus on that. She felt like me focusing on that would just make it harder for her to come or less enjoyable for her. And it ended up that what she needed was bondage or for me to be inflicting pain and making her feel like she was not in control of the situation at all. The first time she came she squirted all over me and it was this really intense, deeply satisfying and rewarding sex for both of us. I always felt like our sex life was good. I wouldn’t have complained about it and she always said the same. She’d never had vaginal intercourse orgasm and the only way she could orgasm was this very specific way she would masturbate. She felt like that was just how things were and just how her body worked and she didn’t want that characteristic of hers to ruin our sex life. She said it wasn’t important to her that we try for her to orgasm during sex. I think it was always pretty good and satisfying for both of us regardless of that. The importance to her was more my enjoyment, and I think that kind of fits in with the submissive thing.
I was reluctant at first. When we talked about it, she said she hadn’t brought it up that whole time because she was afraid of scaring me off because I was such a supportive and caring husband, and she didn’t want to twist the relationship or lose that in any way and she was worried that going in this direction would do that.
We have kids and I think that mostly just makes it hard to find the time to have sex because we don’t want to traumatize them. We don’t have a big-enough house that we can make all the noise we want without bothering them. So it’s just finding the time to do anything, especially any intense bondage or masochism stuff. A big part of that is making a lot of noise, so that’s out whenever they’re around. But she has days off after she’s been on call for the previous 24 hours and if that’s on a weekday when the kids are at school, we both look forward to those and set them aside as play days.
I feel like getting into this has made me feel a sense of plasticity in myself and a sort of evolution within my adulthood in terms of my sexuality. It has struck me as interesting that something that major could evolve and sort of be created or constructed. At this point in my life, I kind of thought that all aspects of my sexuality or sexual orientation and gender identification and all that were sex. But it makes me wonder to a certain degree all of those aspects of an individual’s sex life can evolve based on the relationships that people find themselves in and how those interactions with partners shape them over time.
