Am I Going To Sabotage This New Relationship?!

Q

I know what you’re going to say and I get it, but I really am over my ex! She was pure chaos and our relationship was so toxic. It wasn’t abusive, but it really brought out the worst in both of us. The breakup was explosive and nearly got me fired (long story!), but it’s done and I’m so happy to be living my life completely separate from her. The problem is, we had such incredible sex. I think that’s the only reason we were able to last as long as we did, because no matter how awful a fight was (and wow she could argue) or how sad or lonely she made me feel, we could still find a way back to each other for sex. Armchair psychoanalysis has led me to think she was so attentive during sex and so much more fun and easygoing because she was basically dissociating and playing a role for her own sake, but who knows.

I’m currently seeing someone else who is wonderful and hilarious and very hot and ambitious and smart and I could go on and on, and the sex is fine-to-pretty good. I think we both have fun, it’s just not quite as sexy and exciting as the sex I had with my ex. I’m telling myself it will get better if we keep growing closer and relax a little more around each other, and I mostly believe that until I compare it to the sex I had with my ex. I do NOT want my ex back. I don’t want to have sex with her again, but secretly I do want to have that same kind of sex again. Lately I’ve had three sex dreams about her and each one woke me up with an orgasm, and I feel so bad about it! Not because I got off, that’s fine, but I’m worried this means that I’m somehow still into her and will sabotage this relationship and maybe even others.

What is happening here? My therapist obviously tells me it’s nothing and my subconscious is not in control blah blah, and I believe her to a degree! I want to talk to my friends about this, but I can’t because I don’t really trust them not to judge me or, worse, tell my ex or my current person or accidentally bring it up around them. I feel like my brain is betraying me and I never want to have another sex dream about her. Has this ever happened to you? And if so, was it because you secretly weren’t over her?

A

Summer: First-off, I don’t think it’s a good idea to talk to your friends about this. If anything gets out, it’s going to cause a lot of harm to the relationship. Especially since you may not be able to convince your current girlfriend that you’re completely over your ex. You have a therapist and I think this should stay there.

What I’ll say about dreams is that dreams often but don’t always reflect intense emotions and fears. Your intense sexual dreams sound incredibly rational (if dreams can be called such) in the context of both incredibly good sex and an extremely emotionally taxing breakup. Your therapist is right in that you can’t bend your subconscious to your will. Being asleep is literally an impaired state. You are not in control. My two asks of you are to:

1. Forgive yourself for things that happen that aren’t even in your control. Be softer on yourself and take in reminders that emotions from breakups wane. This will wane over time.
2. Focus on your wonderful current partner. The sex may not match the intensity of your ex, but sex is far from the only important component in a relationship. Your current girlfriend clearly brings you so much good and it would be a disservice to trade consistency and stability for emotional extremes.

In my mind, that’s really it. The intensity of those emotions will wane over time. You just have to keep forgiving yourself for the little things until they do.

Nico: First of all, we simply cannot and should not feel bad for what we dream. I’ve read that dreams are part of your brain processing the events of the day along with your current thoughts and feelings and things that are bothering you. This is why “sleeping on it” is in fact, actually, a thing! Because it gives your brain time to process and sort through its data. The problem your brain seems to be trying to work through is that you are missing an aspect of a relationship that did not work, but in which that aspect was highly positive. You are not alone in having had a relationship where the sex was good, but many other things made you all incompatible or were fraught, and great sex can in fact keep a couple together longer than they “should” be at times. This has in fact happened to me! So I hope you feel better knowing that. It definitely brought up confused feelings because the ex(s) didn’t treat me very well, but that was part of it, too, right? Like, I was attached to the sex because it was something to hold onto in the dynamic that was actually working — when so much else wasn’t. This does not necessarily mean that you’re “not over” her.

I agree with Summer that you should definitely save conversation about this for NON-mutual friends or a therapist. This is not something to talk to a new partner about, especially because you don’t intend to act on it. It’ll likely create insecurities and make intimacy more difficult! At the same time, it’s not something to feel guilty about. It’s unrealistic to expect anyone to be able to force something out of their mind by sheer force of will. Time and distance will heal this wound for you, and as Summer says, it will fade. In the meantime, if you can try to identify more concrete things that made the sex feel so good (besides that it was charged, perhaps, with some chaos from the relationship), then you can work to bring those things into your current dynamic. Try, also, to really spend time intentionally thinking about all the positive aspects of your current relationship and sex life. Our brains can get stuck in loops, and it takes intention to mindfully disrupt those loops. The more you focus on what’s going right in your life during the day, the more you’re feeding your brain positive data to process at night. Most of all, forgive yourself, please, for things you cannot control.

Rescue Me from the Show Tunes PLEASE

Q

HELP ME lol my girlfriend has barely taken a break from listening to and singing the entirety of the Wicked soundtrack since seeing the movie last November. She’s tried putting on other artists, bands she’s loved for years, classical, jazz, her Discover Weekly playlist, OPERA. I’ve tried wearing noise-cancelling headphones, begging, pretending to be in a coma on the floor, screaming, threatening to jump from a moving vehicle.

We are losing our minds. We wake up with song fragments playing in our head, lyrics have crept into our lexicon and I’m afraid our brains have liquified. She knows I’m writing in about this HI LOVE and is also desperate for a cure! How can we move past this?! Is there any hope? Should we just try finding more showtunes to drown these out? This was her suggestion but to be honest I’m worried that will only result in a larger array of showtunes playing on a loop for the rest of my life. I want to think about any other music besides songs that push along a storyline. I can almost remember last summer, and there isn’t much I wouldn’t give for Sabrina Carpenter to release another earworm and save us from ourselves.

A

Valerie Anne: EMBRACE THE SHOWTUNES! Wicked all day,  Wicked all night! Something has changed within you, and you’ve been Ozified! Put on those emerald-tinted glasses and dance it up in the Ozdust ballroom! And yes, finding more showtunes WILL help! MORE SHOWTUNES!!!! All songs push along a storyline, might as well get a whole cast of characters with it! This is your life now, welcome to being a theater geek, it’s great here. Other showtunes recommendations that are super fun to listen to: Heathers the Musical, We Are the Tigers, Legally Blonde the Musical, SIX, In the Heights, and Next to Normal. If you want to keep it Wicked-adjacent, The Wiz is always an amazing listen, Cynthia Erivo is going to be in Jesus Christ Superstar soon, so that’s one you can check out, and Jon Chu is supposedly going to make a movie version of Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat! Those two are both a bit Bible-y but have some REALLY fun songs. (Joseph was one of the first musicals I ever learned, and one of the first I was ever in!) Happy showtuning!!!!

Summer: This is hilarious. Uh, I dunno how to cure your girlfriend of this dreadful malady. I hope it isn’t terminal. For either of you.

All I’ll say is that the one thing that’s ruined songs for me quickest? Parodies of those songs, if they exist. Bad parodies. Whether they’re bad because they’re low quality or bad because they’re so funny they ruin the original, it works. Strike back. Memorize awful parodies of her favourite showtunes. Write your own awful lyrics to them if you have to. Play or sing those back to her. If my understanding of the laws and customs of war are accurate, then the deployment of incessant showtunes constitutes unacceptable escalation. The die has been cast and if you back down, you will quite literally never hear the end of it.

Sa’iyda: As a former theatre kid, the only right answer here is to just lean all the way and embrace the showtunes. Come on, they’re fun and relatively harmless in the grand scheme of things. Can they be incredibly hard to get out of your head? Hell yes. But that’s part of the appeal.

The key here is not to reject the showtunes, but to find ones that you can accept and love. Val has given some excellent suggestions, and since I don’t know you or your girlfriend, I can’t give specific recs. Recently, I’ve really been loving the cast recording of The Outsiders musical, which has a very folky, throwback vibe. I hate to be that guy, but I have a pretty extensive Broadway playlist for just this very reason. Maybe you’ll find something that sticks out and you can use that to replace Wicked, which I agree, gets old after a short while, especially the movie version (Please don’t hate me, I didn’t love the movie!) Good luck, and be careful if you start listening to Cats! (The stage version, NOT THE MOVIE)

Nico: As someone not particularly drawn to showtunes, I FEEL you here. My suggestion? Can you two have a trip together soon, this spring or summer, into nature, where you do NOT bring any unnecessary tech with you and agree not to play any music at all? It sounds like you both need a cleanse and a reset. But hey, if this is the worst of your problems and you’re both still kind of laughing about it, that’s good, right? One final suggestion – make a recording of y’all singing the whole musical and then listen to that a few times until it’s too painful to listen to the songs again. RIP Wicked, but you all have only so much time until part II comes out to save yourselves!

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