I asked Adam out on a second date. That was another thing I liked about him, his holding back, letting me make the first move. We watched a French film in the cinema, and as it played, we kissed. It was cute; the electricity leading up to it made me feel like a teenager. Afterward, we went to a sourdough pizza place, and when he spoke Italian with the waiter, I felt a wave of attraction toward him. On our third date, he came to mine.
When Adam first walked into my flat, he said, “Wow, you must be really good at your job.”
I let him believe that my life was self-funded, an illusion I knew would crack fairly quickly.
We had aloo baingan with store-bought roti for dinner, and for dessert, we massacred a pineapple that had come with my Oddbox, hacking it into chunks before mixing in vanilla yogurt and pomegranate seeds and sprinkling some mint leaves on top. Afterward, we kissed. And kissed again. I pulled him closer and reached for his belt buckle. He stopped me.
“I really like you,” he said, all smiles. I grinned and kissed him again, fiddling with the buckle. Very gently, he moved my hand away. “I’m enjoying getting to know you.”
“Oh.” I looked at him with a question mark in my eyes. He kissed me again, then took both my hands in his.
“We can take our time,” he said. I didn’t understand, but it seemed like he preferred to just … not?
“Yeah,” I said uncertainly, my hands still in his. He pulled me closer in an embrace and then let me go, still smiling.
“Is that okay?”
“Of course.” I nodded, returning his smile.
Our bodies hung awkwardly for some moments more, the question mark hovering between us. He suggested we watch something on Netflix, and so we did, and then we talked some more, and then he left.
I have to admit, I felt irritated and also vaguely insulted. I’d invited him to my home, done my waxing shaxing. We’d been passing along all the right signals. And now, here he was telling me to … slow down? I don’t know. Maybe my annoyance was unfair. Maybe the third date was too soon, and it would be even better with some build up. Maybe the part of me that felt insulted at his not returning my advance with uncontrollable passion, well, maybe that was just my patriarchal conditioning.
“Like, imagine if the genders were reversed,” my American friend Anjali said when I told her what had happened. “Imagine him saying, ‘Dude, date three and she wouldn’t put out.’”
So I decided not to push the issue, to go at his pace. We went on another date, this time to the National Gallery, and then another, walking in the park. Then, a week or two later, we were back at my place. This time, not wanting to risk my hand being pushed away, I held back and tried to let things move organically. There was real electricity between us; his touch was warm and sensitive, his kisses lingering and sweet. But an hour passed, and it didn’t feel like he was going to go any further unless I did, so finally, I took my top off. He followed suit. Then, well, okay, the gist is we tried to have sex, but … it didn’t quite work. I’d never experienced this before, someone just not getting hard. And I kind of panicked, and I think he became embarrassed. We muddled along anyway, and things were fine. We found other ways. But I was left confused. He apologized, which made us both cringe all the more, and I tried to be reassuring, but it sounded disingenuous and awkward.
When the same thing happened the second time we tried, I asked him, as gently as I could, whether anything was the matter. He explained that he needed patience, that it was always like this for him in the beginning, and it would get better. I don’t know how common such things are, but it shook me a little bit. It made me worry, despite his reassurances to the contrary, that he didn’t find me attractive. I mean, what else could it be, right? His body was speaking loud and clear. It felt, basically, like rejection. I spent a lot of time in those first few months down internet wormholes, trying to understand about performance anxiety, erectile dysfunction, things like that. I grew awkward in my own body, trying to please him but receiving strange, self-conscious responses back. Like I remember reaching for his penis once and watching him draw back in a kind of panic, asking, “Are you sure you want to?”
“Do you want to?” I asked back, stopping in my tracks.
“Only if you do.”
It felt like no matter what I did, it wasn’t quite right. Most nights when we lay together, I’d be stewing in my own unfulfilled desire, and even if we did manage to have sex, it would be so quick and unsatisfactory that I’d be even more frustrated than if we hadn’t tried at all because now, he’d stoked the fire. And so, I’d lie there, wondering if I could quietly masturbate while he slept.
I remember asking him once why he never reached for me with desire, and you know what he said? That he believed in “radical consent.” He explained that this meant that he never wanted to encroach, even accidentally. At first, I told myself that this was sweet, that maybe Adam would help me rewrite some of the violations I had stumbled into in the past, that maybe he would help me heal from all the times that I had overridden my own discomfort to pander to the demands of another. But later, I started feeling like maybe he was just using some kind of woke-boy spiel as macho defensiveness.
But I stuck around. He told me he was an iceberg, you see, that would eventually melt. And the sex did get better. He was able, most times, to get and stay hard, at least for a short while, although he’d be exhausted afterward and would perform this exhaustion in a way that felt somehow accusatory. Still, even if I found myself having to temper my libido, and he found himself feeling pressured to perform, we were able to have a somewhat satisfactory sex life after a couple of months of trying. It wasn’t ideal, but we made it work, more or less. And other than the sex thing, we got along well. We went to galleries and the cinema, cooked meals together. I met his colleagues from work. They were funny and nice, although in long doses they made my brain glaze over a bit. Adam was also close to a couple of friends from his childhood, but he hadn’t introduced us.
“You wouldn’t like them,” he said. “Truth is, if you’d known me back then, you wouldn’t have even spoken to me.”
He told me stories then of shoplifting and alcohol and cigarettes before he’d even reached double digits. And I thought of my own childhood, back in Karachi: my inhaler, my flat chest and braces, reading Sweet Valley High books in my bedroom and watching Urdu dramas with my grandmother in the evenings, living a life that Adam would have found painfully uncool.
“You’re the one who wouldn’t have spoken to me,” I said, and he shook his head in the way he did when he felt that there were things about him that I could never understand.
I also introduced Adam to my friends, who seemed generally approving. Naima, though, was skeptical.
“You don’t seem that into him,” she said over the phone the day after I’d invited him to a friend’s gathering.
She also said that the iceberg he claimed would melt never fully would. And although I could see what she meant, I figured that what she saw as a lack of passion could be a good thing. It felt nice to not be swept off my feet—to remain clearheaded and even-emotioned. I didn’t mind that Adam and I had some distance between us, that we could have our separate lives but still also a space we shared. And so we settled into a kind of cozy coupledom, and within three months, Adam had moved into my flat. We took turns cooking for each other. He did most of the cleaning and house repair stuff, and I did admin, like bills and groceries. In the evenings, we would often watch Netflix cuddled up on the sofa together. And during the day, I did my subtitles, working from home, while he did his work, usually from one of his offices. Adam really was fluent in several languages. He was low-key though; the Italian place he worked for didn’t know he spoke Russian, and his colleagues at the Japanese aeronautical engineering place genuinely assumed Japanese was his second mother tongue. I valued his discretion, saw it not as secrecy but modesty. And when I overheard him on his video calls speaking foreign tongues with absolute mastery, I couldn’t help but look at him with admiration. The funny thing was, though, when I tried to teach him Urdu, nothing would stick.