I have been leading a double life. I decided to write this blog so that the people who know my public façade will get to know my other life, which I often keep a secret, although this secret other life is actually the real me. My public façade life isn’t bad at all. In fact it would be the envy of many people. I run a landscape design and install business, mostly from a comfy home office, and have a team of the best, most skilled landscape artisans I could imagine. They are also great people. I live in a nice, residential San Francisco neighborhood called the Westwood Highlands, with narrow, tree lined streets that curve around hills, views of the Pacific and hills to the south. On many evenings, like 3 or 4 per week, you can find me hanging out in dance halls. Not just any dance halls but milongas, where the main form of dance is the passionate, lusty Argentine tango, which has been a love of mine for the past ten years. Here I meet up with many acquaintances, other tango addicts who love to glide around the floor in tender embrace to the stately sounds 1940’s of Argentine tango orchestras like di Sarli and Troilo, and compare the styles of the latest maestros who have come to town. This is also my main opportunity to meet new blood, or fresh meat, i.e. females who come with a built-in common ground, the desire to hook up, at least for three minutes at a time, with men who enjoy the above-mentioned pastimes.
But this, as I said, is my public façade life- the life that I tell people about, the admittedly unique but still fairly acceptable life that I can describe to, say, tango partners, women I meet at cocktail parties, landscape design clients, and my relatives. My other life, the secret one that is actually the real me, is that of a sensual researcher.
The reason I keep this a secret is not that there is anything shameful or immoral about it. It is the fact that I feel it is almost impossible for people to truly understand without going through the twenty two years of research and intense experience that I have gone through to reach my present level of understanding in these particular matters of sensuality, sexuality, and friendships with women. In fact, to even consider casually telling anyone about this life is to go headlong against the grain of so many viewpoints that all of us are born into, the viewpoints of “mother culture” to borrow a term from author Daniel Quinn.
If you are wondering what some of these universally supported viewpoints are, think of the things you have always believed about sex, or the things your friends and role models believe about and male/female relationships. Do you not believe that men are the aggressors in sex, that men want sex but women want love, or at least they want to be in love before having sex? Do you think that men have a sex drive? Do you believe that women have their best orgasms from fucking? Do you think of orgasm as a gradual rise in sensation followed by a steep drop or “going over the edge”? Are you convinced that the best sex happens when two people orgasm simultaneously? Do you feel that a relationship based on sex will probably fail if the couple neglects cultivation of higher level interests and pursuits? Do you think that being lovers or boyfriend and girlfriend are higher forms of relationship than friendship?
If you hold any of these beliefs, you are not alone. I’m not saying that these viewpoints are universally held, but I will say that if you are a human being with some connection to western or eastern society, there is an excellent chance that you were born into these viewpoints, and that the fabric of your existence is woven from the threads of them.
But what I have discovered in these 22 years of research is that none of these assumptions are in any way true. Yet they stand like a fortress around us, limiting our experience and keeping us from living pleasurable lives. This is the fortress that I am up against when I tell someone about my life as a sensual researcher.
In this blog I will tell you about my quite unusual, frankly-hard-to-believe, day-to-day existence living in a tribe of sensual researchers. I will attempt to portray the incredible depth of the relationships, the remarkable profundity of sexual gratification, the diversity of sensual experience, and the sheer enormity of the fun that we experience together every day.
‘What about the challenges?’ you must be asking. They exist and I am not going to keep these from you. But in the process of telling you about them, I will also be indoctrinating you into a world based on pleasurable, winning viewpoints. If I am successful, you will see these “challenges” in a new way. Problems are really games that you deny you enjoy playing.