I was reminded, Sunday night, of the strange way in which there’s no one truth about love or lust or romance or about anything else interesting to humans. The Nymph and I went to see Vicki Christina Barcelona, the latest Woody Allen movie. I enjoyed it right well — and Penelope Cruz is just brilliant in her role — but it also gave me a modest insight of sorts.

In the movie, there’s a love triangle that is brief, implausible, and complex. ”Complex” is my eighty-cent college word; my blue collar brother-in-law would be content to say “fucked up”, in a tone of voice suggesting an unacceptable depth of complexity but without any connotation of condemnation. And yet, just as I was marveling at the very implausibility of the arrangement, I was startled to realize “no, this is just remarkable for being in a movie; it’s not the least bit more complicated than a thousand unusual romantic understandings I’ve seen people reach in the real world, or describe on their personal blogs.” People, real people even more so than scripted people, are willing and able to make the most astonishing compromises and bargains physical, emotional, financial in order to get the love, affection, validation and, yes, sex! that they need.

Hardly a deep or original insight, but then, I never claimed different. Still, it served to remind me of what I love about the sex blog genre and to a lesser extent, blogs in general — NAMEly, that they provide a relatively unfiltered window into the inner romantic and emotional lives of a great many more people than we would normally know well enough in meat space to know on that level. And that’s just interesting.

Today’s example is an excerpt from Bitchy Jone’s Diary, in which she is talking about the big strong man she enjoys hurting, and the reasons he enjoys being hurt by her. That’s one of the categories of sexual bargains that usually overstrains the limited capacities my empathic sexual imagination; and so — despite bearing firmly in mind that an explanation of what’s going on for these people may not speak with authority about any other people — I found it fascinating and instructive:

this is a blog which i've often thought about recommending and was never sure whether it was just too risque, too well pornographic really
but I've been following it for a long time partly because I'm a bit of a dirty old man -- sad but all too true -- and also because it is as Bacchus says "interesting" to get an insight into other people's lives