Part of series
My thoughts were occupied with women since early childhood. Already in kindergarten, I had quasi-romantic thoughts when interacting with girls of my age. I liked that such communication is beautiful, slow, mesmerizing, and memorable. Screams, rudeness, and fast physical activities common to boys weren't to my liking. Way before hitting puberty I understood heterosexuality as something close to Buddhist meditation - temporary transcendence of the physical realm. Way before puberty, I dreamed about group sex with adult women and collected anything remotely resembling erotica or porn.
As you already know, I had two girlfriends in kindergarten. The school however immediately proved to be a much less romantic place. Between 7 years of age and early puberty, most of my romantic aspirations were tied to either imaginary ladies and circumstances or movie actresses and fashion models. Girls of that age preferred to stick around boys who, unlike me, loved fast physical games. And those few who didn't were overtly well-behaved, overtly obedient to the will of teachers and parents, overtly modest girls. They were, in turn, unattractive to me.
At 12 and 14 years of age, I had two opportunities to lose my virginity. Both cases involved older women.
First was an attractive student of the pedagogical university, who was tasked with taking care of a group of kids during the summer break. She flirted quite openly in the presence of other kids. Once she was refusing to go further ahead across our group course unless I agree to hold her hand while we go. Later she also constantly tried to sit next to me while we were eating and allowed me to touch her legs. One day she invited me to go with her and her brother of my age after the official activities ended. But I chickened out and refused. Who knows, maybe that would be a mundane walk with card games and small talk. Maybe something more.
The next occasion happened two years later. At the time I was practicing "occasional" touching of women in public transport. There were occasions where I was publicly berated for this and wild occasions where women played along and were behaving in interesting ways. All of these occasions except one were ending the moment we were out of the subway, tram, or bus. But one day in a subway I was touching a leg of an attractive girl who was around 22 years of age. She was responding in a welcoming way, so I decided to trail her. She noticed this once we were out of the station and stopped near a newspaper kiosk, pretending to be interested in the merchandise. After we made eye contact she smiled and invited me to approach her. Then she brought me to the nearest open-air cafe and bought me coffee. She was bragging she just returned from Dubai but at the time I had no clue about that place and thought it to be an unremarkable place in the desert. Despite my stupidity, she did invite me to her apartment, after asking my age. To that question, I replied honestly, 14. To her proposal, I said no, chickening out again.
Forever after I will be remembering these two occasions and wondering how different would i be today, had I not been such a coward back then. The next opportunity will only happen seven years later.
Now, how should I call those women who were friendzoning me and yet spent much time with me in a relationship close to intimate? After all, I had no intercourse with that kindergarten duo. And yet I do perceive them as girlfriends in my memory. So i think ill call them girlfriends too. Some might also dispute the term, but to me friendzoning means the lack of vaginal intercourse.
While in Moscow I was friendly with a second-tier model but a high-tier woman who once again surprised me with her interest and willingness to chat. Come to think of it, up to a certain age, those women whom I truly liked were always shocking me with their willingness to be in contact. I always suspected there must be some cruel joke or evil intent behind this willingness. Was never prepared to take the opportunity. Now I do know why - I was scared that each choice has a consequence that might be pleasant or might be unpleasant. My advice to the young versions of me - treat it all like a roulette, where pain and pleasure and intertwined. Anyway, we chatted a lot and she tended to agree that I'm talented. I couldn't invite her to either alcoholic or Tajik without destroying my image. And she was from Ivanovo, likewise renting a room in n apartment with other women. So we spent time in artsy places and on the streets. She inspired me to keep the pictures of the women I've been with. We had some intimacy but never kissed.
The only woman I haven't kept a picture of is the one with whom I had my first French kiss. At the age of 21, after returning to Kharkiv. I consciously decided to forget her as I found the whole experience too unpleasant. She was 4/10 on the incel attractiveness scale, 29 y.o. single mom and a psychologist. We met on the online forums dedicated to socionics, a half-scientific post-Soviet interpretation of Jungian archetypes. Apparently, I was ENFJ/"Hamlet" and she was "Jack London". Not the best combo but she was very interested and constantly invited to her home. Despite her background, she couldn't understand that I'm a virgin and I didn't tell her. She behaved very rudely in bed. I couldn't get it up and frankly did not want to. Curiosity and the need to practice kept me around, not the feelings. So while I managed to get a woman naked in bed, I failed to lose my virginity.
This whole situation irritated me and I decided to skip the chivalrous part and hire a "sex worker". That was done a week later after the aforementioned episode, in a mini-brothel near Pushkinskaya subway station. Matron allowed me to choose from two women. One brunette was around 30, with visible signs of alcoholism on her face. One fake blonde around 27, without such signs. Obviously, I chose the latter. She was very good at sucking off and "the entrance" was sublime. I fucked and fucked for around 40 minutes and my time was coming to the end, as I bought just one hour. I found the whole experience much softer than expected. And no, I didn't came. She was very surprised by this and apparently, this hasn't happened to her before. She tried to force my orgasm by hand but I stopped her and we talked for the rest of the time. I confessed that this was my first time and she said that she wouldn't agree had she known beforehand. It was the middle of December and it was cold outside. Yet she dressed in a robe and accompanied me to the porch. Just outside the door there stood two men, who looked like a mix of cops and thugs. She started talking with them and encouraged me to leave, which I did. Seems like my loss of virginity was going to end with a pre-planned shakedown, had she not intervened.
Although I was mostly disappointed with the experience, psychologically I became more relaxed. The "Steam achievement" was unlocked and it did not feel like cheating. Because another woman was willing and naked the week before. Thus I have returned to the chivalrous approach and found my first girlfriend who was younger than me. Kindergarten ones were peers and all the subsequent ones were older. She was a goth. Liked to lure me to the central Kharkiv graveyard at the midnight. Loved vampires and called me Armand. Asked me to bite her lips until they bleed and was very much into masochism. Was from a Muslim, Crimean Tatar family and had a name that could be spelled in Asian, Slavic, and French ways - Kamilya/Kamilla/Camille. She predictably preferred the latter. Was it the strictness of her parents or whatever else, we never had sex. We separated after I practiced her beloved neck squeezing too close to her mother in their apartment. Mom apparently saw us from another room and decided that's not a habit her daughter should be practicing. Camille did not defend me, although that was her invention and her insistence. I'd rather just have sex. Still, I found this relationship rather amusing. We wrote to each other seven years later without any resentment. She found a way to practice her francophilia on a new level and frequently spends time at the Parisian Père Lachaise graveyard.
I was still a student. But as you remember, my attractiveness to the other students was at the bottom because I made a mistake in attending physical culture lessons. Nevertheless, there I developed two crushes. One was strictly visual. She was Britney Spears type of girl, common in the 00s. Not much to talk about but provoking hard-ons while doing so. Jean-Claude Van Damme slept with her sometime after her graduation.
The second one was a bit simple facially while having a decent slim and tall stature. Was a huge fan of my essays. I missed the window to chase her while preoccupied with Camille. By the time I was free, she already found some average but a funny dude in Omsk. Pretended she wants to be faithful to him. Spent a lot of time corresponding with me online. That was my first properly poetic correspondence, which existence will later greatly disappoint my wife, who hoped that only she evoked such deep feelings in me.
No longer a virgin and being in constant contact with women I was still cockblocked until 2007, apart from a couple of summer romances in Koktebel. That year I met my next big crush Evgenia and my future wife Christine. And while our first meeting with Christine was very romantic - staring at each other for like three minutes without interruption and in silence, as if we knew there is going to be something serious between us, she won't occupy my thoughts until much later.
For the time being my priority was yet another partially Tatar girl, this time from Kazan. Not as pretty as Christine, her manners were very attractive to me and outweighed Christine's beauty. As snobbish as I was at 12, she was able to preserve that snobbism due to being a girl and thus not having to fight numerous hooligans. She was also into socionics, like that psychologist single mom, and unfortunately took it too seriously. She was my conflicting type, "Jean Gabin". Except that I liked her coldness very much while she was afraid of my unpredictable outbursts. I didn't take her interest seriously while online. After all, she was far away and I thought that her attitude is similar to Kseniya M. She took offense, started sending nudes, and promised sex in the first day if I get there. Got there in a week, rearranging my work schedule and leaving Christine to frolic with our co-worker, whom she will temporarily marry only to spend less than six months together.
The city was interesting while the sex wasn't. She kept her promise but was constantly trying to substitute vaginal intercourse with petting or other games. She was relatively inexperienced and probably had some physical barriers between her and her orgasm. Feelings were mostly mine and she quickly decided that I'm too emotional for her. Not having a decent job over there didn't help and she didn't want to relocate to Kharkiv. After leaving her for what I assumed to be a temporary term, which I needed to finish the various tasks in Kharkiv, she stopped replying to my online messages. Heartbroken, I was attempting to make amends for the entire next year. Without success.
After getting over it, I decided to find an unattractive but sexy girl for a change, thinking she will be more loyal. That proved to be true. My first ethnically Ukrainian girl was raised in Marhanets, Zaporizhzhya oblast. After getting some sort of tech engineer diploma in Kharkiv, she quickly realized that she was too dumb to work in the acquired profession. Having nothing better to do, she was renting an apartment together with her sister. Conscious of her facial unattractiveness, she outweighed that through slutmaxxing. And boy, she was THE slut. Often I thought that leaving her alone in Mcdonald's to go get the order is dangerous as she might start fucking while I'm away. Taking her to nightclubs and letting her dance with others was a special treat, as she was barely hiding the desire to go to the toilets to fuck despite my presence. This quality made her an amazing lover. She always asked for more. Initiated intercourse even when her sister slept in the same room, in the moving train or on public benches in parks at night. And when without possible ears, she cried in a manner similar to Japanese porn actresses. She became my first LTR and spent several years with me.
Being together is one thing, having kids is another. She begged me to marry her and sire kids with her. Having experienced so much pain because of my physical shortcomings, I wanted my kids to be prettier than me. Her native Marhanets is right next to Enerhodar, the place of a nuclear power plant. Doubtless, it hurt her health a lot, as she was getting sick at the slightest contact with cold water. Her peculiar religious beliefs also worried me - she was insisting on me converting to the Orthodox Church, starting doing all the rituals, and becoming a vatnik activist. We even went together for a weekly pilgrimage to the male monastery in Central Ukraine. Interesting experience, though not one I'd like to ever repeat, much less to do it constantly. She was likewise attending my communist gatherings and did not understand much. I refused her proposals and decided its time to slowly end this relationship. Not without regret, as I knew it will be hard to find this level of awe and worship of your superior intellect from a woman. Her stupidity evoked fatherly, protective feelings in me and raised my self-confidence. Sadly I also knew I need to progress further and staying with her meant staying satisfied with remaining nobody.
She did inspire me about the kids part, as I thought its time to start having them. I wanted three in my childhood, two sons and a daughter. I still remembered the woman whom id like to see as their mother, the one which I skipped earlier in favor of Evgenia. By the time I found her again she had our former co-worker's surname Dubrova was living with her mother, and was extremely poor. I always considered myself poor but I was never seriously indebted. She however came with a genuine legacy of debts, a vast variety of them. She was under-utilizing her model-tier face and skinny build, and at first, I couldn't understand why. At the time I also wanted to rebrand myself and realized that I'm no longer an atheist but a polytheist. Her maiden surname suited those needs perfectly - not only it suited well to my own name and our future son's name, but it also was implicitly polytheistic. Voron means crow in Russian and crows are the messengers of Odin. The high Priest of Jupiter from Poltava named himself Marcus Corvus. I didn't need to resort to such trickery and understood the opportunity to take this surname as yet another omen, in addition to our romantic first look at each other. There was also the third. She somehow knew which song I sang to myself on one of our dates, even though I was 600 meters away from her, and did it very quietly. In addition, I never formally proposed to her. It's like both of us knew we were always supposed to marry and so we only discussed how it might be done. For some time this relationship felt as if it was guided by destiny. So we took all the legal trouble of her renouncing the former husband's surname and me taking her maiden surname. And although we divorced, I have no intention of ever changing it again.
The magic worked for three years. Then I started remembering why I preferred Evgenia and opted for Oksana instead of returning right away. She saw me as a funny addition to her life rather than a moral or amoral authority. Her authority was her mother, with whom she never ever disagreed even on issues of secondary importance. Such a thing was unimaginable in my own childhood family - all of us endlessly quarreled with each other ideologically. My mom thinks she only married me for the money. Except where did she see that money? I never had a car and brought her to dates on public transport. I bought her some costly gifts, by Ukrainian proletarian standards. Like a branded Yves Saint-Laurent cosmetics set. But I never had more than 500 bucks in my wallet at any given time. More likely, she was in love with the image of me rather than the real me.
The divorce process was a novel worthy endeavor in itself. Thriller with criminal cases, detentions, relocations, security agencies, hospitals, lawyers, and property sieges. Nervous as it was, I do think it further improved my character. Now I have suffered enough to know how to deal not just with top-tier girls, but also with law enforcement.
Now that I'm able to match with the absolute best on Tinder and finally outgrew my teenage fears, the question which looms on the horizon is whether I still have the time to improve my financial standing or if should I just continue my personal life in Picasso mode.
As that this series comes to a close, you might wonder why I made it so personal. After all, people aren't always friendly and something from these articles could be used against me in the future. My motivation is to break the glass of generic image-making. All those who smile with mechanistic, dishonest smiles or emulate the existing consensus among powerful groups aren't my friends and will never be more than a twist in my sobriety.
P.S. This girl deserves both the honorable mention and an out-of-context place. She's like a joker card to me, always around and never around. Appears, disappears, keeps and breaks promises, allows and disallows things. The most chaotic thing in my life, she's the only one among all mentioned who will certainly read this text. Meow!