(This is the final part of a series I've been writing here over the last couple of weeks, examining the issues of addiction and co-dependence as it relates to my own life; here are part 1 and part 2, for those who may have missed them. As with the other parts, today's entry gets into my sex life in quite graphic detail, and is obviously not appropriate for relatives and others who may get upset reading about such things; and I would especially like to re-emphasize today that my ex-girlfriend's opinions regarding these subjects might be profoundly different than my own, and that I am in no way attempting to "speak" for her.)

Okay, so a little backstory, for those who need it...

A couple of weeks ago I ended up re-watching the movie Auto Focus, a scarily accurate portrayal of the real life of actor and sex addict Bob Crane. And that in turn prompted me to write a couple of essays on the movie as well, including my opinions when it comes to the subjects of sexual addiction and co-dependence, many of which are of course atypical of the norm and even controversial, as my opinions tend to get no matter what the subject. And so those entries, just like all the other ones here, inspired a number of nice emails and a number of nasty ones, with the nasty ones in particular generally asking me where I got off, thinking that I have the right to talk about addiction and co-dependency here in ways that a lot of others disagree with. And so that prompted me to write yet another series of entries, detailing my own real history when it comes to things like drug addiction, sexual addiction and co-dependency, and how these experiences have led me to the opinions I now hold on the subject.

The first two entries were simple enough (or at least were fairly straightforward to write), because they dealt primarily with me and my own private experiences regarding all this stuff; but now we're to the point where I start talking about my ex-girlfriend W., which is where things start getting a lot more complicated, and which is why I put off this entry for so long. Because the fact is that both W and I were self-admitted sex addicts before even meeting - mine dealing with porn, W's dealing with a whole host of issues - and we both knew this about the other before starting our relationship. Yet our relationship itself turned out to be this time of intense sexual exploration between the two of us, including the first experiences for both of us regarding water sports (peeing on your lover and/or getting peed on), BDSM (mental and/or physical domination and submission between two lovers), having sex in front of strangers, watching strangers have sex in front of us, filming ourselves having sex, sharing these videos with the general public, and a whole host of other activities.

We were never shy about sharing all this stuff when it was actually happening, which is why I don't mind mentioning it again; I mean, the whole reason we met in the first place was because we were both doing confessional online journals at the time, so it was important to both of us to try to still maintain that confessionality even while dating. (Although I admit that we had a series of rules about our blogs back then as well, that helped quite a bit with it all - like, never mention an argument we'd had until we'd resolved it on our own first, never use our blogs to communicate things to each other that we hadn't first done face-to-face, etc. By the way, if you and your romantic partner are yourselves dual bloggers, I highly recommend working out some rules like this regarding your blogs and your relationship - such a thing helped immensely with our own, and with avoiding a lot of sticky situations that can come from such a thing.)

Anyway, my point is that a whole lot of other people now know about the sex life we had while dating, and a number of them have interpreted our past relationship as a co-dependent one, one that existed mostly so that we could mutually continue pursuing our sexual addictions, and mutually deny that we had these addictions in the first place. And in this sense, these people claim, the relationship W and I had was no different than the one Bob Crane and John Carpenter had in real life (deftly portrayed by Greg Kinnear and Willem Dafoe in the movie), that it was just as sick and just as wrong, that she and I were just as much in denial about it all as Crane and Carpenter were themselves.

And yet, even three years after our breakup, I still consider my time with W to have ultimately been a very healthy experience for me, and one that I'm still glad I have as part of my past. And the reason is complicated, of course, but all boils back to this simple fact, which is what a lot of people have a hard time understanding - that neither W nor I ever denied having sexual addictions, either to ourselves or to each other, and that all the sexual activities that occurred during our relationship were specifically designed to aid in our addiction recoveries, deliberately and consciously, and not to help us mutually deny that we had problems to begin with.

I mean, this is even how some of our kinkier experiences came about in the first place, as long-time readers might remember, as a way to specifically address some of these addictive subjects, and to combat them while still having the highly active sex life that both she and I needed at that point to remain happy in a relationship. (I still need a pretty active sex life with a partner, in fact, for me to be happy in a romantic relationship; W, however, may or may not have changed her mind about all this by now.) Just take this tidbit, for example, to see what I'm talking about - that because of her past experiences regarding abuse and scummy ex-boyfriends, W admitted early in our relationship that she could no longer get completely excited in bed unless her very physical safety was in danger.

So what as a boyfriend do you do with information like that? Obviously I wanted W to have as good a time in bed with me as she possibly could, but obviously I didn't want that to come at the expense of her actually being in physical danger. But at the same time, I hated the thought of her missing something whenever she was in bed with me, that she simply wasn't enjoying herself as much as she'd done with past lovers. And so that's what led me to reading about BDSM for the first time (and especially the exquisite Screw the Roses, Bring Me the Thorns, a must-read for anyone interested in the subject), which is what led me to learning that many past victims of abuse have turned to BDSM as a safe outlet - how in many cases the controlled submission of a BDSM session allows a person like this really to achieve the same kinds of sexual bliss they were before, while not putting themselves in any kind of real danger at all. (In fact, many BDSM practitioners claim that the experience is actually empowering to abuse victims - that the safe words, the emphasis on the submissive person's uneasiness level, actually help abuse victims gain mental and emotional control over their past, and learn how to enjoy sex again without that dark cloud always hanging over them.)

And so I told W about all this when I read about it myself, and then she read about it too, and like me thought it was an intriguing thing worth exploring more. And so that's what led us to actually start holding BDSM sessions, albeit pretty ritualized ones that relied mostly on roleplaying and mindgames, because I've never been very comfortable with the physical elements of BDSM (the spanking, the whipping, etc etc). And at the time at least, both of us ended up really enjoying the experiences, and W confessed that the roleplaying sessions really did produce almost the same kind of sexual enjoyment as the former, legitimately dangerous situations had as well.

And I guess this really is where a lot of people get confused when it comes to this stuff - that the general public tends to think of sexual addiction like they do alcohol or drug addiction, that you're either completely addicted to the entire thing or you're not. But in the case of something so infinitely complex as sexuality, this simply isn't true, with it being entirely possible to get addicted to one specific aspect of sex but not any others. I may have an obsession with owning porn and masturbating to it, but it doesn't mean I have a desire to have sex with my partner in public places; W did have such an obsession herself, but it didn't mean she wanted to have sex with animals, for example.

You see what I mean, right? The entire time W and I dated, we were both ridiculously hyperaware of each other's sexualities, each other's sexual histories, each other's addictions and trigger behavior; and we were both dedicated to doing things in our relationship that wouldn't feed these particular addictions or behaviors, while still allowing us to have the highly sexual, highly kinky relationship we were both seeking at that point in our lives. I never considered us as in 'denial,' because we weren't denying anything back then; we were both very upfront about it all, in fact, not only to ourselves but to each other and even to the random audiences at our websites.

I guess ultimately it all boils down to this - that in my opinion, being merely interested in kinky sex does not automatically make you a pervert or an addict, in and of itself. Where the danger lies, as I've said many times here, is when you start using kinky sex as a way of avoiding trickier or more troubling issues in one's life; when you find yourself compulsively seeking sex when you're depressed, for example, when you start relying on sex to put you in that good mood that nothing else otherwise can inspire. W and I never had that problem, or at least in my opinion; like I said, we were almost too aware of the weak spots in our personalities, and the overanalysis that went into almost every single decision we made as a couple sometimes threatened to border on the ludicrous.

Now, of course, this all comes with a really huge caveat as well; namely, there's always the chance that W was lying to me about everything I'm talking about today, that for her our relationship really was a co-dependent one that allowed her to remain in denial about certain aspects of her life. I mean, I would've never in a million years even suspected this was the case while we were dating, because that was yet another basic thing our relationship was based on - complete honesty, sometimes brutal honesty, an attempt at 100-percent openness when it came to dealing with each other. But unfortunately, since our breakup W has gone on to occasionally flat-out lie about even me, to whoever will listen sometimes, and learning that has sadly now thrown into doubt for me everything else that she said during the year we actually dated.

But like I said at the beginning of today's entry, the only person I can really speak for is myself; and speaking for myself, I can sincerely state that I was 100-percent honest with W during our relationship when it came to all this stuff, and that I really did approach it in the spirit that I just detailed, even if it was to turn out that W didn't. And that, like I said, is why I ultimately consider the experience as a healthy one for me, one that I'm glad I had; because I learned how amazing, how powerful it is to have a romantic relationship based on complete honesty, and how profoundly it can add to the sense of intimacy you and your partner are trying to build. There's something very liberating, I think, about admitting all your faults to a lover, all those troubling little things that you can't stand about yourself, and to have your lover say, "Okay, I still like you anyway." It's something I would've never learned if I hadn't spent a year with W attempting such a thing; and there are all kinds of other great things I learned as well (like how to be patient with your partner's fuck-ups, how to forgive a partner when they hurt you, how to truly have another person subsume half of your life and still maintain your own individuality, and lots of others), which like I said is why I'm ultimately glad I had the experience in the first place. (Although let's make no mistake - W also hurt me more than any other individual in my entire life, so much so that it will undoubtedly be years and years before I'm ready to put myself in that kind of situation again.)

I'm always glad when an experience teaches me something about myself that I didn't know before; like I've said many times, my life is dedicated to nothing else if not ongoing and sometimes intense self-examination, and my time with W certainly provided a bounty of this. And so that's why I ultimately consider that relationship a healthy one for me to have had, and one that I'm glad I had. If she's feeling differently about it herself, or if random strangers who read my site are feeling differently, there's not much I can do about that; this is how I feel about it all, and that's pretty much all I can honestly claim.