Enjoying the Ride

I have said it before and I’m quite sure I’ll say it again: I am fundamentally unsuited to relationships.  I was happily plodding along in ethical non-monogamy when Covid-19 hit.  5 months of solitude later, I can see advantages to living with someone!  I’m not anti-relationship.  For most people they are great, and the issues are mine rather than with the structure most people choose to live within.

My early relationship history is a tawdry and hackneyed story with which I’ve no intention of boring anyone, but even with that understanding there are a few things I really miss about them, brought home by a conversation I had yesterday about the most banal and everyday of things: a lift home.

I didn’t learn to drive until after my last cohabiting relationship ended, so the whole time I lived with anyone they would drive and I would be the passenger.  I adored the quiet intimacy of being driven home at night; just the two of us in the car in our own bubble, protected from the intrusion of the outside world.

When I was with J he drove a battered old Jag.  It was a beautiful car, all leather and wood interior, rusted and dented exterior and an engine that sounded as though you’d left half of it behind at the last set of traffic lights.  J never drank when we were out, but used to adore getting me into a slightly fuzzy state of not-quite-soberness, at which point he’d shake his head disapprovingly and fondly fold me into the passenger seat, then rest his hand on my thigh all the way home, giving the occasional squeeze.

The car had no radio and these were pre-smartphone days, so we would go home in companionable silence or talking the sort of shite you can only talk when you’re alone with a lover.  We shared so many confidences in the shelter of that car, in the safe space that cocooned us.  No topic was off limits, nothing was held back.  It’s an intimacy you can only share with a lover of long standing.  No matter how close your friendships, a lift home off a friend isn’t the same.  It’s not something you can get from an Uber driver, no matter how much of a tip you give.  It requires the newness to have been worn off the relationship, no concerns about impressing the other person, no fears of judgement.  Just honest-to-goodness open-hearted intimacy.

Oddly, even though I loved that time in the car, tipsy as I was was, late night as it was, I have never had sex in a car.  I’ve given a blowjob or two, I’ve enjoyed some lovely mutual masturbation sessions, but never sex.  Some of that is the logistics of a very fat bird trying to get it on in a confined space.  Some of it is my lack of exhibitionist tendencies.  Some of it was the almost painfully sexually unadventurous guys I chose to have relationships with (J sadly included).  My sexual awakening really came much later, when I was in my 30s and was quite capable of driving myself thank you very much.

Just the same, all these years later… I do miss those lifts.