/Lust/ debauchette

My last serious relationship was about six or seven years ago.  I was a studious grad student, he was a studious med student, and together we were perpetually high-strung.  It was a good-on-paper relationship, in that our backgrounds and ambitions seemed to fit, and for the first few months we were reasonably happy.  We shared cheap beer and watched movies, we went for long walks through the city and talked, we browsed bookstores together and saw the occasional band.  First he wanted me to spend the night, and then he gave me the key to his apartment.  Once I learned to feel comfortable sleeping over, we settled into a committed relationship. And then the sex stopped.  At first we chalked it up to various impediments, like stress, work, and exhaustion. A friend reminded me that all relationships hit their slumps and that I should focus on working it out, so I dealt with it by convincing myself that the sex wasn't important when there were so many other elements to the relationship that felt perfect.

The relationship drew on, but once we stopped touching one another, we started to drift.  I felt weirdly lonely for someone who generally enjoys being alone, and then I started to feel trapped.  The commitment made me claustrophobic; I started to think about sex with other people, with women, with groups, with kinky sexual scenarios, and those stray thoughts weren't just fantasies about sex, they were fantasies about freedom. I wanted to fuck to feel like a sexual, full-blooded woman again. But because I didn't believe in cheating, I kept it inside, tried to dull my sexual appetites, and eventually, long after our relationship had sputtered and died and there was nothing left to say, we broke up.