ARTICLE: Pornhub Is the Kinsey Report of Our Time By MAUREEN O’CONNOR

Waking up on a Sunday morning, I received a text about what happened after I left the previous night’s party. “Everyone got high and we played truth or dare. Ted and Ivan docked.”

“Are you serious?” I replied. “I thought that only happened in porn.” Defined by Urban Dictionary as “the act of placing the head of one’s penis inside the foreskin of another’s penis,” docking is an act that, until that fateful night, nobody at the party had attempted or witnessed firsthand. (Or so they claimed.) But once you know a thing is a thing, sometimes you can’t get it out of your mind. And in a fit of libidinous boredom, or idle curiosity, or lust, or who even knows why anyone does anything anyway — you do that thing. Because that thing exists, and so do you. At some point, someone had to.

On the internet, there is a maxim known as Rule 34, which states: If you can imagine it, there is porn of it. No exceptions. And now that we are solidly into the age of internet pornography, I believe we are ready for another maxim: If there is porn of it, people will try it. (Maybe we can call it Rule 35.) And if people are trying that thing, then inevitably some of them will make videos of that thing and upload those to the internet. The result: an infinitely iterating feedback loop of sexual trial and error. Once upon a time, someone would try something new on film and it would take years to circulate on VHS or DVD through a relatively small community of porn watchers. But today, even the mainstream is porn-literate, porn-saturated, and porn-conversant. For a sexual butterfly effect to take place, you don’t even need to try that thing with your body — you can watch it, text about it, post jokes about it on Tumblr, chat about it on Grindr, masturbate while thinking about it, and type its name into so many search engines as to alter the sexual universe. There is such a thing, now, as a sexual meme — erotic acts and fantasies that replicate and spread like wildfire.

For we are living in a golden age of sexual creativity — an erotic renaissance that is, I believe, unprecedented in human history. Today you can, in a matter of minutes, see more boners than the most orgiastic member of Caligula’s court would see in a lifetime. This is, in itself, enough to revolutionize sexual culture at every level. But seeing isn’t even the whole story — because each of us also has the ability to replicate, share, and reinvent everything we see. Taken as a whole, this vast trove of smut is the Kinsey Report of our time, shedding light on the multiplicity of erotic desires and sexual behaviors in our midst.

Some of these memes can jump into the real-world sex lives of the people watching them. In recent years, a number of sexual memes, ranging from the slightly risqué (spanking) to the more outré (docking) to the simply rude (motorboating), have even landed in the real-world sex lives of people I know. “Is learning to squirt a feminist thing now?” asked a female friend who read a how-to article on a blog. When another friend voiced frustration with hookups who kept “slapping” her vulva during sex, I reacted with horror. “I think they get it from porn,” she said. “But where do the porn people get it?” I asked, arriving at the chicken-or-egg question of our time: Do we fuck this way because of porn, or does porn look like this because it’s how we fuck — or would fuck, if our asses were that firm, our penises that priapic, and we knew how to tie such elaborate knots?

As long as there has been porn, there have been people worrying that porn is damaging sex. I’m not here to join that debate. The deeper we go down the internet-porn wormhole, the more it seems narrow-minded to understand porn exclusively in terms of what kind of sex it “teaches” us to have. Because in the streaming era, the amount and diversity of porn we watch exponentially outpaces that of the sex we have. Porn is bigger than its real-sex analog, and the difference isn’t just volume: The porn we see is weirder, wilder, and more particular than what most of us will ever have — or want — in our own lives. An expansive erotic landscape unto itself, pornography exists adjacent to and in constant conversation with real sex — but is much more capricious and capacious and creative. Pornography is more than a mere causal agent in the way we screw. It has also become a laboratory of the sexual imagination — and as such, it offers insight into a collective sexual consciousness that is in a state of high-speed evolution.

The speed of that evolution may be best observed in the deluge of sexual memes that depart from traditional real-world sexual behavior. In addition to acts like pussy-slapping and ball-squeezing — which could theoretically be included in some crazily updated version of The Joy of Sex — the new generation of sexual memes includes a new set of narrative memes. Pornographic scene-setting, erotic situations, and role-playing are being reinvented, and imaginations have expanded to accommodate a never-ending supply of novel stimuli. Some of these memes seem to live almost entirely within the realm of porn. (Does anybody enjoy being searched by the TSA?) Some may have real-world origins, but have undergone so much reimagining as to approach derivative art. (When homemade-porn versions of the video game Overwatch spiked last year, had there been a preceding spike in dirty talk in the headsets of Overwatch players?) And others are only acceptable when they don’t have real-world analogs. “Is it me or is there way too much stepdaughter porn lately?” a straight man recently asked. He was right, and it doesn’t stop there: In the U.S. in 2015 and 2016, the most popular search term on Pornhub was “stepmom.” Though he said he was “immensely insulted” by the genre, that didn’t prevent him from watching. “If I ignore the title and the girl looks hot, I open it.” And no, “stepsister” porn has not made him feel any different about his sisters, and I can go to hell for asking.

“The internet is for porn,” the rude puppets of Avenue Q sang in 2003. But acquiring and watching internet porn was actually kind of hard back then — images loaded slowly, videos took hours to download, and everything had to be saved in secret folders on your hard drive. On-demand video-streaming platforms were invented only in 2005, when a man named Jawed Karim was searching for videos of Janet Jackson baring her breast at the previous year’s Super Bowl. Frustrated with his findings, Karim joined forces with two colleagues from PayPal and founded YouTube. The site grew rapidly, but just as Janet Jackson teased — but never quite showed — her nipple, YouTube refrained from giving the internet what it really wanted: porn. And so a series of hard-core imitators did their best to replicate YouTube’s model: Xtube, YouPorn, RedTube, and the site that would eventually rule them all, Pornhub. (Literally. Pornhub’s umbrella company, MindGeek, owns all of those sites, now known as the “Pornhub network.”)



What We Learned About Sexual Desire From 10 Years of Pornhub User Data

The biggest adult website on the planet, Pornhub celebrates its tenth anniversary this year. The site serves 75 million visitors each day and is the 40th-most-trafficked website in the world (bigger than Google Canada). In the U.S., it’s the 20th-most-trafficked website. (Bigger than the New York Times, the Washington Post, ESPN, and BuzzFeed.) More than 10 million videos have been uploaded to Pornhub. Watching them all, back to back, would take 173 years. Which means every single person with access to the internet has access to more hard-core porn than she will have time to consume in her mortal life — and more is added every day.

Most porn viewers do not pay for the experience. Their visits are supported by the ads they see (for webcams, paid porn, hookup websites, penis pumps, escorts, boner pills, video games, food delivery, and the occasional clothing brand or Hollywood movie) and by the handful of visitors who, enticed by the free content, end up paying for premium material, either on one of MindGeek’s sites or on sites run by other studios. When streaming sites first launched, they lived largely off amateur and pirated content. But they quickly became so dominant that the studios had to get onboard — albeit with varying levels of enthusiasm — by posting their material in partnership with the tubes, or as preview clips designed to send traffic to their own websites. Today, the massive trove of free smut includes amateur clips uploaded by exhibitionists; semi-professional videos from people who might dabble in webcams or collect occasional royalty-like paychecks from the tubes, and whom Pornhub pays per page view; and those good old-fashioned, studio-produced pornos. (Not that today’s studio-produced pornography looks like the porn of yore, but we’ll get to that in a minute.) And a lot of the old stuff is online, too, categorized as “vintage” and “retro” porn.

How users navigate that material in private — what they choose to watch, in what sequence and for how long — is a sexual-sociological gold mine. MindGeek’s understanding of its users’ autoerotic habits is almost terrifyingly precise. Like Facebook, Google, Netflix, and every other major player online, Pornhub collects and analyzes a staggering amount of user data — some of which it uses, like those other companies, to help curate content and determine what a user sees. Pornhub also publicizes some of its anonymized findings on the company’s data-analytics blog, Pornhub Insights. (Which means the X-rated version of Netflix is actually more casual with its data than the real Netflix. Knowledge of the human condition, in the age of big data, is idiosyncratic and subject to corporate marketing strategies.) To celebrate the website’s tenth anniversary, Pornhub Insights analyzed a decade’s worth of data — and provided access to that data, granting us an unusual peek into the internet’s collective id. And it’s an id that is constantly shape-shifting — sometimes very rapidly. New sexual memes are invented daily, and when they explode in popularity, they can spawn thousands of spinoffs and imitators. And sometimes they fade away just as quickly — another porn fad that came, conquered, and vanished. Overnight.

A large number of the women I know who watch porn watch female massage porn. That is, porn in which a woman receives a massage from a masseuse of any gender, and at some point the masseuse switches from kneading her sore muscles to kneading something else. Few of us want to actually receive an erotic massage — the thought actually makes my skin crawl. Ever since massage porn became ubiquitous in my porn, I have been unable to endure professional, nonerotic massages: The porno version has worn a groove in my psyche that is too deep to ignore. In my mind, massage tables have become sexual apparatuses, and I cannot be near one in the presence of a stranger.

“Massage” enjoyed its first surge in popularity in 2010, and in the course of two years it skyrocketed from the abyss of little-known niche smut to become one of Pornhub’s top-ten search terms in the U.S. Though many studios and amateurs now contribute to the genre, Pornhub’s “Massage Rooms” channel is consistently among the most popular on the site. (On the day I wrote this, it was No. 16, but the rankings change from day to day.) Operated by a paid partner, the channel provides hundreds of 10- to 15-minute videos, free of charge, as recruiting material for their higher-quality pay-per-view services at MassageRooms.com.

Why massage? The appeal, for the women I spoke to, was not narrative but practical. Massage recipients look comfortable, which, for women in porn, is not always a given. (There’s nothing like a horrifyingly contorted hip flexor to distract you with questions like: Does that hurt? Does she do yoga? If I did yoga, could I do that? In 2015, a yoga-themed orgy video drove a massive spike in yoga-themed searches on Pornhub. The appeal, it seems, is the wardrobe: “yoga pants,” “ripped yoga pants,” and “tight yoga pants” were all more popular than “naked yoga.”) Female erotic-massage recipients are relaxed, enjoying themselves, and receiving pleasure from what amounts, ideally, to a pair of disembodied hands. There aren’t really story lines. You don’t have to search reams of videos to find a suitable set of partners. The genre’s conventions simplify the viewing experience. All that remains is the dedicated depiction of successful female arousal and pleasure. (A similar effect could contribute to lesbian pornography’s popularity with all women. “Lesbian” is the most-viewed category for women in most of the Americas, and Pornhub reports that North American women are 186 percent more likely to search for lesbian porn than men.) Of course, the genre has been reinvented in a thousand different ways, but there’s a principle here worth exploring: As we are consumers of pornography, our viewing patterns are undeniably part of our erotic lives, but that doesn’t mean our porn lives are part of our sex lives — at least, not directly.

Instead, pornography trains us to redirect sexual desire as mimetic desire. That is, the sociological theory — and marketers’ dream — that humans learn to want what they see. In porn terms: If you build it, they will come. Women who want to see images of female sexual pleasure learn to use “massage” as a shortcut to find it, triggering a feedback loop that brings them more massage porn and encourages pornographers to make more of it. “We license content from studios based on our users’ viewing habits,” Pornhub vice-president Corey Price said, explaining how the company uses its data. “We regularly send reports to our content partners featuring top searches in various regions so they can better cater to users.” What may look like a pure marketplace of desire that rewards the most popular erotic content is, of course, also a corporate environment shaped by investment decisions, marketing strategies, and studio leverage. And even the data that informs executives like Price doesn’t necessarily contain answers to why a genre is popular, just that it is. Many of these trends seem to be self-contained. Whether massage porn had shown up in 2008, 2010, or 2012, it would have been equally appealing.

Other memes don’t stick — but are still nostalgic reminders of pornography’s power to unleash our sexual imaginations. Remember “Big Sausage Pizza”? In the early days of online porn, Big Sausage Pizza was a studio that showed a giggling pizza deliveryman conspiring with a friend who, viewers were led to believe, was holding the camera to record a prank. The deliveryman would contrive a reason to sit down and put the pizza on his lap — and open the top to reveal his own tumescent penis, popping up through a hole cut in the pizza. Fellatio in proximity to melted cheese would ensue.

Big Sausage Pizza did not last. Though pizza-delivery guys are still a staple in the autoerotic landscape (in a blog post last year, Pornhub reported that “pizza” was searched about 500,000 times each month), other gimmicks have taken over. Take, for instance, Pornhub’s most popular studio of 2014, Fake Taxi. This studio shoots what amounts to fairly conventional heterosexual sex scenes — a man and a woman meet for the first time and end up engaging in a variety of acts. Sometimes commerce comes into play — maybe the woman ran out of money and pays with sexual favors instead. The narratives end up similar to those in Big Sausage Pizza, as well as other porno tropes designed to manufacture a reason for a strange man to show up at a mansion to fuck someone else’s wife — because she ordered food, or had a leaky faucet, or needed the pool cleaned. (And maybe she ran out of cash, or couldn’t flee, or was just horny.) But today’s porn studios are rarely working with budgets that allow decadent settings and sweeping camera angles. Stranger-sex in the tube-porn era takes place in the back seat of a car on the side of an empty road, with fixed dashboard and point-of-view cameras. Similar moods appear in videos where women are pulled over by big-dicked cops who join them in the back seats of their cars; are selected for additional screening at the airport; and get into sexual situations during job interviews in tiny offices with no windows. (Think of all the overhead you save by filming in a neon-lit cubicle instead of a sunlit mansion.) An efficient sexual meme can use one narrative (say, traffic cop) to satisfy a multiplicity of desires (strangers, authority figures, uniforms, power dynamic, female desperation, and other categories you never knew existed, much less would have tried to find). The new setups look different from the old ones, but ultimately they’re designed to stimulate a not-dissimilar set of tastes.

Another exemplar of the fixed-space stranger-sex genre comes from a studio called Backroom Casting Couch, which blew up in 2010. All of the videos were filmed on a black leather sofa in a nondescript room, and were structured to sound like an interview for an erotic-modeling job. The male interviewer instructs the model to strip, then cajoles her into a variety of sex acts. Usually, the fact that she’s “never done this before” gets played up — she gets to be both the virgin and the whore, a naïf who has never been bad before but can be persuaded to do so now. (It’s “Blurred Lines” for people who think sexual harassment can be hot.) Or, more accurately, tricked into doing so. The company’s slogan articulates the story’s central conceit: “There is no modeling job.” In reality, of course, there is a job — the job is the porn. A handful of performers have gone on the record after the fact to confirm that they signed up for porn (and got paid for it, too). But the Backroom Casting fantasy is about the acquisition of undeserved sexual capital, paired with the amateur feel of a “real man” documenting those conquests. After Backroom Casting made it big, the Pornhub Network expanded to include the studio Reality Kings, which was one of the first to use the shaky-camera porn vérité that characterizes so many of these “Blurred Lines” subgenres. The network also distributes content from Fakehub, which produces Fake Taxi as well as Fake Cop, Fake Driving School, and Fake Agent. Ten years into the streaming era, and we are many generations of porn evolution beyond basic generic categories like “orgy,” “milf,” and “teen.” Not that the classics don’t persist — just that the categories have gotten much more detailed and sophisticated.

In fact, the variations can seem infinite. By putting “fake” in its title, Fake Agent probably grabs up viewers who have the same basic tastes as Backroom Casting Couch fans but don’t like the cognitive dissonance created by the vérité marketing. Acknowledging the artifice excuses viewers who might feel uneasy with the fantasy or need reassurance that no real coercion is taking place. (Some videos even feature before-and-after interviews with the performers, explaining what’s real and what isn’t. Of course, sometimes those interviews can turn into performances in their own right. Pornography is a very self-aware medium.) Fakehub’s narratives also provide an excuse for tapping into the moods found in amateur pornography. “Amateur” is Pornhub’s third-most-popular category of all time, and in 2009, the company launched the Pornhub Community to encourage the DIY set. Though piracy may have taken a bite out of the porn industry’s profits, the rise of amateur pornography both cut into the market and revealed the market’s appetite for tastes that had long been ignored. Turns out a lot of people weren’t as excited about watching improbably perfect bodies engaging in unbelievably acrobatic acts in impossibly decadent settings as the porn industry had led us to think; they often really wanted the lo-fi realism of normal people in their messy bedrooms. In 2013, a data scientist named Jon Millward analyzed 10,000 performer bios on the Internet Adult Film Database and found that the “typical” female porn star was not the fake-boobed blonde of stereotypes but a five-foot-five-inch brunette with a B-cup. (She was, however, 48 pounds lighter than the average American woman. Similarly, the average male performer was of average height but less-than-average weight.)

Porn is a theater of the id, and America’s id is racist.

Sometimes a sexual meme’s rise can have as much to do with curiosity as with libido — but will end up with real staying power. Such may be the case with cuckolding, a fetish genre in which a man watches his wife have sex with another man as a means of emasculation. (Or to manufacture a “homosexual alibi,” as Not Gay: Sex Between Straight White Men author Jane Ward argues in an analysis of the video series “Cum-Eating Cuckolds.” After watching his wife have sex with a rival, the cuck “must submit to both of them in order to keep his wife,” ultimately by swooping in once the sex is done and ingesting the other man’s semen. It’s called “cleanup,” and it’s the third-most-common search term to be paired with “cuckold,” after “humiliation” and “amateur.”) “Every month, 1.75 million people search some variation of ‘cuckold,’ ‘cuck,’ or ‘cucked’ on Pornhub,” the Pornhub Insights blog observed last year, when “cuck” crossed into politics as an alt-right insult designed to emasculate right-wing moderates. But whereas other news-driven search terms will spike in popularity when the public first finds out about them, then drop back to their previous baseline, cuck porn hasn’t dropped all the way back down. Sometimes you don’t know you’re into that thing until you stumble across it after listening to The Rush Limbaugh Show — and then you can’t let go.

Cuck videos frequently have racial dynamics — white men eroticize their anxiety about black-male sexuality by creating humiliation fantasies that involve sexually superior black rivals. Porn has always been a place for indulging irrational, secret, and socially unacceptable desires — which makes it a place where people feel free to let their racial prejudices and fantasies run wild, too. Porn is a theater of the id, and America’s id is racist. To browse pornography is to stroll through a library of stereotypes that can be viscerally and unshakably disturbing. For the past decade, seeing women who look like me — Asian women — in sexual contexts has meant seeing women who look like me being abused, dominated, and defiled. Is this how people see me? I used to wonder, but perhaps the most disturbing realization is that I don’t ask that question anymore. I was in college when the first tube sites launched, and I remember telling a friend that I had been browsing the “Asian” section of a free porn site looking for women who looked like me. The color drained from his face. “Don’t do that,” he said. “It’s masochistic in a way that’s really disturbing. You need to stop.” When did Asian-fetish porn stop bothering me? Did I get better at compartmentalizing? Did the porn get gentler? Have I become jaded? Or have I settled into a bleak form of sexual pragmatism — just as I have learned to set aside ethical and aesthetic irritations in the name of having fun on the dance floor even when “Blurred Lines” is playing, I have learned to look past racially dubious imagery. (Literally, I move my eyes past it as quickly as possible.) That’s just how this dance floor is, and apparently I don’t care enough to quit or find a new one.

Of course, politically incorrect racial fantasia aren’t the only eroticized taboo. For several years, culture writers have been trying to figure out why incest porn is so unstoppable. Some argue that in the game of ever-escalating taboo-busting, incest is the last and most intractable taboo — it always titillates. The fact that the genre has, in the past decade, included lightning-rod performances from actual sets of twins (and other possible blood relations) seems to bolster that theory. But in its most popular incarnations, I’d argue that “stepdaughter,” “stepmom,” and “stepsibling” porn has less in common with incest than it does with Fakehub. Since everyone knows the performers aren’t actually family members, words like “stepdaughter” function as a dysphemism — that is, the opposite of a euphemism. (In other words: a way to have your taboo-flavored creampie and eat it, too.) It’s a more offensive way to announce a number of stepdaughter-adjacent qualities, like youth and innocence. My friend who complained about “stepdaughter” porn might not like the imaginary leaps that stepdaughter porn invites him to take, but if he’s already watching young-looking actresses feigning innocence with older men, can he really blame Pornhub for offering, as his next video, a girl with pigtails cooing “daddy”?

As technology has breathed life into fantasies ranging from familiar to recognizable-but-iterated-into-weirdness to utterly strange, it has also helped create a few outright. Take the tenth-most-popular Pornhub category of all time: hentai, a Japanese term that literally means “transformation” and refers to perversion. But for English-speaking porn consumers, it’s the catchall term for anime and manga porn. The “transformations” depicted in hentai are sometimes anatomical — eyes bigger than feet, breasts the size of heads, penises thicker than waists. Cartoon imaginations can go places that special effects cannot — including fantastical paranormal pairings and supernatural beings that combine the sexy human shapes with candy-colored fur and animal horns, ears, and tails. Meanwhile, the mind’s eye is free to go where cameras cannot — like a cutaway rendering of a woman’s uterus as a Godzilla-like monster fills it with semen. Body parts can morph mid-sex, swelling and shrinking and shape-shifting in ways that make the most fantastical works of Western literature, like Alice in Wonderland and Gulliver’s Travels, seem quite basic. But the bigger change is in audience. Literary erotica — from the Marquis de Sade to Nicholson Baker — was similarly playful but reached a fraction of the audience that a video that winds up on Pornhub’s front page will in, like, minutes.

The legacy of Sade is certainly visible on Pornhub — even though, for all its abundance, it’s a site defined primarily by mainstream taste. The free-porn model relies not only on a large quantity of low-cost and amateur porn but on preview-length clips provided by studios serving a number of smaller niches. Since the vast majority of people don’t pay to watch porn, the content they consume is essentially being paid for by the slim minority whose spending is lucrative enough to keep the enterprise afloat — and that group skews to the niche, fringe, and extreme. For those people, all 10 million videos on Pornhub are just a preview, and I mean that quite literally: Most professional studios provide teaser content to tube sites willingly, which means if the porn looks elaborate and expensive, it probably is, which means that the handful of people who are into that type of porn are probably really into it. Which brings us to Kink.com.

Asked how he discovered bondage, Kink.com founder Peter Acworth cites the ropes and lassos in Western movies from his youth. Every time the cowboys and Indians tied each other up, Peter would get excited. His first foray into adult entertainment was a series of bondage videos he uploaded to the web from his Columbia University dorm room in 1997, which he posted to a site called Hogtied. (The models were nude, but bondage and sex were kept strictly separate. Back then, hard-core bondage was verboten.) Today, Hogtied is one of the 34 channels packaged together on Kink.com; a month’s access costs $50. Other offerings include Foot Worship; Men in Pain; Whipped Ass; Struggling Babes; Electrosluts (which involves tasers, cattle prods, and electric shocks); TS Pussy Hunters (transwomen dominating ciswomen); TS Seduction (transwomen dominating cismen); Naked Kombat (male wrestling where the winner tops the loser); and Ultimate Surrender (female wrestling where the winner tops the loser with a strap-on).

Whereas Backroom Casting Couch and Fake Taxi stay in business in the age of free porn by keeping production costs low, companies like Kink do it by catering to highly specific tastes, which viewers are often more willing to spend on. If your thing is skinny girls having vanilla sex with strangers, you don’t need to pay for porn. Designing specific experiences for fans, though, like private webcam shows and personalized clips, can be highly lucrative. In 2014, Kink auctioned a one-hour cam session with Maitresse Madeline, a dominatrix. The winning bid was $42,000. Niche audiences have a harder time finding their thing at volumes great enough to titillate and surprise on a regular basis, or maybe they’re just more dedicated — it’s hard to say. Either way, the business works much as Pornhub does: by giving the audience a taste for things they didn’t know they wanted until they saw them.

Consider the fucking machine. It’s a mechanized device for, well, fucking a person, usually by pumping a dildo in and out of one or more orifices. (Chain-saw-like machines lined with tongues are also popular.) Sometimes the setup involves gynecological stirrups, a specially designed seat, and straps or cuffs binding the performer to the machine — these machines can be very elaborate. Kink’s first piston-powered machine was made by an engineer Acworth found on Craigslist. But such machines have a tendency to multiply: Immediately after the first machine’s debut, fans started building their own and shipping them to the company’s old office in the San Francisco Armory. The machines ranged from an X-rated and fully operational replica of Short Circuit’s Johnny 5, to a Kitchen Aid mixer with a dildo, to a Pilates reformer with phallic accessories, to a rotary-operated ass-tapper that resembles a pump-jack oil rig.

Were people fantasizing about fucking machines before Kink prompted them to? Sure, probably. Several of the machines in Kink’s two mechanized porn channels — Fucking Machines and Butt Machine Boys — resemble images from “The Fornicon,” a suite of erotic drawings Tomi Ungerer published in the 1960s. (Ungerer is also famous for illustrating fairy tales.) But some portion of the audience are people who never imagined a fucking machine until they saw one on the internet. These machines provide novel stimulus for fans of solo sex, dildos, extreme penetration, and uncontrollable orgasms. (Not to mention fans of Short Circuit, baking, and Pilates.)

I do not like fucking machines. Initially, I attributed this to my gender. Surely this is a straight-male fantasy, I thought. It’s about performance anxiety, or the male desire to make women orgasm without exerting oneself or risking failure. Many of the machines advertised on Kink would seem to require poses involving the aforementioned hip-flexor issue. But Fucking Machines is the second-most-popular channel among Kink’s female audience. A spin through Kink’s message boards reveals that the appeal can be quite similar to massage porn — minimum plot, maximum pleasure — but for women who are more sexually intense (and perhaps more flexible) than I. One woman’s extreme-penetration fucking machine is another woman’s gentle massage.

And one man’s fetish is another man’s party trick. Reached for comment, the men who docked that Saturday night maintain that they did it merely for the LOLs. “The whole thing started because we had a vacation rental with an actual dock,” Ted said. “Ever since someone made a dock-on-dock pun, we’ve had dock on the brain.” Neither man had a boner. There was no foreplay. (Recognizing that the public may struggle to accept their penis-in-penis innocence, Ted and Ivan requested pseudonyms, which I have granted.) Just two men inserting the heads of their penises into one another’s foreskins. They were in a weird mood. They’d seen it on the internet. Why not?

POETRY: BEFORE I SAW HER

Before I saw her, I...
didn't believe
in love at first sight.
Thought it was bullshit.
And then I saw this...
reckless girl who had forgotten
how beautiful she was,
and I thought,
I thought if I could wake up
every day and look into that face,
I could get through anything.
And you...
were standing

ARTICLE: Failure to Launch: When Beauty Fades BY ELIZABETH WURTZEL

 “riding the carousel” which, to put it nicely, means a gal sleeping around, hooking up, and having casual, no strings sex during her teens, 20s, and early 30s with alpha male and finally settling down with Beta.

When you are younger your market sexual value is high
When you are older your market sexual value is low.

Elizabeth Wuretzel learn the hard way. BTY...i love the movie based on her first book




When she was younger




  and NOW

Because I need to make a point, I'm just going to be immodestly candid: I was a remarkably adorable child, the kind with such rosily expressive cheeks that grown-ups couldn't resist pinching them. So when I became a teenager and then an adult, I was what you would call a hot number or something like that—at any rate, they put me half-dressed on the covers of my books to sell them, so draw what you will from that. Now that I'm in my forties, people say, I think kindly, She still looks good. This is to be followed by a phase of ...for her age, which is hot on the trail of handsome, and then—then who knows? I think it deteriorates from there, enough so that the vain among us start to look forward to death, or at least stop resisting its horrific pull.

So here's what I'm getting at: I was, at least at some baseline, a pretty girl, the kind that boys were supposed to like and sometimes did. And because I was cute all along—it's not like I blossomed into honeysuckle after adolescence—I was given to believe that love would be easy, men would be elementary, and I would have my way. I was meant to date the captain of the football team, I was going to be on a romantic excursion every Saturday night, I was destined to be collecting corsages from every boy in town before prom, accepting such floral offerings like competing sacrifices to a Delphic goddess. It was all supposed to be to the tune of some glorious Crystals song from the early '60s, when everything was still innocent, and my life would be a wall of sound from "Then He Kissed Me." Love would be simpler than tying a string bikini, the kind I wore a lot while waiting on the beach for my ship to come in.

Alas, love has been complicated.

The men have piled up in my past, have fallen trenchantly through my life, like an avalanche that doesn't mean to kill but is going to bury me alive just the same. There's really no point, this late in the day, in picking through all the boys in order—alphabetical, chronological, epistemological—but looking back, I have been in far too many scenes that could have happened in a John Cassavetes movie or an Edward Albee play, if only they rose to that literary level. I attract (and seek) bottle throwing, foot stomping, door slamming, pot clanging, hair pulling, and, above all, a lot of loud screaming and walking out in a huff—usually leaving me crying, wondering what just happened, or, more often, too astonished to cry.

Or else: There is the thrill of loving for a little while—a night, a week, a month, even a year—and then loving stops, just like that, in the coldest, blankest way, a screen going snowy at the end of a movie. There is no yelling, only silence—the kind in a Carole King song: the phone that doesn't ring, or the words you didn't say that you think of on the staircase spiraling down once the door is locked behind, or maybe even months later.

When I was still in my twenties, for several years I had this wonderful boyfriend; I'll call him Gregg—he's the one we're all waiting for: tall, blue-eyed, with this thick black hair, all smart and sensitive, an inveterate graduate student who used to rub my feet at the end of the day with a lovely pink peppermint lotion from the Body Shop. It was young and romantic. You'd have thought we were happy. I think really we were happy. He was good for me: People met him and liked me better because I was going out with him; his sweetness redounded to me like a sunny day on a dark sidewalk. I could have and probably should have spent the rest of my life with him, might have avoided scenes like the time some guy I was seeing later on chased me down Topanga Canyon with a hot frying pan, screaming at me something about learning to make my own goddamn omelets. In other words, had I just stuck with the good boyfriend, I could have prevented a good deal of extraneous craziness.

But something went wrong—terribly wrong. The calm I had during those years was like a dormant illness or an allergy that doesn't emerge until later in life, or something you don't see coming because it's coming from within: You are making yourself ill. I became seasick with contentment. It was nauseating daily, and I couldn't still myself against a funny feeling that there had to be more to life than waking up every day beside the same person. To say I was bored would be to misunderstand boredom: I did not need to take up table tennis or ballroom dancing—I needed a sense that this wasn't the end of the story. The idea of forever with any single person, even someone great whom I loved so much like Gregg, really did seem like what death actually is: a permanent stop. Love did not open up the world like a generous door, as it should to anyone getting married; instead it was the steel clamp of the iron maiden, shutting me behind its front metal hinge to asphyxiate slowly, and then suddenly. Every day would be the same, forever: The body, the conversation, it would never change—isn't that the rhythm of prison?

My imagination, my ability to understand the way love and people grow over time, how passion can surprise and renew, utterly failed me. I was temporarily credentialed with this delicate, yummy thing—youth, beauty, whatever—and my window of opportunity for making the most of it was so small, so brief. I wanted to smash through that glass pane and enjoy it, make it last, feel released.

And so, I cheated on him. With everyone I could. Bass players, editors, actors, waiters who wished they were actors, photographers. And everywhere I could, like that Sarah Silverman and Matt Damon video: on the floor, by the door, up against the minibar. I couldn't sit still or stand still or lie still. And I didn't want to lose Gregg either.

He knew, or must have known. But he was such a gentle guy that he gave me a chance to fix the damage. We were sitting at brunch one Sunday; Gregg was in his denim jacket and Sonic Youth T-shirt, his hair swept across his face, and he grabbed my hand over the table and looked at me so earnestly that if it had been a movie, the audience would have laughed. "I wish I could make whatever is bothering you feel better," he said.

"I know," was all I could say.

Months later, when Gregg found out for sure what I was doing, when he went through files on my Mac and found letters never sent to this lover or that one, he didn't want to make me feel better anymore. He threw a two-thirds-empty bottle of Stolichnaya at my head when I finally found him at a friend's house. He told me, I was your only chance at happiness—now it's over for you.

Years later, when I was dating a guy who drank much too much and did things like toss lamps around because he had a temper when he was loaded, and I was ducking to avoid some projectile and wondering how I'd found my way to this, I knew Gregg had been right: I could have been a contender; it was over.

And then, somehow, years go by.

Dating this person for three months, that one for a few weeks, sometimes longer. They come, they go, someone is always coming as someone else is going; it's not like there's no one, but it's all so lonely. I have no trouble meeting them, and I meet them everywhere: the usual places like friends' rooftop barbecues and downtown dive bars—but also in business meetings, where we end up making eyes at each other instead of working, or standing in movie lines or walking home at night. I am a hopeless, shameless flirt. I wish I were shyly, quietly intriguing, like Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy, like someone French and fashionable who knows how to twirl her ladylike locks just so and walk adroitly on kitten heels, who is all gesture and whisper—but I am unfortunately forward and forthright: When I am interested in a man, he absolutely knows it. And I like men quite a lot and convey so much excitement and heat that I can keep the game going, at least for a while. Occasionally, I meet someone truly wonderful, and my heart breaks because I don't know how to sustain the energy. It never quite starts, and I can't tell you how it ends—all this pretty persuasion is a big pull for men, but then they're gone. All of them. Somehow, I can seduce and be seduced for a moment here and there, but I can't seem to meaningfully connect. That's why it's not seduction at all; if it were, I'd be getting what I want.

And I can get what I want in so much of life. I can sell sand to the Saudis, tea to the Bengalis. I get fired from one great job and then hired by a better organization. I decide in my thirties to go to law school and get into the very best one despite some questionable credentials. It's what you would call not a bad life, even a good one.

But I am baffled by men. When they want me, I don't want them; when I want them, they don't want me. We are just shooting dirty pool. Or maybe it's more like I'm still sitting at the baccarat table at a smoky, dingy casino in Reno, it's well past 3 a.m., I'm in hock to the house, I'm drinking bottom-shelf martinis and eating stale canapés from the complimentary smorgasbord, my mascara is smudged, there's no reason to reapply Cherries in the Snow to my chapped lips, it's long past the point where any reasonable person would have cashed in her chips and gone home—but I keep thinking I still might win or at least break even one of these hours or days.

Age is a terrible avenger. The lessons of life give you so much to work with, but by the time you've got all this great wisdom, you don't get to be young anymore. And in this world, that's just about the worst thing that can happen—especially to a woman. Whoever said youth is wasted on the young actually got it wrong; it's more that maturity is wasted on the old. I was both emotionally unkempt and mentally unhinged—deeply depressed, drugged, sensitive, and nasty all at once—during the years I was supposed to be spousing up. My judgment was so lousy, I probably deserve plentiful wedding gifts—Tiffany silverware to serve several dozen—for all the people I didn't marry, because the men I dated were awfully bad choices, and I was not such a good bet myself.

These days, I am a stable adult professional—a practicing attorney, capable of common sense—but I still know how to live life on the edge. I was a terrifically brooding and mature teenager, then a whiny and puerile adult, and now I may finally approximate the grace of a person who has come of age. But it took a very long time—probably far too long. Now that I am a woman whom some man might actually like to be with, might actually not want to punch in the face—or, at least, now that I don't like guys who want to do that to me—I am sadly 41. I am past my perfect years.

No one says to my face that 41 is just a little too old to still be dating—in fact, people like to point out how it's normal these days, which is also true—but I know what's up. I just moved a couple of months ago, and I made a determined effort to put my effects in order. I went through a box of old photographs and contact sheets from shoots I had done throughout my twenties and thirties, pictures in all kinds of poses, various stages of dishabille and froufrou and frippery, too much makeup and barely a bit of blush, Kodachrome and black and white, in studios and hotel rooms and cornfields and corners of streets—piles of portraits, marking a life. And I looked at the girl in all these images, as varied as they were, and still I could see the same person somewhere in there. But most of all it wasn't me anymore. It's not what I look like now—I have aged since. Oh, it's nothing to cry about, nothing to mourn for—I probably have another decade before I really start to look old, but something has changed.

I don't know what it is—I don't have wrinkles or age spots or any of the telltale signs that the years have gone by. Thank God for La Mer and Retin-A and Pilates—and, yes, hot sex, which is good fun and may be no more than a Maginot Line against the inevitable, but that's not nothing. And my hair, honey-highlighted for years now, has the swank length of mermaid youth—which is how I plan to keep it no matter what proper pageboy is age-appropriate. No question, there are physical facts about my age that are undeniably delightful. I am much sexier now than I used to be—I suddenly have this voluptuous body where I used to just be skinny and lithe. Really oddly, a couple of years ago I got serious breasts, to the point where people think I've had them surgically enhanced, which I certainly have not. Still, I think, the honest truth is that I'm just not as pretty as I used to be. Something has abandoned me. I don't know what that thing is—they've been trying to jar it and bottle it for centuries—but it's left, another merciless lover. My hips are thicker, my skin is thinner, my eyes shine less brightly—will I ever again glow as if all the stars are out at night just to greet me? What finally falls away, after enough things don't go as planned, is that look of expectancy—which, when worn down to pentimento, is revealed to be exhaustion.

So here's the funny thing: There seem to be more men coming around these days, and they keep getting younger as I get older—I'm an interesting, mature woman to a man in his twenties, while to a guy my age, I'm just jaded—but I think they are falling in love with a person I used to be, with a girl in a picture, with an idea or an image, not with who or what I am now. Because with every passing second, I feel I am less physically desirable, even though I'm finally, in fact, a desirable person. It makes no sense, it's not fair, and it sucks.

I'm hopeful that there will be a moment in the next few years when I'll be more striking than ever because some aura will wash over me in that way that these things just do: as when feminine confidence and feisty intelligence overwhelm the depredations of age, and suddenly women smolder anew—running companies, winning Oscars, reaping millions, landing heavenly younger men. After all, there are many famous women who seem ageless, like Catherine Deneuve; or have aged sexily, like Susan Sarandon; have aged voluptuously, like Catherine Zeta-Jones; have aged beauti­fully, like Michelle Pfeiffer. But eventually, at some somber and sobering calendar date, most of us lose our looks and likewise one of our charms—and I will lose mine. At which time, for me at least, there won't be much point to life anymore at all.

I don't want to look back at what was, tell stories of once upon a long time ago, of what I used to do, of the men I once knew way back when, of 1,001 rapturous nights that were and are no more—I don't want my life to be the trashy and tragic remains of a really great party, lipstick traces on a burned-out cigarette at the bottom of a near-empty champagne goblet. Sex and sexuality, at least for me, are not some segment of life; they are the force majeure, the flood and storm and act of God that overtakes the rest. Without that part of me, I'd rather be dead. And I know all I can do right now is hold on tight to the little bit of life that's left, cling to the edge of the skyscraper I'm slipping off of, feel my fingers slowly giving way, knowing I'm going to free-fall to a sorrowful demise.

Maybe I would not have to hold on with such tough white knuckles if I'd done things right when I was still young.

Oh, to be 25 again and get it right. People who say they have no regrets, that they don't look back in anger, are either lying or boring, not sure which is worse. Because if you've lived a full life and don't feel bad about some of what you did, pieces are missing. Still, there are some mistakes that one is eventually too old—either literally or spiritually—to correct. I can't go back.

PERSONAL: FOR THE WOMAN WHO REFUSES TO SPEND HER LIFE AS JUST THE GIRLFRIEND

For the woman who refuses to spend her life as 'just the girlfriend' from the one who's planning to split from her long-term partner because seeing other friends get engaged 'breaks her heart' -I am here for you. While the vast majority of women are happy to let their relationships develop at their own pace - there are apparently quite a few who feel the total opposite...i am looking for you.

Ladies, don't play wife to a man who had no intentions of marrying you at least moving into the next stage of your relationship. *If a man cannot see you in his future, then why waste your time on him? If he cannot make a future commitment with you then LEAVE!!! No matter how hard, it will only end in tears anyway. *Men know what they want and who they want, and will actively pursue the woman they want in their life. *DO NOT give a man who is just your boyfriend a child. Your body clock, I'm sorry to say, is a bitch. I don't say this in order to hurt its feelings. But the tick-tock of women's fertility, which starts declining at 33

I want to get married. I was married before. I love marriages that work; I love the stability that comes with marriage, the family structure, the coming together of two families, the meeting of hearts, and the love. It’s all so beautiful.

And if you want to get married then your first challenge will be to figure out what your priorities are in a husband so you can make the best “deal” possible.  A good way to do this is list what you would trade for what.  Is a good job more important than height?  Is a sense of humor more important than looks?  How much game would you be willing to give up for some other quality.Keep in mind that this isn’t about settling, it is about getting the most bang for your Sexual Market Value buck.  If you can pull a man who looks like Brad Pitt, is 6 ft 6, has perfect game and earns like Bill Gates then of course you should do so.

PERSONAL:DIFFERENCE BETWEEN LOVE AND CHEMISTRY

My approach to dating is very different. I don't believe in chemistry.My personal experience shows that the very spark  that attracted me to her also made me  ignore all the red flags. Sure, She treats me like crap, but she is so attractive and hot, ahhhh, can’t wait to see her again. Then one day she goes too far, and I snap, I was okay with all her bad behavior previously, what has gotten into me now? And the answer is, the spark has left the building. It wasn't love because  Love doesn’t flee. Love endures.

What you notice is that when you’re incredibly attracted to someone, all of your critical thinking powers immediately go out the window.This is why you’ll put up with a man who only calls you once a week, a man who doesn’t call you his girlfriend after three months, a man who doesn’t propose after three years. If you were thinking critically, you’d never put up with this, but you’re not.

All I’m pointing out here, is that while chemistry is an incredible feeling, it is in no way a solid predictor of your future. It’s literally just a feeling. A feeling that masks your partner’s worst traits and allows you to put up with them.

You don’t have to trust me. Just look back on the greatest chemistry you’ve ever felt and think about how those relationships ended. Ask yourself if you want to be in another relationship where you’re always fighting and you never feel secure in your future.

What is more important, getting your next chemistry *fix*, or improving your prospects at finding love? I read so many women write in their profile that they can’t fall in love *without* this elusive chemistry. But there are different kinds of chemistry – short acting (lightning strikes, gone in 60 seconds, when the relationship fails – which most women are only too accustomed to), or long acting(the kind that takes, months, if not years to evolve and appreciate). And the first one *is*(no matter how much you might not want to believe), poorly correlated with women and stable relationships

Love can be built and nurtured but most folks apparently don’t know this, so they only believe in spontaneous love which is based on attraction and not compatibility.How can love ever exist without chemistry. The same way a delicious plate would never  exist without the right amount of ingredients.

And my advice for those seeking for true love...do what I do.....look for someone that has the qualities you seek for in your life partner then go for it and watch how the feelings and chemistry gradually develops later. If you want to find love – a love that endures – you have to find a new way than the one you’ve been using for your whole life.

DATING: THEORETICALLY, THIS ONLY HAS TO WORK ONCE.

Finding real love, is like trying to find an almost-extinct animal. Everyone just wants to hook up rather than form a meaningful connection. Physical appearances matter because people want to get intimate on a physical level and leave emotional compatibility at the door. This also makes people shallow in that they lack depth and real connection. Ugh. There’s nothing worse than being on a date with someone who’s only talking about themselves and has no interest in chatting about intelligent topics. It’s really tough being a romantic in the dating world these days. People might roll their eyes at you when you talk about love and romance

We have all heard the romantic fantasy of the woman holding out for a hero, someone who will sweep her off her feet and ride into the sunset. Well, men have a similar fantasy. I had the checklist of skills I was looking for in a spouse: funny, ninja skills, could dish up a killer rattlesnake stew, and someone who would have my back through thick and thin. Every potential candidate I met was subject to my list of supposed "must-haves." And none of them measured up. The cycle of meeting someone, looking for compatibility and chemistry, not finding it for one reason or another, and starting all over again became depressing.

Theoretically. this only has to work once,but I feels like you have to put in a lot of swiping to get one good date. I can't seem to find a woman who appreciates what I have to offer. (Kindness, intelligences, financially stable, attractive, don’t drink, smoke or take drug) or want to put any work into the dating process. I always have to call, I always have to make plans. Is anyone else but me tired of these "rules" and "games" that you're supposed to play in the dating pool? The “Cliff Notes” version of me can’t tell the whole story, the better scenario is to email me so we can start getting to know each other and then take it from there. Who knows? A grand adventure may be about to begin-but unit I hear from you, we are missing out on all the fun!

My intentions are sincere and honest,! I am not here to sell a dream.I am just an ordinary man who is looking for his woman here. I am not a top model, only myself, a man with the qualities and faults. I cannot find woman who appreciates what I have to offer.-kindness, someone who

keep their word, caring..I fall hard and fast. I put myself out there because I believe it’s the only way to truly be loved by someone. I think very few women actually want that, given that kind guys are drama free and hence boring..

There are millions of guys out there who have a good heart, who are intelligent and has an open mind, who is caring and enjoys the simple things in life, but is that what you really want? If it is then start going after men who have traits of kindness to everyone, honesty, loyalty and run from men who displays traits of lying, cheating, and are sexually aggressive around women.

  

I've grown tired of dating  The girls seem to be the kind who don't want to put any work into the dating process. I always have to call, I always have to make plans. Even when dates go well and it seems like this could go somewhere, I still have to do all the work (which makes me think the girls isn't really THAT interested).

I'm a particularly attractive guy, caring, smart, compassionate and I don't have problems finding girls who show interest, but when it comes to actual dating, it always seems that these games have to get played, and when it seems that there is a game being played, and she's not being real, then I lose a lot of my interest instantly. Any time I've dated a girl who played games, it never went anywhere and I just ended up confused and hurt. The few times the girls were real were the few times that I developed meaningful relationships.

LETTER: DEAR SOULMATE

Dear Soul mate,

Today i was thinking, and wondering who you are. Sometimes i just get into these moods where i just wish i knew you, and you knew me...because its these times where i wish i just had your shoulder to cry on. Life's hard and i guess ill just have to suck it up and get over it one day but i always have this fantasy in my mind that I'd be perfectly content if i was just with you. life would be worth while that way. one day when you meet me...you'll find all these scars I've gotten along the way...from some tough relationships, to family issues and stress. i hope your waiting for me, because I've been waiting on you since the moment i understood that God had u in mind for me. even though your a mystery to me, i know you'll be better and far beyond higher then my expectations. honestly I've been looking for you for forever and I'm actually pretty discouraged right now. no one comes close to my standards and I'm not meaning to sound stuck up I'm just afraid maybe I'm being too picky. Ive been hurt thousands of times...and I'm sick of it. please don't be offended if it takes me a while to fully trust you, its not that you've ever done anything to make me feel that way...its just what my past experiences have proven to me as sad as it is to say. i hope your life is wonderful and that life gives you everything you've ever wanted. i hope all dreams and ambitions come true. i hope you know that wherever you are someone loves you more than life itself. and that no matter what you've done he'll never stop. one thing this guy has that you'll never find in someone else is, a space in her heart that only you can fill, and love that can never fade away. Ive thought about you constantly and wondered if you'd ever even wanna know me someday. not that its your fault but sometimes i get mad that its taking us this long just to find each other. and i know I'm on God's time schedule not my own but I'm very impatient and you'll learn that quickly. my family is a wreck. and when we meet you'll know all about it when the time is right...i don't wanna scare you away with all that yet though. haha. i know you'll be the woman i always wanted and more. you'll make me happier than anyone ever could and i can't wait to meet you. so when your down and you feel lonely and upset and lost...just know that I'm praying for you and love you every moment and every day. I'll always be out here loving you. just keep that in mind. please wait for me though. never give up, I'll always be waiting for you. forever.

love always,
your soulmate.




PART 2

Dear Soulmate, I have always loved you.

Many may find this strange.But those who have experienced it will understand completely.You see, I’ve always loved you.Always.Way before I knew you, before you even thought of me and before I even thought of you, I already knew you. And when I saw you for the very first time, I recognized you instantly.I puzzled for a while, questioning where I’d saw your face and slowly it came to me.You were with me all along.Every small footstep, each long and winding road, every mountain I struggled to climb, was synchronized with each path you were taking.Though at the time my mind was not alert and I did not pay attention, as I was concentrating on surviving each day—I can see now that nothing was ever in vain.I will never forget the first words you spoke to me and how your voice resonated deeply inside my chest.

I thought my heart would break through to get to you, but we’d only just met—have patience, sweet organ, I know you’ve been waiting a life time, but, please, beat slowly and keep me calm.I knew in an instant that I loved you.I didn’t know whether you drank tea with no sugar, whether you liked honey on your toast or whether you talked sometimes in your sleep.Neither did I know if this connection would last a moment nor a lifetime, but I did not care, I submerged in how it felt to be in your company, familiar, yet with so much to learn and unravel.

My imagination is wild, but I never dared to believe in someone such as you.Our electricity connected and you turned me on.I saw myself for the first time when I looked into your eyes. And you saw us.You had strengths where I had weaknesses and your weaknesses built up my assets.You knew me better than I knew myself. You never faltered, you had faith allowed me beyond your surface.You cracked your heart wide open and you allowed me to freely step in.We are one and the same, although, so entirely different.When our fingers met we made our first love right there, without a care for the world, that continued around us.

You touched me in places I never knew existed, I surrendered to your love and I allowed myself to fall.I gave you everything and you gave me myself in return.You held out a mirror and I was no longer afraid to look, I could not see me without knowing you first.Our fragmented pieces smoothly slid firm into place.You fearlessly drove and you never once doubted our love.You ran through each bone in my body and then printed your name on my heart.My veins pulsed wildly when you tenderly showed me your love.You gave me it all.

And I loved you more.

I had no choice.

There is no reason nor no explanation for love.


You were always the one and I have always loved you.

I waited and you waited and we finally arrived together.




PART 3



Dear Soulmate

To be someones mate is to be there exact pair. Two things that undeniably go together. Two things that were made to be with one another. Even the naked eye pairs them with no other information than a look.  

You are my soul mate. The way I was drawn to you from the very start is unexplainable. The feeling I get from simply hearing your voice. The way every nerve in my body stands at reacts to your touch. The comments of admiration we get from complete strangers about how in love we are. The seamless life we have built together. The ease in which you fit into my family and I fit into yours. The moments that we spend laughing over funny accents. The way you make me feel truly alive. The habits we have formed. The meals we have cooked. The tears we have shared. The way I see forever in your eyes. The countless conversations. The open hearts and vulnerability. The fact that I miss you before you ever say goodbye. The nights ended in each others arms. The mornings began tangled in sheets. These are all mere things that alone may not mean much, but it is in their entirety that our profound love can begin to be explained.




PART 4

Dear Soulmate,

I want to start by saying how much you mean to me. You are so caring and loving and there is not a person like you under this sky. You are my one and only, unique and special. No one understands me as you do, not a single person. I never thought this was even possible; that I could meet someone who knows what I am thinking, someone that, despite all of our differences, is always there by my side through ups and downs, someone that I never imagined I could love so much as I love you.

You encourage me to do better, to be better. You lift my soul and I thank you for that. You make me feel like I don’t have to face all the obstacles of the world alone. Simply your presence makes me happy, makes my life better. Being with you makes me realize how lucky I am to have you. Sometimes I wonder how did I even get so lucky. I know a thousand people who spend their lives looking for their “soulmate” to fill that empty space. I can’t believe I already found you without even looking for you!! I’ve been blessed with you!

I want you to know that I will always be here for you, just as you are always here for me. I want you to know that if life takes us apart one day, you were a light in the darkness. If I ever have to leave you or vice-versa, I will always be waiting for you, waiting to see you again. You are someone worth waiting for. I don’t know if you remember how we met, but it was magic. We connected instantly, do you remember? We understood each other perfectly.

I know we have had difficult times, conflicts and problems, but above it all our chemistry has always been stronger than anything. I want you to be happy, truly happy. I want you to grow personally and professionally. I want your dreams to come true, and do you know why? Because they are my dreams too. I feel what you feel, and when you are happy I am happy and when you cry my heart breaks into pieces; I just can't see you like that. I want you to know that you don’t have to stick with me your whole life. I want you to fly wherever you want to. I will always be your soulmate even if we are miles apart. If one day you get tired of me, I will also understand and let you be. I want you to be YOU, because that’s what I love about you, your whole person, your virtues and flaws. I love you as you are and I don’t want you to change anything about you.

I know friends come and go, but you, you will stay in my heart forever and no one will ever replace you.

With love,

Your Soulmate




PART 5


A message in a digital bottle:

Dear Soulmate,

I’m not quite sure I believe you exist. But the “Can you hear me now?” guy switched from Verizon to Sprint and now I guess anything is possible.

Which Chipotle are you reading this from? Oh, you already had Chipotle today? Twice, really?

You’re at home now eating cookie dough and listening to jazz? Cool. I’m actually glad you’re reading this. You see, I’ve had my fair share of awkward first dates and Tinder matches gone wrong. One time I even went out with a girl whose favorite food was candy corn. Favorite food, not even favorite candy. WTF? I was terrified. I didn’t date for a month after that one, and still haven’t fully recovered. The point is, I’m glad you’re finding this letter now, so we don’t have to waste our time.

We don’t have to stressfully search for a trendy first date spot and participate in dull small talk and try to pinpoint mutual friends and pretend to like each other, then the check comes and it’s like ugh awkward, but I pay, and then it’s time to go home and we get separate Uber Pools, but end up in the same car... It’s just no good.

FYI:I don’t like candy corn, but I can eat almond joys until I throw up. Not apologizing.

A little more about me: When I was little I thought I lived next to The White House, but it turns out I just lived next to a white house (who knew?) If someone called me right now and asked if I wanted to watch Spy Kids I honestly probably would. I think I owe Costco for a lot of my happiness. Also, I strongly believe French toast tastes better in stick form. Um, I’m 5’7” but my heart is 7’5”. 
And what about you?

Who are you? Have we met? Are we friends? Sh*t, is this Katie from 5th grade? Sorry again for starting that rumor about your dad being Guy Fieri (but it was hilarious.)

I guess I already know everything about you, though. You like the Obamas. And potato chips. You’re weird. You enjoy going out, but also sometimes avoiding human contact at all costs. You’d watch Spy Kids with me (What the f*ck. Were those movies even that good? I can’t remember.) Kindness is an innate quality of yours, but let’s be honest when it’s just us hanging out watching Spy Kids we’ll talk sh*t about things. You think I’m funny, but you’ll also tell me when I’m being an idiot or watching too much Spy Kids. Do you like shaved ice or crushed? Waking up early or sleeping in? Hash browns or curly fries? Did you answer, “I love both?” Of course you did.

Where’s your favorite vacation spot? Do you like drinking? How many times have you read the Harry Potter books? Pop-Tarts or Toaster Strudels? Do you play an instrument? Not a deal-breaker, but we could start a band and tour and I bet someone would make a cool movie about it (Ryan Gosling would play me.)

What seat do you choose on an airplane? For God’s sake please don’t say the middle. If you were any kind of sandwich what would you be? I’d be a deluxe grilled cheese — comforting, reliable, not trying to be anything I’m not, and it’s like, “Whoa this was already amazing, and NOW THERE’S BACON ON IT.” I don’t keep kosher.

I’m not really in a rush to meet you tbh. Life is good and there’s a lot of new standup on Netflix. It’s just nice to know that you’re out there.

Anyways, I’m sure you have to get back to napping or maybe you’re going to a concert or a basketball game or perhaps you’re on your way to a brewery. No, probably just napping. Hmm yeah, that seems right.

OH, PS, I haven’t updated my LinkedIn in a while so don’t judge me on that.

See you around? 

PERSONAL: WHY CHOOSE ME AMONG OTHER?

Why choose me among so many men? First of all, because I am real.My intentions are sincere and honest, I am not here to find a plan Q, live a short-term relationship or without next day! I am not here to sell the dream.I am just an ordinary man who is looking for his woman here. I am not a prince, or a perfect man, not a top model, only myself, a man with the qualities and faults. I like to which I like! I would like to make a beautiful meeting, I want to love, of complicity, of desire, to share and exchange, to build, to base a life of two We will take the time to discover us and to dial our history

The woman I’m looking for is all about “going with the flow.” She is a woman who knows what she wants in life and has learned how to ask for it. Intelligent, attractive (both physically and mentally), and confident, she would capture my attention right away. As soon as we started to talk though,or text, and we would both “just know.” The connections could not be ignored and the risk would be well worth the effort. Honest, fun-loving and adventurous, this is a woman who would become the “best friend” I couldn’t see myself without!

Since the “Cliff Notes” version of me can’t tell the whole story, the better scenario is to email me so we can start getting to know each other and then take it from there. Who knows? A grand adventure may be about to begin-but unit I hear from you, we are missing out on all the fun!

ARTICLE: ‘I made a statistical game out of dating’: could I crack the formula for love? BY Dina Nayeri

I am a math nerd. “A maths nerd,” my partner corrects me, because we live in London now. Fine. I love puzzles and formulae and bullet-pointed plans. I’ve spent many a winter morning with a steaming cup of tea and an Excel file. I don’t often make major forecasting errors, but I’m in the middle of my life’s biggest miscalculation.

Until I was eight, in 1987, I lived in Isfahan, Iran, in a big, warm family of science and maths types. I had a bike and a best friend and my own calculator. I loved a boy named Ali Mansouri. But then my mother was jailed for converting to Christianity and, when she was temporarily released, we had to escape Iran. Before you could calculate the probability of losing every toy and friend and photo, it was gone, favourite calculator and all. We were in a refugee hostel in Dubai and then in Rome. And then two years had passed and I was the foreign kid in early 1990s Oklahoma. Every subject was foreign to me: English, Oklahoma history, the topography of who knows what. But one subject hadn’t changed; in fact, in this one area, I was ahead of everyone else. In maths, I shone. I could do a sheet of 100 multiplications in less than a minute.

At 12, when I started to feel our poverty, I asked my mother how much money an average person needed not to stay awake all night, punching my calculator. She said, flatly, $5,000 a month. Sixty thousand a year, I thought. I went to a library and looked at average income levels. I learned that to make that much right out of college, I had to get into an east coast university (I had yet to learn about the regional cost of living). Screw this life, I thought. I’m going to live comfortably. I had the grades, but back then it wasn’t so marketable to be an Iranian refugee: even trying felt like a risk.

The university guides said I needed sports. I needed a national championship. I calculated the probability of winning trophies in the sports I loved: tennis and swimming. Other girls loved those, too. Wealthy Oklahoma suburbs were teeming with country-club girls who had way more practice and nicer rackets than me. I needed a sport that bent to my juvenile analytics: a sport with trophies handed out by weight levels, age levels, belt levels. A sport that didn’t attract rich girls with trainers. So I signed up for taekwondo.

I dropped 20lb, put in five hours of practice a day alongside the boys. I counted calories, fat grams, the hours on the Stairmaster. At 13% body fat, I stopped menstruating and won a national championship.

At Princeton, I decided to find a boyfriend. I had never had one, never been kissed, never had sex. I made a secret chart of the boys I knew. I quickly threw it away, ashamed of myself. I hated the entitled rich boys. I didn’t want another financial aid kid – the probability of poverty was too high. I was planning to go into finance or consulting, so I joined a business organisation and met an awkward boy with a kind heart who loved my OCD and the way I counted on my fingers. He wasn’t hungry like me; he was enjoying his life. So I gave him some of my hunger, that missing ingredient, and he thrived. We married and bought a canal house in Amsterdam. He grew handsome and ambitious. He had rows of wooden shoe racks and the most beautiful suits.

I followed the numbers to New York, to McKinsey & Co, and he came, too. My life was perfect on paper, an immigrant girl’s fantasy: the midtown consulting job, the apartment, the husband. We made way more than $5,000 a month. In one of our earliest photos, we’re both in Brooks Brothers trench coats, leaning on a Princeton umbrella and sporting his-and-hers corporate haircuts. A friend said, “That’s the yuppiest thing I’ve ever seen.” Then I went to Harvard Business School; we made a plan for our lives. He would have the low-beta career and I the high-beta (beta being the finance term for risk and potential reward). We actually did the maths for this.

I remember thinking, 'If I date him, there’s an 80% chance I’ll get a weird infection'

Through the years, I’ve had periods when something snaps. When I turn deaf to the data and do something crazy, because I crave joy, creativity, a jolt. It happens every decade or so. In 2011, it happened. I became a writer. We divorced.

I moved back to New York and made a statistical game out of dating. I downloaded a few dating apps and quickly figured out which had the best men: the best apps centred on photos. After all, I had undergone enough institutional brainwashing to be able to weed out, from a few snaps, the cultured, educated ones from the ones who were faking. I learned that a hat means he’s bald, no smile means bad teeth, grainy pictures means lying about age. From photos, I could figure out their travel smarts, their creativity, insularity, intelligence level, and even education and political bent. Believe it or not, something as simple as a baseball cap, choice of sunglasses or favourite sport is enough accurately to differentiate (on an aggregate level, at least) a midwestern Republican bible-thumper on a two-year work stint in New York from a pro-choice, dual citizen who makes his own bechamel sauce and reads Sebald.

In two years, I had many high-quality boyfriends, ones who scored well by every known metric. And, as predicted by my personal algorithm, I went on roughly 12 dates per eventual boyfriend. Once, I segmented the population of Iranian-American men into four categories and devised a plan to date one from each kind. The experiment effortlessly settled the question: “Should you be with an Iranian?” The answer was no.

As a rule, I wasted no time. I had a tight schedule. I had many pretty dresses. I kept my body fat next to nothing. Sometimes, I accompanied friends to freeze their eggs. I considered it, but in the end I believed in my eggs. Throughout all this, I found my way into a decent writing career. At 35, I had it together again.

Then, out of nowhere, chaos.

***

I met Sam, not on a Tinder date, but at a writer’s colony. He was English, divorced, 39, jobless. His shirts were full of holes. He hadn’t cut his hair in six months and washed it maybe every two weeks; it was a crazy curly mess that reminded me of Sideshow Bob from the Simpsons. Back in New York, I was dating a handsome Mexican businessman who fit all the criteria. A low-beta career, love of travel, a sense of humour. But, suddenly, I found myself falling for the unwashed writer, and I was confused. I actually remember thinking, “If I date him, there’s an 80% chance I’ll get a weird infection.”

Over many meals, I learned that Sam had spent the last year wandering from residency to residency, writing a novel about a Vichy demographer so devoted to his work that he didn’t stop to think maybe he shouldn’t be calculating census numbers for the Nazis. Now, he was on trial for crimes against humanity.

“So you’re claiming that he did it mostly for the love of the census?” I said.

“Right,” Sam said. “Culpability is a complex thing.”

“I think he’s guilty,” I said, surprising myself. “Maths is just a tool. You have to care about the thing you’re calculating.”

Silently, I did the forecasts on Sam: he wouldn’t make a dime for years. But I loved his novel. He lent me The Reader. He lent me Stoner. We walked in the woods. I stopped crunching the numbers. Slowly, I fell for his distractedness, his wandering, the life he had scattered in three storage spaces. He loved my OCD and the way I counted on my fingers. He called me Rain Man.

“How much do you love me?” I asked.

“There’s beggary in the love that can be reckoned,” he said.

Screw that, I thought. Everything can be measured, even love. If it was a job, I’d be amazing at it. I should be a yenta.

Sometimes, Sam watched me do puzzles. He read me short stories as I slept.

Then, at some point between a history in French demography and a night with the works of Annie Dillard, my once-a-decade insanity came early and I got pregnant.

Soon, every sphere of my life, once neatly rolled skeins arranged in a basket, unravelled into one big tangled mess. Early in the summer, early in our relationship and also in our pregnancy, Sam and I decided to leave New York and start over. “Let’s wander!” we said, delirious with our news, with our brand new romance, each of us seeing in the other a strange twist on the qualities we had always chased in others.


We drifted to a tiny French village with a population of 3,000 geriatrics who dipped their toes in the fountain in front of the local restaurant, spoke only fast, accented French, and tested positive for toxoplasmosis at alarmingly high rates. Within three months, I’d dismantled my life and landed inside my own worst nightmare.

But we also relished our aimlessness. We plunged into the pregnancy, thinking that we could build a world around our unborn baby, caring for her, feeding her, monitoring her heartbeat. We looked at her sonogram: her big ears and the way she touched the wall of my uterus. Sam cooked me exceptional French dishes every night. Friends delivered American vitamins to France. Sam read my writing. I read his.

Unable to make sense of my new life, I slowly went feral. When I got too big to shave my legs, Sam offered to do it, but I decided just to stop. When I got a yeast infection and didn’t want to drive to the doctor, he stepped up with a bowl of yoghurt and a turkey baster. He cooked gingery salmon. He cooked a daube full of lamb. He cooked sour sauces to assuage my cravings. I devoured them all with my fingers.

“This isn’t the life I imagined,” I said.

“I know, love,” he said.

Fingers shaking, I sank my teeth into chicken thighs, gnawing to the bone.

***

To preserve a sense of my own space, I turned to geometry. I created a perimeter: my suitcase, my backpack with my laptop and work stuff, a big leather purse of important documents. I put them in a corner of the room and closed off that corner. I said, “Sam, this corner is mine. Don’t move it or touch it.” I figured, everything that surrounds me can change – we can move down the road or to another country – but in every place I’ll have this square metre that’s mine.

Each morning, I woke in a stifling 500-year-old room, a constellation of mosquito bites covering my feet and calves, every tooth threatening to fall out as I struggled against a half-conscious panic attack. It always took me a few seconds to recognise the shock of black curls on the pillow beside me, the gentle English accent: “What’s wrong, love?”

My first thought: “I don’t have an address any more, or a phone. We’re in a town with no maternity store and I’m wearing your boxers and I’ve known you for 10 months.”

I counted on my fingers:

Probability of relationship failing and becoming a single mother: 60%

Probability that current lonely feeling is caused by hormones: 90%

Probability that that cheese I ate earlier in the market was unpasteurised and carrying The Tox: 99% (I returned again and again to have my blood tested).

How trifling and small they seemed now, my formulae and aspirations and plans

I wanted my charts and my formulae back. I wanted something to strive for. Twelve dates equals new boyfriend. Two months in a colony equals a book draft. It wasn’t just the indignities of impending motherhood or having to forfeit all the carefree bliss of early romance: Sam was a stranger to me. Would my child be a stranger, too? And what did this turn of events say about the way I had lived my life so far? Was it all for nothing, all that calculating, all that striving?

Worst yet, had I chosen wrong? I spent a month trying to find a formula for Sam. His unwashed hair (that smelled so nice), the scattershot holes around the collar of his T-shirt (the softest shirt I’ve worn), the way he took five minutes to get out a sentence (oh, but what sentences!). I remembered the day his parents had come to Heathrow to pick me up three months earlier. They didn’t know my face – I knew theirs because they were each identical to Sam in unrelated ways: his mother had his curls and his long, angular face; his father had his expressive eyes and aquiline nose. I watched them scanning the crowd, confusion blanching their cheeks, for several long beats before I approached them. What were they thinking? Who was this woman their son had brought home? In what configurations would our genes meld together to create a new person?

One morning, I woke up soaking wet. I had sweated through the sheets and the stress was giving me acid reflux. “I have no plan,” I murmured into the pillow.

“We can make a plan,” Sam said.

“You look terrible on paper,” I said.

“But we don’t live on paper,” he said.

“We’re living out of a suitcase,” I said. “Do you know how much stuff we need? We need a stroller and car seat and diapers and burp cloths and a changing station and 10,000 other things. There are a dozen vaccines and two dozen signs of meningitis to memorise, and allergens and baby cribs. Do we put her on her back or on her front? Should we have life insurance and godparents? How will we build a whole life?”

“It’ll build itself,” he said. “Have a little trust.”

But the universe gave me data so I don’t have to trust. Often, I wonder about the ratio of chaos and order that would equal a happy life. Clearly, I wasn’t satisfied in a life of diversified betas and shoe racks all aligned. But going feral almost broke me. Is life only chaos or an ordered game of averages? Should I welcome it and its beautiful wildness, or fight to rein it in? So far, all I know is that my life has been a constant act of letting go, of changing what I need to survive, recalibrating the perimeter.

After France, we built a life slowly. We moved again, and once more after that. We bought a changing station. We chose godparents. We borrowed a car seat. Suddenly, we were surrounded by aunts, uncles, cousins. We inherited bundles of baby clothes. We had the funniest, cleverest girl (there is no comparing). It came together by itself. No, Elena brought it together. How did she do it, with her little hands?

A few months ago, I stumbled on a piece of paper from 2014. It was labelled, “My five-year plan”. It was full of silly goals: publish second novel, finish third novel, decorate apartment, find community, read 50 books a year. Reading it, I missed my old self. I wanted to edit it, to make a new list, to build a predictive model of my future, and Sam’s, and Elena’s. Where had this vital part of my identity gone? Without it, I was no longer entirely me.

And yet it was frightening what I had left off. Where was my Elena? How trifling and small they seemed now, my formulae and aspirations and plans.

I looked again at the page, the unfamiliar language of it. I kept thinking, without my deviations and the screw-ups, the probability of Elena would be zero.