ok, im throwing my two cents in...this thread totally hits home for me... (go get a sandwhich, this one is a little long...)
I understand where your coming from- not so much in the "gotta find the love of my life and be married by 30" aspect (im cynical, though, so marriage for me is 'iffy' anyways lol) but that lost, hopeless, why-am-i-stuck-with-this kinda way. I hate having this fetish sometimes-....most of the time...-because it really does keep us from being "normal." Some people are fine with it, and even take joy in it, and I really do envy them. For me, I feel like I've been cheated. I listen to my friends talk about bad dates or their fights with their boy/girlfriends, and I can't help but fell like "you think YOU have problems?" I know it's wrong to feel that way, but I just feel like we have such a harder time finding someone than "normal" people do. (I use 'normal' loosely, but I think you guys get what I mean)
In regards to loving someone without the detish- I'm seriously SO HAPPY for those of you who that has worked out for. I really really mean that, you guys are so lucky. In my own experience, I was dating someone for 2 1/2 years when the whole Joe Millionaire thing broke (I hope you guys know what Im talking about) This sparked a topic of converstaion between us about fetishes, in which he went on and on about how weird having a tickling fetish was. And no, he had no idea I had one- I never wanted to disapear so badly in my life. A year later, I came out to him about it- he was the first person I ever came out to. And believe it or not, he was totally fine with it. I mean, he didn't get it, but he didn't think it was that big of a feal.
Sounds good so far, right? Well, another year goes by, and I hit my 20s...kinda coming into myself and realizing what I needed in my sex life. He couldn't do it for me. Just because he accepted it didn't mean he understood. Even when I would talk to him about it, his jokes were kind of cruel- like he was laughing AT it rather than WITH it. He wasn't a mean guy by any means- he just didn't understand. I would never want to try anything with him because he would never get it. I could never tell him what turned me on, because he was so vanilla. And believe me, I tried. It just didn't work.
Fast forward to last year. We broke up after 5 years, and I started dating someone from this community. It was amazing. We had a reeeeeeally big location difference, so the meat of our relationship was in the form of raw communication. We never got the chance to "do" anything (again, I'm making the obvious reference) but just the fact that he understood and felt the same way was....amazing. We laughed about it all the time, we'd send each other threatening emails, we could talk fantasies without any judgement, and we could actually bleep the "t-word" out of our conversations because, like so many of us, neither one of us could actually say it with ease. It was a level of understand like I've never experienced. Even though we ended up giving up on it because of the distance, he remains my best friend in the world.
<deep breath> So what am I saying in all this rambling? Dont get me wrong- it CAN work with a vanilla person. And not all vanilla people see this as SUCH as weird thing. In a related story, i came out to my mother (I know, I can hear the gasp) this past winter- and she's amazingly fine with it. Ha, she's more supportive than I ever imagined anyone could be (sorry, off topic again). BUT anyways- not all vanilla will think that we're weird, and it can work. I love hearing sucess stories from community members. But in my experience, there's no substitute for someone who really understands. Dating someone from the community is amazing. I guess Im plugging the community, haha. But that brought me the greatest joy, and I guess a glimer of hope that there ar people out there.
We're an oddly shaped puzzle piece, I admit- but that doesn't mean that there isn't a perfectly fitting one somewhere out there.
Whew, sorry if that was wicked long, but I guess I needed to get that out. Btw, I've been on this site for a few years (mainly the TMF) but have kinda dropped away- Im trying to get involved again. I guess this is my official introduction- hope some of you are still awake after reading all that 🙂
~clair 😀