Church of Crush

Forgive me father, for I have binged

No one wants to make God with me. This is the wall I slam my libido against until it is bruises.

God is always there when I’m making out, and I think that means I’m doing it right. But sometimes I fear I’m the only one who wants to surrender to God-making, and that everyone else is just sort of pretending.

On Friday night, I made a Notes App list of text messages that might increase the likelihood of my crush making God with me:

• Can I have a picture of your cock please? To keep in a locket.

• The fact that you have yet to ask me for a nude photo makes me feel like you hate me. Actually it makes me think you only see me as a good friend who you had sex with one time but view purely platonically which is worse than hating me. Therefore, I have cursed your dick so that you can only get hard inside me, and the only way to break my curse is to say “I love you” to me and REALLY mean it. You really have to mean it because if you don’t mean it OR if you stop loving me the curse becomes PERMANENT and there is no way to reverse it.

• How was your day :)?

Regardless, it would be a double text. About 30 minutes ago I’d sent a picture of my new IKEA dresser with the tiniest sliver of my right foot in the corner of the frame - an obvious invitation to sext. I looked at the nudes I’d taken in preparation, my soft naked body still spilled across my bed, posed like he would walk in the room at any moment teleporting from 3,000 miles away to climb atop me with the truest gratitude.

But he didn’t teleport from 3,000 miles away to climb atop me with the truest gratitude. He didn’t even text back. It was likely because he was having sex with another woman, or maybe 5 other women, all of whom were at least 25% more boring than me and whose thoughts were at least 75% less interesting than mine, with blowjobs 50% less good. But they were also probably 100,000% geographically closer to him, which is all men care about these days.

They don’t understand the divinity of pining.

Naked on my bed, I texted Erin instead - “He watched my instagram story but did not respond to my text message. Should I do something insane that will alter the course of his life forever?”

Despite my urges to startle people into loving me, I’m actually very normal. I’m very human, unlike the milquetoast, wet-blanket, seemingly puritanical lovers I tend to take. Yes, it’s everyone else who is insane. Bereft of passion. Of course I would cut off my left pinkie finger for someone I’ve had sex with one time, it’s called being a Lover. A Romantic.

No one is romantic anymore. We should be writing each other letters about how the world turns for you my love, how the gravity between us while the oceans that barricade our touch is what moves the tides, about how the waves that lap upon your shore are my heart’s supernatural soldiers, they are the fingers of my soul, seeking you, seeking only you, they have always and forever been seeking you.

Instead we’re sending our situationships screenshots of our Hinge profiles asking if they’d swipe right. We desperately seek their approval while subtly implying they don’t have ours, not fully anyways.

It’s all so fucking stupid. We can point fingers all day at what has degraded our devotion - dating apps, porn, non-monogamy, third-wave feminism, the internet- but what’s undeniable is that hardly anyone wants to be devoted anymore, to anyone or anything other than themselves. No one wants to soften to love, wilt under the mortifying ordeal of being known. They just want a warm body, or notch on the bedpost, or a wife-as-accessory. In the same way they’d want an air-fryer, or a 100 day Wordle streak, or to buy a house.

I conveyed all of this to Erin with another dramatic text that said “His lack of passion angers me more than anything I’ve ever known. I am offering something akin to divinity and he does not give a FUCK”.

“Can we reframe this?” Erin responded.

“Sure,” I said, “I’m reframing it as I’m going to murder him with my psychic powers by exploding his penis while it’s inside someone else so that she also suffers.”

On queue, he responded right then. But he did not say “I need to see you NOW, I need to see you TONIGHT, I need to see you YESTERDAY, and I’m getting on a plane as we speak because I’ve never met anyone else with such a perfect mind and body and big gorgeous mole in the middle of their back.”

So I pocketed my phone and walked to the bar to brood alone, excited to embody the hermit archetype that brings me solace when I feel lonely. But God had other plans, and when I walked in I immediately spotted my dear friend Sarah, sitting atop the exact barstool I like to brood alone at. In no time, I was meeting her dining partner and gabbing with the two of them about our recent sexual exploits. As much as I’d wanted to get drunk and write an embarrassing blog post, this was probably a healthy pivot.

Because it was pressing, I immediately found a way to mention Secretary, the 2002 film starring Maggie Gyllenhaal as a neurotic loser who finds herself falling in love with her dominant boss James Spader through a quirked-up BDSM relationship.

I saw Secretary a couple months ago and it awakened something within me. I knew Sarah would understand my awakening because she too is what one might call a “strong woman”. I find this phrase ineffective personally, because usually people just use it to call me abrasive and stubborn. Sarah is neither of those things, but she does know what she wants, and generally seems to get it. Either way, it’s not necessarily strength. It’s just a way of handling oneself that people associate with masculinity. And therefore dominance.

It means that a lot of submissive men want to sleep with me. This annoys me because their expectation that I will want to: tie them up, slap them in the face, make them beg - reveals an irritatingly surface-level read of the type of person I am. It’s a recognition of the more public half of my personality, the most performative facet of my sexuality. Don’t get me wrong - I do love to tie/slap/force to beg. But I get to be the boss in so many real arenas, it feels a waste to assume that position in the arena of fantasy, in the singular place that one can play out the dynamics they don’t get to experience in real life.

The most seen I have felt in a while was when describing this phenomenon to a lover. They didn’t understand why I attract so many subs. “But Kenzy,” they said, “ it’s so obvious that behind the front you put up, you’re just begging to be taught a lesson.”

What watching Secretary taught me is that maybe I am seeking this lesson in the wrong places. Maybe my seemingly-complex relationship with sex and love is just a very straightforward case of masochism.

Often, I’ve thought about how deeply I crave someone to take care of me. To make all of my decisions for me. To pay my rent and make my food and carry me from the bath to the bedroom and wash my hair and bring me water and tell me exactly how to live and what to do.

Jung says that we all - subconscious or otherwise - crave a return to the womb. The one place where our life is not ours, where we needn’t even breathe for ourselves. This womb-return is the engine that powers our death drive, that feeling of wanting to jump when you stand atop a tall building. But it’s not death that we want, just the closest thing to it. Wombdom.

I struggle with control. Ironically, I guess, since apparently all I want in this life is to give it up. But for some reason my psyche white-knuckles everything it touches and forces me to be the one in charge all the time. That’s what I get for leaving the womb.

The emotional domination of a lover’s indifference towards me is sort of my final frontier. I hate it, of course. My control issues activate and I start orchestrating like crazy. I try my best to guide their hand to my leash, and when they won’t take it, I spiral. What is obsession if not an attempt to control? A neurological fallacy - “if I think about this enough, I might be able to change the outcome”.

Sarah’s friend leans over, a few Old Fashioneds in. She says “but why? Why on earth do we engage with these men who are so bad for us? Who we know will hurt us?” I tell her the most honest answer I can muster, because earlier she said she likes that I “tell it like it is”, and now I have to maintain this image of me as a straight-talking slut.

“It brings you closer to God”, I say. Grief thins the veil.

Just like James Spader’s flat palm, the spiritual spanking delivered by an unenthusiastic lover reminds us that we are not in control, we are never in control. It could be argued that all we can control is our own actions, but anyone with addictive tendencies knows that’s hardly true.

When we’re rocked with the grief of our lover behaving in a way that makes us feel like shit, we’re stripped of our ability to choose. Sure, we can choose to leave them (theoretically), but we don’t get our first choice. We don’t get to choose that they treat us right and love us back. And it reminds us, maybe, of the womb. Of being dead. Of God.

When my lovers withhold love from me it makes them god-like in the sense that I am witnessing that which I cannot possibly understand, cannot make objective meaning of. Can only mythologize, prophesize, hypothesize. Could build religions around but never prove as true.

We’ve seen God together but they won’t text me back, and only God knows why.

As a switch, I can also empathize with the desire to dominate. Where the masochist familiarizes themself with the god in other people, maybe the sadist is more seeking the god within, through their own power and control. To have a whole human being at their whim, despite that human’s supposed free will… that’s a sick pleasure that an Old Testament God would delight in.

Personally, I’m all too familiar with the god in me, or more accurately I should say The Part of God I Am - I think we’re more like blood in veins than vice versa. I could tie in communion here if I knew more about Catholicism, but I don’t really believe in god like that.

I know nothing about the Bible but I know everything about my own spirituality. It’s not my fault I see god everywhere. I don’t just see it when my face is buried in someone’s crotch, I see it when my neck is stretched towards the sky, looking up at the moon. I see it in sweet little dogs that look like baby lambs, and I see it in the horrible little drops of mystery liquid that drip off the ceiling of the subway station. It’s in everything.

But it becomes particularly potent in feelings of love and lust. I feel closest to God when I see it in someone else. The God inside me is no mystery, it’s with me all the time everywhere I go. But the God in you? I’d kill to know them.

Too much divinity through my own eyes results in the same sort of soreness I get from fucking too much with a latex condom. The condom in this metaphor being my own familiar self. Sometimes I just need to rip away the boundary between me and the rest of everything. But the boundary *is* me. So the only option is to take the whole universe within me and just sort of let it be absorbed by someone else’s whole deal. Let someone else’s Jesus take the wheel for a second. Submit to the reminder that I am in fact, not god. And while they aren’t either, when we merge we are 100% more God than we were on our own.

This is the devotion I’m talking about. The worship. And maybe that’s what I actually need. Prayer. Maybe I need a church that is not of the heart, a shrine that is not of my lover’s body. Maybe I need the 3rd step.

Sometimes I wonder if what I perceive as “going crazy” over a “crush” is actually a sort of spiritual psychosis. It’s a divine vision so powerful it blinds you. Human ears were not designed to hear the voice of God, but then your lover speaks.

The bartender that night was a very handsome albeit dorky man who turned me on every time he slammed the shaker down on the bar. Sarah said “isn’t it funny that the more you know about someone the harder it is to fantasize about them?”

She underestimates how powerfully I can drown out reality with my fantasies. For example, my crush doesn’t lack passion, he’s just wise, measured. Balanced. It’s not that he’s not into me, he’s just… wise. Measured. Balanced. LEFT brain. It’s not that he isn’t a hedonist like me, he’s just… ummm… wise. Measured. Balanced. In my head he’s still that romantic I’m looking for. But I can’t fuck a guy who only lives in my head. The god-channel is too sore.

I thought about that Anna Freud quote, “in our dreams we can have our eggs cooked exactly how we want them, but we can't eat them.” I imagined my crush sunny-side up, broken yolk spilling over a piece of rye toast. My stomach growled.

I said goodbye to Sarah and ordered a cheeseburger even though I don’t eat beef, which is something I like to say in between the times that I eat beef. They forgot to bring me a napkin but I tucked in anyways, licking mayo and ketchup and meaty juices from the corners of my mouth. I thought about that Anthony Bourdain quote, about how adventurous, messy, passionate eaters are better lovers. I think this must be true. I think that generally, the way we are with things is the same as the way we are with other things.

I thought about my complex relationship with food, about how I deprive myself of it because I want it so bad. I thought about my complex relationship with love, about how I pretend I don’t want it, following self-imposed celibacy clauses only to relapse and binge on the human equivalents of low-calorie ice cream. So afraid of what I want, I can only seek it in someone who will never give it to me.

Unhealthy on both fronts. But god-seeking. Or dopamine-seeking if you’re a scientist, though what is god if not a chemical?

The cheeseburger was perfect. Satisfying. Nothing like fucking the text man for texts. But it ended. Almost as soon as it started. Fries still littered my plate, but the burger was gone forever. It was inside me, being digested, alchemizing into shit. Which would be a depressing metaphor if alchemy was not the breath of God, regardless of what the thing starts or ends as.

Destruction and creation,

creation through destruction.

I wanted to eat it again.

I spoke with an ordained minister friend of mine about this, asking him why no one wanted to make God with me. He said “they’re afraid of losing their comfortable agnosticism”. Of course. Why would you want to admit that you aren’t in charge, not really, when you could instead believe that you have absolutely any control over the things that happen to you? Why would you want to give up that power? Why would you want to ask your crush for a nude if they could say no? Fall in love if you could get hurt? Make God when doing so would unravel the psychological safety net your ego has created based on the concept of the self?

Unlike those people, I love the reminder. Loosening my grip, I can finally relax. Even if it leaves me free falling. Because when I hit the ground, I know it’s going to hurt so good.

The next morning, I woke up with a horrible stomach ache. Erin would say “God is punishing me”, but I’m starting to believe that the painful consequence of a divine experience is in fact part of the divinity. As I sat on the toilet paying for last night’s burger, I prayed. Over and over again I repeated: “I accept the things I cannot control. I accept the things I cannot control. I accept the things I cannot control.”