I Was An Emotional Prostitute Part 54

I don’t fully know how to explain this, but when a woman becomes intimate with a man, she can sense how he really feels about her and just how safe she is with him, whether she realizes it consciously or not. From the start of our intimacy, I knew at some level that I was loved, cherished, respected and safe with him, even though it took me a while to realize that consciously. Knowing those things had a lot to do with my ability to trust him enough to become fully open about the emotional pain and junk in my life.

Now, I don’t want to give anyone the idea that our relationship has been trouble free. Believe me, it hasn’t. We’ve had arguments and a couple of times we’ve yelled at each other. But, we worked through the problems and are better off for it. The key here though, is that we were both willing to work through the problems and forgive each other.

The one really big argument we had occurred on a night when David went out with a friend, Karen. I had told him before he went out that I needed him that night. He told me he’d be home by a specific time and we would be able to spend some time together then. I had a feeling before David walked out the door that he wouldn’t be home at the time he said. He was originally supposed to just take her out for coffee, but Karen called him at the last minute and asked if he’d mind taking her to a shelter where some people she knew held a service and they might need her to play the piano.

When David didn’t come home within 15 or 20 minutes of the time he said he’d be home, I tried to call him on his cell phone. When he didn’t answer, I started to get upset. By the time David got home, over an hour after he said he would, I was furious. I waited up for him in his bedroom and confronted him the instant he walked in. David tried to explain, but I was too angry to really listen. Finally he told me that if I was so needy I couldn’t wait, then I might as well walk out the door and not come back. As a man, he could not handle that kind of neediness on a regular basis. That’s when I told him that I had been sitting on my needs for a few days because every time I’d thought we were going to have time together, something interfered. He understood and I finally calmed down enough to be reasonable about the situation. Since that night, I have not allowed things to interfere with getting my needs met, unless I truly have no choice. I also learned to express my needs to David, even when we couldn’t be together for some reason. I learned to tell him what I’m feeling and to express my emotions. This all helped prevent the kind of buildup of emotional need, which fueled our biggest argument.

There have also been times when we’ve argued because no matter how hard we tried, we seemed to be misunderstanding one another.

Sometimes David chewed me out for things I should be doing. For instance, I never asked him to pray for me when I had a headache. Given that God had not healed me when people prayed for me before about my headaches; I never thought to ask David. I do now.

A lot has happened since the day I decided to move into David’s house. I’ve changed and in the process, I also learned about living with a man who knows who he is and is capable of being the man of the house; not a wimp who can’t stand on his own two feet, much less be a tower of strength for a spouse. I learned that even that kind of man has his own set of pressures and weaknesses, which means there are times when he needs someone to lean on, but this isn’t an all the time thing. I learned the reality of the line in the Wedding Song, which states “woman draws her strength from man and gives it back again.” For that is one that has been happening for me since I moved in. It’s been difficult at times, but it’s also been wonderful.

I Was An Emotional Prostitute Part 53

One of the most continually amazing things to me about living with David is our physical relationship. The wonderful thing is how much it has helped me to be with someone who is more concerned about me and my needs, even though his are not completely fulfilled. David and I can be physically intimate, but not have sex and my need for intimacy is met. He never expects me to fulfill his needs or desires. Not that he isn’t tempted and not that I haven’t offered, there are times when we both would have liked nothing better, but we know it isn’t right so we’re careful about how far we go, David more so than me. My experience with men has been that they want their needs and desires fulfilled, period. They may try to fulfill mine, but they are always concerned with theirs.

One man in particular, Randy, got upset with me one night when I was too tired to have sex with him. We’d had sex that morning, even though I had a bad headache and by the end of the day I was exhausted. So much so that the mere thought of having sex was tiring. After I refused, he thought about it for a while and finally realized that I’d given all I had to give that morning. He apologized, but it still hurt. That wasn’t the first time he’d insisted on having sex when I was too tired. That was simply the one time I truly put my foot down and said, “No, I really am too tired.”

David is the exception to the rule when it comes to his needs and desires. He is almost always there for me when I need him. If something makes it impossible for him to be there, we talk about it. It’s also surprising to me just how important our intimacy is to me. The intimacy that happens between us is more than a physical thing; it is an expression of my emotional state. It almost always happens as something new in me opens up and becomes free. Being intimate with David means being free to be me and express myself in ways I’ve never been allowed to. If that means I need to lay in his arms and cry, then I lay in his arms and cry. If I need to be physically intimate, then we’re physically intimate except for having sex. By giving me the emotional freedom to be me, David unlocked the door to my real self, which had been locked up for way too many years. I used to wonder if I would ever find out what was really under all the emotional junk I’d gotten buried under.

I’ve also learned that just cuddling with David can make me want to be more intimate with him. There have been times when I’ve gone into his room and laid next to him in bed, solely for the comfort of cuddling. As I lay there with him, I will feel my desire flare up. It surprised me the first couple of times it happened as I wasn’t expecting to feel that way.

Another interesting thing to me is that as I’ve opened up and allowed all my emotional stuff to come to the surface and be expressed (even when I don’t understand it or know what it is), I’ve become less needy. This means I don’t have such a strong need or desire to cuddle or be so intimate with David because for the first time in my life, a lot of those needs are being met. Not that the physical side our relationship is any less important: I still want and need to be hugged and kissed on a regular basis, it’s just that I don’t need as much of the more intimate type of touch.

Another thing about being intimate with David is that we almost always talk afterwards and sometimes during our intimacy, about what being intimate does for a woman and how it affects her overall. It was during one of these discussions that I fully realized that Dennis, the young man I had once had a crush on, had raped me as child. For years, I thought that because I gave in to him, I had “consented” to having sex with him, even though I felt pressured and didn’t really want to. David and I were lying side by side on his bed one afternoon talking after being intimate, and he asked me an interesting question. He asked what it was like for a woman to freely give herself to a man for the first time. I started to cry because it was then that I realized I had never been allowed to freely make that choice. David just held me and let me cry it out. I will someday know what it means to give myself freely without reservation both physically and emotionally to my next husband, but unfortunately, the first time I gave myself physically I didn’t make the choice freely.  

Often the talks David and I have during and after our intimate moments open up whatever area is on the surface at the moment. More than once David would say something, which would set off a chain reaction in me that opened something up. He also frequently talked about how different women would be towards their husbands and life in general if they were as satisfied with their relationships as I am with David. Another time he asked me what I thought I would have been like if I’d known I was so easy to please. The first thought which went through my head was, “I would have become a nympho.”

This led to the realization that I would probably have had sex with even more men and been used by them in the process therefore piling on even more hurt. I started crying. David quickly realized what was happening and just held me. He has never made me feel like I can’t cry immediately after being intimate with him or even during. If I start to cry, we stop and he lets me cry. Often in those instances, we continue our intimacy at another time.

The intimacy David and I shared gave me an environment in which I felt loved, respected and most of all safe in ways I had never experienced before. Not knowing who I am made me uncomfortable in virtually any social situation and as a result, I never felt truly safe with anyone, till I moved in with him.

I Was An Emotional Prostitute Part 52

Even now, situations arise in which my mother somehow puts a new hurt on top of the old festering wounds she has already inflicted. I saw a notice at church regarding a women’s retreat to be held at the end of March one year. The contact for information person was my mother. That almost made decide not to even look into it, but look into it I did. I spoke with her at church that morning and found out that because I would be registering so late, if I went at all, it would cost me an extra $5. She said that she hoped I would come and that she would put the information in the mail to me in the next day or so. That Wednesday, there was no sign of the information I needed. I told David that if it didn’t arrive by the next day, I didn’t think I’d bother going. The next day on my way home, I saw mother’s car on the side of the freeway and stopped to see if she and her husband, who was with her, were ok. They were, the car had been making funny noises and they had stopped so he could make some adjustments and they could get home. While we talked, I asked her about the information she was supposed to mail to me. She said that she planned to “drop by” with it the next day on her way home. I thought, “uh huh. You’re just doing this so you can see Caleb outside of church.”

As I drove away from mother and her husband, I started crying and got angry with myself. Why did I stop to see if they needed help, when I really didn’t care to spend any time with either of them? I suddenly realized that despite everything I feel about them, it is not in my nature to stop caring altogether, nor can I pass up someone I know who may be in need of help.

That night when I got home, I told David what had happened. He agreed with me about mother’s probable motive. I called her and left a message on her machine telling her not to bother, as I wasn’t going to go to the retreat. She didn’t call back and ask, “why?” nor did she ask me in church the next time I saw her, which happened to be her birthday, but then I didn’t stand around in church where she could find me either. She did try to come over to greet my son during the worship service, but I shook my head at her and she backed off. I didn’t fully realize it at that time, but I had made a decision to keep her as far away from my son as possible, even in church, until she and I work out the difficulties in our relationship. Unfortunately, my son may pay the price in the end, but then again, I can’t trust her to follow my wishes in regards to things that concern him, unless I’m right there. The other thing is, that I was hoping this would force her to come to me and say something, which would allow me to tell her why I was doing the things, I did.

It didn’t work. Mother did apologize for not getting the information to me sooner, then she mentioned the probable dates for next year’s retreat along with her hope that I would go. I told her I wasn’t sure I wanted to. The one thing that made me hesitate in the first place was the probability of having to have more contact with her than I really want. At a retreat, there aren’t a whole lot of ways to avoid someone.

The next time she called me, it was to tell me that my insurance had been cancelled. I learned that I’d been driving around without insurance on my car for just over a month. The insurance company sent the renewal notices to mother’s address. Rather than forwarding them to me or putting them in my church mailbox, she assumed they were ads and sent them back. When they kept coming she finally realized they might be important and opened one up. That’s when she called me and said something about it. I was furious. Then to top things off, the insurance company wouldn’t re-instate my policy because it had been over 30 days.

I called mother back and yelled at her. I told her that thanks to her the insurance company would not renew my insurance. She told me it wasn’t her fault that I hadn’t told them my new address and I told her that she could have at least taken it with her to church and put it in my church mailbox, and hadn’t it occurred to her that because it was insurance related, it could be important? I also told her to put the shoe on the other foot. I could bet anything you wanted that if I had done that to her, she would have been angry with me and said things like, “You couldn’t take the time to bring it to church and put it in my church mailbox?”

Yet, she seems to think that it’s fine to not extend me the same courtesy. If she had not known where to find me and how to reach me, then yes, it would be completely my problem, but that’s not the case and obviously she can’t be bothered with such a thing.

I also learned that I can’t spend any time with my mother and my son, Caleb in the same place outside of church. I had occasion to do so at my niece, Raychel’s birthday party. I found myself competing with my mother for my son’s attention. When I realized what I was doing, I stopped, but I was so tense the rest of the day that I even bummed a cigarette from my sister-in-law even though I no longer smoked.

The next morning was Sunday and although I wanted to go to church, I woke up with such a nasty migraine from grinding my teeth over the tension that I was unable to go. I got up and took two Excedrin at 3:30 a.m. then went back to bed. When that didn’t work, I took one more around 7:30 a.m. Two hours later I took two more. When the first two don’t ease it, I know I’m in bad shape. David took us out to breakfast. Although that helped, I was in no condition to go to church. So, David took Caleb to church while I came home and took a much-needed nap on the couch. Thankfully, I had recovered by the time they got home.

I Was An Emotional Prostitute Part 51

David and I knew from the start, we might fall in love. And for a short time it happened. We even talked about getting married.  However, a woman in our church, who had no way of knowing what was happening, came to me at church one morning and asked to speak with me alone. We went to a secluded corner where she told me she felt she had a word from the Lord for me. God told me to “trust Him” and made it clear that he had someone for me. He didn’t tell me not to love David or marry him; just that he had someone for me. As a result, David and I talked it over and decided not to get married. As time went on, we began to see the wisdom in what God said. I love him very much, as a friend. I know he loves me too. However, we both know we’re not what the other needs. There are still times when I am drawn to David as I see things in him that I want and need in my next husband, but in my heart, I know it wouldn’t work between us. Not only that, I love another man very much. So much so, that I want only what’s best for him, regardless of the cost to me. This means that if he would be happier married to another woman, so be it. His name is Dorn.

I met Dorn when I was about 12 or so while he was staying with his aunt in part to help her with his young cousins. I don’t remember why I and my brothers were staying with her, but I do remember developing a huge crush on him. He didn’t know it, but everyone else did. Then circumstances in our lives made it so that we lost contact with each other and I forgot about him completely, although I never forgot about his aunt and cousins.

Then several years later, an interesting set of circumstance brought us back into each other lives. My brother, Mike stopped at a fast food restaurant for lunch, which apparently is a rare thing for him. As he was standing in line, he noticed a woman in another line who looked familiar. She’d been looking at him, too. Then they realized they knew each other. It was Dorn’s cousin, Elaina. They talked and swapped contact information, which included mother’s phone number that she passed on to her mother.

Several days later I came home to a strange car in the driveway, which annoyed me as I had to park on the street and then walk up the steep driveway to the house. After being on my feet all day at work, I was tired. When I got up to the house, I could see the back of a heavyset figure standing in front of the sliding glass door. When I opened it, his Aunt Liz turned around. I said, “Liz!”

She said, “Hello.”

Then we talked for a bit and she told me that Dorn was living in Federal way. I asked how he was as I frantically thought, “Dorn? Who’s Dorn? Oh, yeah, her nephew upon whom I used to have a crush.”

She told me she might bring him by someday. I said, “I’d like that.”

Shortly after that she left. In the days following, I tried to picture seeing him at the house after all those years, but I just couldn’t. A few days later I received a call at work from my mother to tell me that Dorn had called and asked for me.

I said, “He asked for me?”

“Yes.” I was surprised as I hadn’t expected that. He called again after I got home. There was no awkwardness. It was is if we’d always been friends. As time went by and we got to know each other all over again, I began to love him. I didn’t realize it at first. In fact it was David who pointed it out to me one night when we were in his study talking. It took me about three days to adjust to the idea as I felt like I’d been hit on the head with a load of bricks, but I realized he was right. I did and do love Dorn.

The love I feel for him hasn’t died or even lessened in any way. It feels as strong as it did when I first realized what I felt for him wasn’t just friendship. So until that issue is resolved one way or another, no way is my heart free to love David or anyone else for that matter. Part of me wants to; sometimes I think I love David that way, but only for a moment and usually during our most intimate moments because my heart is so involved there. Otherwise no, I just can’t, as my heart isn’t free to right now. There have been times when I wished I didn’t love Dorn. Partly because he made it clear that he didn’t think it was possible for us to ever be more than friends. Also because I think it would be easier on me to not love someone who may never feel the same way. I have learned from this that you cannot control what your heart feels. You can only control how you deal with those feelings.

Loving someone like that and not being able to express it is very difficult and painful in its way. This has helped me to understand how David felt when he used to tell me that he loved me so much that he wanted to kiss me. It has also given me a greater understanding of how much God loves us, but won’t violate our free will and how hard that must be on Him to have so much love for us but be unable to express it.

I Was An Emotional Prostitute Part 50

When we discovered that I love to garden and I have a very green thumb, he bought me the compost bins I wanted and a greenhouse. When the greenhouse got blown away in a windstorm, he helped me find another to replace it with. Both times he helped me build them without complaining that I was creating more work for him. Even though the second one had directions that were about as clear as mud and we had to figure out a lot of things by looking at the diagrams and experimenting with how the pieces fit together for ourselves. There were times when I would have given up on the second greenhouse and returned it, if it were not for the fact that it had the tallest ceiling in it of anything we found suitable for our situation, but I really hated working on it. There were times when David would kind of have to push me into getting out there and working on it.

About the time we got to a good stopping place on the second greenhouse, I realized why it had been so tough for me to work on it, even though it was primarily being built for me to work in. Something about the situation was causing an emotional issue to surface. One I didn’t even know was there.

All my life my mother has treated me as an unpaid servant. As long as I did what she wanted and conformed to her ideas about how my life should be, things were fine. If I tried to be myself or deviate from her ideas in any way, I was treated rebellious. I’ve often said that even now my mother would control me if allowed to.

What really caused me to look at the being my mother’s servant was a lady who owned one of my favorite hamburger restaurants. David and I stopped in there the day we got the main parts of the second greenhouse up, for a celebratory milkshake. The owner mentioned that she’d met my mother one night when she had my son with her. She said that my mother seemed like a nice lady. I just kind of went, “mm hmm.”

For some reason I told her about my mother’s controlling me as I was growing up because the next thing she said was that I was right, my mother was very controlling. When I told her my name was “Mayone (my own)” she looked at me and said, “That’s too possessive. You should change it.”

I realized she was right. I started working on a new name right away. At first I thought I’d just use my middle name, “Marie” and not bother with a complete first name change. Then I realized that although “Marie” is a nice name, it doesn’t really suit me. Not to mention that if I kept my original first name, it would leave me open to someone thinking I am a possession. So, I did some internet research about names. I wanted something unique and hopefully something that didn’t start with the letter “M.” I found some great choices and some interesting choices, but nothing that really seemed to fit me. David suggested I try some combination of my first and middle names, so I started playing with that idea.

Some of the names I came across online or came up with on my own were nice and some were silly. It was an interesting process which took longer than I hoped it would. I just kept reminding myself that whatever I chose, I would be stuck with for the rest of my life. It took me over a year to settle on the name “Wynter.” Originally I was going to keep my middle name, but it didn’t really work with “Wynter,” So I changed that, too. 

David has also taught me that lovemaking doesn’t have to mean intercourse. That caressing and touching and exploring each other’s body is lovemaking too. Actually, making love doesn’t have to be sexual at all. A man bringing home flowers for no reason and saying, “I love you” is a form of making love. Or a woman who fixes her husband’s favorite dishes just to please him is a form of making love.

Also, because of how intimate we have been with each other and because of how I feel about David in general, I tended to be jealous when he’s gone out with another woman. I didn’t like the way I felt and it certainly didn’t seem logical as he wasn’t my husband or even my boyfriend and never will be. However, it was how I felt.

I knew from the start that there was a woman, Karen, whom he’d met at a second church he attended that he was drawn to. He didn’t know why, but he went out with her a couple of times in an effort to figure it out. Every time he was out with her, I missed him and to some extent, a part of me resented her and the fact that she got some of his time.

One of the best things though, is that as I went through these changes and my emotions came to the surface, David was generally quick to reassure me that what I felt was normal and natural. To hear that after years of being told that my emotions were wrong or I was too sensitive or my emotions were out of proportion to the situation, especially the negative ones, is reassuring. Something I’ve needed for as long as I can remember.

I finally realized why I felt so jealous when David talked about going out with other women, regardless of who. The reason is, that for the first time in my life, I am a priority to someone, as best as they can. Not even my own mother ever made me feel like a priority to her. Neither did my ex-husband or the boyfriend before him.

Before my husband and I married, we had sex. Immediately afterward I started shaking and shivering as if I was cold, but I didn’t know why. It only happened the one time, but after we were married, the first time we had sex, I cried when it was over.  I didn’t know why then any more than I knew why I shook the first time. Pat asked me what was wrong. I told him I thought it had to do with the “beauty” of having sex after you were married. I didn’t know how to tell him I didn’t understand my tears. After our divorce, I waited several months before dating again. When I did get involved with a man again and had sex with him, I shook and shivered when it was over. It happened with every man the first time I had sex with him. Anytime we had sex after that there was no shaking. I never understood why I shook and shivered until one night I had a dream.

I was sound asleep one night when I started having a wild dream. I dreamt that David was angry and frustrated about something. He walked into his bedroom and I followed him so I could listen to him and try to help if possible. We sat on either side of his bed and he had his back to me. I reached out and started to rub his back, as there really wasn’t much else I could do for him. Pretty soon we were kissing and then we were having sex. In my mind I started fighting the dream. I was thinking, “No! This isn’t right. This isn’t what God wants! No! No! No! NO!”

Then I woke up. I looked at the clock and it read about 3:45 a.m. I wanted to tell David about my dream, but he wasn’t going to be up for another 45 minutes or so. I fell back into a restless sleep for another 30 minutes or so. Then I got up to go to the bathroom. The moment I sat up, I started to shake and shiver as if I was cold, but I wasn’t. I did what I needed to do and then crawled in next to David. He noticed me shivering as I adjusted his blankets to cover me. He told me to crawl in and get warm. I crawled beneath the covers, cuddled up and almost immediately stopped shivering. That’s when I realized I was emotionally needy.

When David’s alarm went off, I didn’t even hear it. He got up turned it off, ate some breakfast and came back to bed because he’d realized I needed him that morning. After he satisfied my emotional need I told him about my dream and how I used to shiver and shake like that after having sex with the other men in my life. He told me that it was my body’s way of telling me that my emotional needs were not being met. I knew he was right the moment he said it. Those men had not met my emotional needs. They probably couldn’t have given that I didn’t understand how I needy I was.

It’s not just my emotional need for physical affection that gets met either. David will do things that are just for me. For instance, when I had my 40^th birthday, he bought me a cake at Costco that I’d wanted to try.

For his 60^th birthday, he took his vacation and then he and I went several places and tried new restaurants with just the two of us; and I got to choose the restaurants!

When appliances in the house needed replacing, we went looking together and I made the final choice. I always chose things that cost more, but would last for a long time. Such as the stove: its professional quality designed for the home and I love it. So are my new crock pot and the clothes washer.

I Was An Emotional Prostitute part 48

If you’ve read this far into my story, I’m sure you’re wondering if David and I were physically intimate. In other words, “Did we have sex?”

Yes. A couple of times, but God spoke to David and said, “I understand, but you two need to back down. This is not what I brought you together for.”

We stopped. It wasn’t easy and there were times when we pushed it, but each time God spoke to David to remind him. About the third or fourth time though, God also told him that if we didn’t do as He said, He would pull us apart. God did allow us other physical intimacies to satisfy our natural sexual needs.

Our physical relationship is based on need, not lust or just because we want to have fun. God made that clear early on, as well. That hasn’t been easy, either.

The thing that has impressed me and helped me the most is that David has always put me first in our physical relationship. I have never felt as though he was satisfying me so he could meet his own needs as so many men tend to do. This is turn has made me feel even safer with him than I ever have with any other man, including my ex-husband. Some of the men in my past did try to make sure I was satisfied, but there was always an underlying, “if I take care of her, I can get what I want.” I never truly felt like it was purely for me, whereas with David, I get the sense that’s he’s concerned with my pleasure. His can wait till he knows I’m content. There’s no need to hurry on his account.

Another thing that helps me is that he’s never asked me to do anything I’m not comfortable with or enjoy doing. We discussed those things once and I was pleasantly surprised to learn he didn’t like them either.

I think it also helped that for years before I moved in with him, David had been telling me that he loved me. Not of his own accord or feelings, but because God had given him a love for me that at times he had a hard time containing. During those years, he’d sometimes tell me that he wanted to kiss me, but because he knew I wasn’t ready. he didn’t. He never even tried to violate my boundaries.

God used our physical relationship to help heal part of me emotionally and sexually as those parts of me have been the most damaged. Because of our intimacy God exposed a part of me, which felt like I was a prostitute. I’ve known for a long time there was a part of me that felt that way. Once, when I was in high school, I dreamt that I was in the part of our town where you’re most likely to find prostitutes and that I was wearing a dress, which had been crocheted in such a fashion as to leave huge openings in the shape of sunflowers. On this occasion, we were just starting to become intimate, when David looked in my eyes and saw “her” the part of me, which felt like a prostitute. He stopped everything right there and we sat up and talked about “her” presence in me. The big reason “she” got exposed right then was that I was behind in my rent to David and it bothered me, even though it didn’t bother him. He saw that in my view, I only had one way to pay him, and that was with my body.

Shortly after God exposed “her” presence in my life, “she” was driven out. I sat down and wrote a note to David in a card, which said something about “understanding being a fountain,” and expressed my heart regarding his understanding. This was enough to finish driving “her” out of my life.

Also because of our intimacy, I have opened up to David in ways I don’t think I could have or would have otherwise. I’ve allowed myself to express the pain, shame, disappointment, and anger I’ve felt over different circumstances in my life. I could not and would not have done this had I not felt completely safe with David and able to trust him. The physical intimacy we shared showed me how much he cared for me and respected me, which in turn made me feel very safe. His sensitivity to my needs and wants and his respect for my boundaries and comfort levels during our intimate times are the things which allowed me to know that I was loved and respected in ways which I had never experienced before.

The physical intimacy we share isn’t the most important part of our relationship. It simply allows me to know that David truly loves me and will not take advantage of me, which allows an emotional intimacy to blossom between us.

When a woman is physically intimate with a man, she finds out real quick whether he’s being honest with her about his feelings or he’s doing what he has to do so he can get what he wants. The physical intimacy between David and I allows me to know he loved me as he never seeks to please himself only. This has also been difficult for me because as the woman in me came to life, I found myself becoming more sensitive to being touched, caressed and kissed by a man who really loves me and in turn that makes me want more. Caressing me can now arouse me in ways I never thought possible for me. I’ve heard about women who could be aroused by being caressed but never thought of myself as one of them.