I mentioned another man while talking dirty with my boyfriend. I was trying to sound adventurous. What I apparently gave the evening was a completely different agenda.
We had been hanging out, and the conversation had become sexual. I wanted to say something a little daring, something that would excite him. What came out was a suggestion that he might want to watch me with someone else. I had aimed for provocative. I had not stopped to establish which kind.
The mood disappeared. Since then, he has been quieter and more distant. He hasn't shouted at me or started a fight. That would at least give me actual words to work with. Instead, there is this awkwardness between us, and the fairly strong impression that he is pulling away.
The least impressive part is that I can't even give a confident account of why I said it. I think I'd encountered the idea online, filed it under things people apparently find exciting, and reached for it in the moment. My research method was essentially having seen something somewhere. An excellent qualification for very few activities, and evidently not this one.
I wasn't trying to announce a plan. But he heard the sentence, not the vague process that produced it. A line that felt like borrowed fantasy to me might have sounded like an actual wish to him. Or like an assumption about what he wanted. I had put him inside a scenario without knowing whether he wanted a part in it.
That's where my guessing starts, and where it stops being especially useful. Maybe the idea made him jealous. Maybe he disliked it, full stop. Maybe he is wondering whether I was asking for something rather than saying something. I don't know which, if any, is true. His silence doesn't come with a key, however much I would appreciate one.
Part of the embarrassment is how much confidence the line implied. It sounded as though I knew something about his desires. In fact, I was improvising. Having to explain that gap feels considerably more exposing than saying the supposedly daring thing in the first place.
Now I want to apologize, but even that feels oddly easy to get wrong. If I rush to explain that I didn't really think about it, I could sound as though I'm dismissing whatever bothered him. If I arrive with a theory about his jealousy, I would be telling him what he felt before he's told me himself. I'd like my next contribution to contain fewer assumptions than my last one.
What I want to understand is what that line meant to him. I know what I hoped it would do, and I can see that it didn't. The conversation I still haven't managed to begin is the one where I stop filling in his half.
