WILL YOU BE MY FANTASY LOVER?
It’s a question that is asked in most relationships at one time or another. But what should you do when you get the feeling that the fantasy is more important than the reality – that you are just a surrogate for what someone else really wants?
Anne Sexton, 01 Oct 2009
Whenever she was in bed with him Aisling wondered what he was thinking. Perhaps it was pleasure that caused him to close his eyes, but she couldn’t help but suspect that he was lost somewhere in his own imagination – that she was a blank canvas unto which he projected his fantasies.
At first it had been easy. Outside of the bedroom he could not have been more considerate. He called when he said he would; held her hand as they walked down the street; made dates; sent emails and text messages. He was the very definition of keen, but the longer she knew him the more she began to suspect that there was an empty space in his life labelled “girlfriend” and that he liked her more for her ability to slot into this role than for anything to do with who she actually was.
Her suspicions were based on snippets and intuition. A clue here, a hint there as she tried to piece this man together, to figure him out.
Taken separately they meant nothing much, but when considered as a whole she wondered if, when Kevin looked at her, he saw who she was or merely a woman who could be moulded into something approximating what he desired.
“Do you ever wear high heels?” he asked on their third date.
“Not really,” she replied. “And certainly not to the movies.”
“You’d look good in heels.” He smiled and flashed his eyebrows. “With a short skirt.”
It would have been easy to please him. His requirements were typically male, mundane even – stockings, garter belts, revealing clothes. She considered dressing up for him, more than once, but it felt less like an outfit and more like a remodelling experience.
When she looked at herself in the mirror she had to admit that the shoes and fishnets showed off her legs to their best advantage, but his near constant hints and requests worried her. She felt like an escort dressing to please a client – less like a girlfriend, more like the girlfriend experience.
He rarely called her by her name. Instead she was ‘Baby’. A nickname she wouldn’t have minded, suggesting as it would have some sort of intimacy, but she disliked being addressed by an interchangeable term of endearment, stripped of personality and individuality, of adulthood – a mewling, helpless thing, a person but not quite fully realised, dependent on the whims of others.
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