When All Sex is Make-up Sex

Two yowling cats woke me up at 2 am this morning. This is not unusual. Screaming at each other is their favourite thing to do, and they will do it for hours. I don’t know much about cats beyond the fact that they are assholes, so I can’t tell you if this is a precursor to hot sex. All I can tell you is that dogs are the better species.

I know all you cat people are probably yowling at me right now, which is appropriate, I suppose. Not all people are privileged enough to know dogs are better. I’m guessing our entire neighbourhood is being kept awake by a hate-fuck situation, and I know a lot about those. I dated an artist for five years. I’m a poet, so when you put the two of us together, yowling and sex usually followed.

We hated each other.

We fucked each other.

We loved each other.

It always happened in that order, so all sex was make-up sex. Having suddenly realised the unerring perfection of our love, we had the best sex we’d ever had since last Thursday when our last hate fuck had occurred.

Google tells me my neighbourhood cats are, in fact, fighting about territory, and my cottage happens to be the disputed boundary. I’m nothing if not a writer of extended metaphors, so I am, of course, going to tell you that The Artist and I had a disputed boundary, too.

I wanted true love and marriage.

He wanted uncommitted-but-monogamous romance.
He did not put a ring on it. He did not want to put a ring on it, and I was not Beyonce, so I couldn’t convince him to put a ring on it.

We fought about that all the time, so every time we fell in love, I started asking for commitment and he started straining against it. We spent years disputing that border, and now we haven’t been in the same room for almost 20 years.

I learned something in those 20 years: Like Oz’ Dorothy, I had what I’d wanted all along: him. I had him. I wanted him. I lost him for insisting on getting something I already had. Just like my neighbourhood cats, we could have shared that space peacefully, but we spent it screeching and yowling instead.

Life fucked with The Artist royally after that. His next true love experienced an accidental pregnancy. Apparently yowling cats experience those quite often, so now he has the very life he swore he did not want. He’s a good dad, but also an exhausted one. I see his psyche disintegrate a little more every year. I’m living the free life he was desperate for, and he’s living the committed one I had wanted.

How’s that for a living nightmare?

Being single gets lonely sometimes, but I wouldn’t want it any other way. It turns out The Artist’s desires had some merit. I got the gold prize. He got a wholly different thing that I won’t attempt to define as anything but fatigue.

Maybe it’s worth it. I’m sure every parent would tell me it is, but I think I got the best outcome between us. I know him well enough to assume he thinks I got the best outcome, too. There is a third reality that we’ve not explored:

Somewhere in an alternate universe, a poet and an artist fell in love. They insisted on treasuring what they had instead of chasing after what they did not. There were no rings to speak of, but they didn’t need one. They had each other.