If you’re in the Fox Point neighborhood these days, you should know there’s somebody on the lookout for a new pod.
“Dating was hard enough before you had to find someone worthy of inviting into your bunker.”
He wasn’t looking for a boyfriend. Just someone he could let off some steam with while he waited for the pandemic to expire.
“We had gone on– I want to say four or five dates when it started, but nothing had turned physical yet. Some kissing; that was it. I like to go slow at first. I wasn’t looking for a relationship either. I’m one of those guys who thinks he’s married to his job, but he’s the same way, which is why we started connecting in the first place. We both liked going out and doing things, but neither one of us wanted anything serious. Dates and fun. That was it.”
That was it.
“You can’t do that anymore though, because now, even if you’re using protection, one night stands are a public health crisis.”
Unless you’re willing to go all in.
“I still wasn’t willing to say ‘boyfriends,’ but I knew there was no way I was going to make it two years without physical contact. I had friends saying they could do it, and I thought, ‘They’ll last for three months and then summer will get here, and they’ll be over the whole thing and they’ll be twice as reckless.’ I wanted to come up with a better solution.”
So he pitched the idea of a pod to the guy he was casually dating.
“He thought it was a great idea. I thought it was a great idea. Cool. We’re good to go.”
Everything was going well.
“For the first month.”
For the first month.
“It’s just that thing where you get sick of someone. I’m guilty of it. We’re all guilty of it. I got bored with him, and normally, I would move on. Because that’s what you do. But we had done the whole isolating, he works from home, I work from home, not seeing other people, doing all of that. We waited so many days before we took things to the next level. It was this whole process, and now I have to do that all over again with someone else? I didn’t have the energy for that.”
It soon became clear that he wasn’t the only one feeling this way.
“He made it clear to me that he was also no longer interested in me, but we both were stuck in this way that– It’s interesting, because it’s usually the way you get stuck in a relationship, but we weren’t in a relationship, we were supposed to be just having fun and helping each other out, and now that wasn’t happening anymore.”
But, because the needs that led them to this arrangement weren’t going anywhere, they pressed on.
“The sex was great. Even when we got sick of each other, we still had great sex. So that was one more reason not to throw the whole thing out the window. We just kept hanging out, following the rules of the pod we created, but it became this thing where we were openly hostile to each other the entire time we were hanging out.”
You might wonder if that made the sex less enjoyable or–
“Way more enjoyable. Way more. Have you ever had sex with someone you really dislike but still find attractive? It’s so hot.”
Hate sex is known to (sometimes) be the hottest kind of sex, that’s true.
“It’s true.”
But then he started to suspect that his pod partner was opening up other options.
“I heard from a mutual friend that he was talking with someone else about starting a pod, and I confronted him about it. This is weird for me, because–What can I accuse him of? Cheating? We’re not exclusive in the sense that we care about each other and made a commitment to each other. It’s strictly about health and safety.”
His podmate confessed that he was only planning on seeing the other guy once they agreed to form their own pod, and then he was going to leave the pod he was in, pointing out that things had become too toxic.
“Right, but where does that leave me?”
Strangely enough, they didn’t stop seeing each other after that. Instead, he began looking for a new pod, and when his pod buddy’s back-up plan fell through, it became a race to see who could get into a new pod the fastest. But don’t worry, they weren’t dumb enough to keep having sex as all of this was going on.
“We were definitely having sex the entire time.”
Of course they were still having sex. This column isn’t called Good Decisions, is it?
“He ended up moving to Atlanta at the beginning of the year. He wanted a change. That tells you everything you need to know about him. The dumbass moved to one of the worst COVID spots in the entire country because he wanted to shake things up. Why are the stupid ones always the best in bed?”
As for him, he hasn’t found a new pod-lover yet, but that might be for the best.
“I went from thinking I couldn’t live without sex this whole time to resenting sex for making me act like such a #$%-ing idiot, so who knows? I might be able to hold out until all of this is over.”
He will not be able to hold out.
“I’m not going to be able to hold out. Even as I was saying it, I knew it wasn’t true.”
We’re all telling ourselves lies these days, aren’t we?
“Things are bleak out there.”
Lies about what we can handle and how long we can handle it and what we’re comfortable with and how safe we’re willing to be.
“I’m right in Fox Point, gays all around me, and I can’t find a decent one to watch horror movies and hook up with once a week. I’d even let him keep the mask on.”
While part of me thinks that what we’ve learned about the people around us has been startling, lately it seems like what we’ve learned about ourselves can be even more frustrating.
“Before this, I would have thought I had way more self-control than I do. They better start working on a pill that gives you pandemic amnesia, because I want to forget all of this.”
So if you’re near Fox Point and you’d down to potentially make some mistakes you can forget post-pandemic, have I got a pod for you…
Disclaimer: The In Providence column is a slice of life in Providence based on true stories. Each column may include elements of creative non-fiction. See our story on that concept here:https://motifri.com/in-providence-creative-writing-taking-on-the-burden-of-the-truth/
