The freedom
I thought
I wanted.

I lived on a sailboat for over a week in 2021.

An entire week suspended between the sea and the sky, with nowhere important to be and a man who seemed born with saltwater in his veins.

He was the chef on the boat, a deckhand, a sailor in his own right, and the owner of his own vessel. He was much older than me. Wild. Unashamed. Erotic in a way I had never encountered before. He belonged to the water more convincingly than he belonged to civilisation. I liked that. I remember thinking he wasn't quite a man in the ordinary sense, but some brown creature the Mediterranean had spat onto land for a little while. A sea urchin. A pirate.

A beautiful, weather-beaten animal who knew how to use his hands, feed people, navigate the ocean, and, as I would discover, love a woman.

He was six feet of long limbs, bright eyes and the most ridiculous, beautiful, boyish grin. A little Tarzan, a creature who seemed to belong more to the ocean than to land. He would hang upside down from the sailboat's rigging like a monkey, laughing, swinging, entirely entertained by the extraordinary business of being alive. Yet those same playful hands were rough and weathered by work, capable of sailing through storms, cooking beautiful meals and working tirelessly beneath the sun. God, the contradiction of him. Until then, I had only known hard men, men who seemed to believe masculinity required the sacrifice of tenderness. But he was both. Fierce and soft. Capable and wonderfully silly. His hands were hard, but his soul was soft as fucking honey. There was something devastatingly erotic about a man so completely at home in himself, so unashamed of his own joy.

He had the hands of a man who could weather a storm and the heart of a boy who would still dance in the rain. I am pretty sure the night we got off the boat we did, in fact, dance in the rain now that I think about it.

And I fell head over fucking heels.

I was so young. So confused. So entirely unaware of how much of myself I had never actually inhabited. I had already experienced plenty of [word obscured] by twenty, but I had experienced very little intimacy. There is an enormous difference, and I wish somebody had explained it to me before I began offering my body to people who had no idea what to do with the person living inside it.

And then I met a sailor who seemed determined to teach me an entirely different language.

He did not approach my body as though it were somewhere he needed to arrive, accomplish something and leave. He approached it with curiosity. With patience. With this almost outrageous enthusiasm for the possibility that I might actually enjoy being there. He wanted to know what I liked. What I felt. What made me soften. What made me laugh. What made me forget the world outside the room. My pleasure was not an inconvenient little detail he attended to before returning to his own. It was the centre of his attention. He seemed to derive enormous satisfaction from giving, from discovering, from knowing that the woman beside him was

experiencing something beautiful. I had never known a man could be so interested in what was happening inside a woman.

And perhaps more importantly, I had never known that I was allowed to be interested in it myself.

Until then, I had been so accustomed to watching myself from the outside. Was I beautiful enough? Was I desirable? Was I doing the right thing? Was he enjoying himself? Was I performing whatever strange choreography I had unconsciously absorbed about what a [word partly obscured] appealing woman was supposed to be? There was very little room left for the rather obvious question of whether I was enjoying myself.

The sailor turned the entire arrangement inside out.

He taught me that [word obscured] could be somewhere I returned to myself rather than somewhere I went to escape myself.

I wonder whether he ever understood what he gave me.

He was not a perfect man.

God, he was broken.

I don't believe in perfect men, and I certainly don't believe that every extraordinary lover is necessarily an extraordinary partner. But there was something about his generosity that stayed with me, something I have spent years trying to understand.

I think about that sailor more often than I admit.

And this week, I thought about him again.

Because I met another man who carried something remarkably similar.

The same extraordinary, almost feral aliveness.

The same absence of embarrassment around his own wanting.

The same sense that his affection did not have to pass through a committee of insecurities before it was permitted to reach me.

He was tactile.

Warm.

Almost overwhelming in his presence.

It is funny how life has a way of bringing us back to the very things that first awakened us. Not only did my Italian sailor message me recently, but over one long weekend, two more sailors entered my orbit. One arrived with a gentle eagerness to know me, to take me out, nurture me and discover the woman I am. The other arrived like a fucking lightning bolt - a recognition so immediate, a fire so enormous, that I could have sworn it was love at first sight. And just as quickly as he appeared, he vanished. One offered the possibility of something tender and lasting; the other reminded me how violently alive a single encounter can make you feel. And somewhere between the two, I found myself thinking of that twenty-year-old girl who once fell in love at sea, wondering why the ocean keeps sending its men back to me.

I should also mention my fear of anything ocean-related, even though I'm a watery Cancer sign throughout my chart, my name means the ocean, and I have an immense calling to the same ocean I deeply avoid.

Nothing is by coincidence.

The man I fell in love with this weekend had the same name.

It was like encountering a current I had known years ago on the water.

And I realised something rather beautiful.

There are people who enter our lives and remind us of the person we were before the world taught us to contain ourselves. And there are people who arrive to introduce us to the person we have not yet become.

Perhaps the sailor did both.

I have spent years since that love affair studying [word partly obscured]. Psychology. Desire. Trauma. Pleasure. Shame. The unconscious. The strange and often heartbreaking ways human beings attempt to find love through one another's bodies. I have written about the bedroom as a mirror of consciousness, about the difference between being [word partly obscured] experienced and being emotionally intelligent, about the way our earliest relationships can follow us into every bed we enter afterwards. And I sometimes wonder whether the entire

investigation began on that boat. Whether a twenty-year-old girl falling in love with

an Italian pirate was, without knowing it, receiving the first lesson in what would become her life's work.

I think back to that twenty-year-old girl on the sailboat, falling helplessly in love with a much older Italian man who smelt of the sea and seemed to have been born knowing how to live. She had no idea that one ridiculous week would follow her into adulthood, into her writing, into an entire career studying [word partly obscured] and the unconscious architecture of desire. She simply knew that something inside her had opened, that she had encountered a man whose aliveness made her curious about her own, and that the world suddenly seemed much larger than it had the week before.

And I think that is what I want love to keep doing to me.

Making the world larger.

We spend so much of our existence trying to become somebody, trying to arrive somewhere, trying to make the correct decisions and protect ourselves from the consequences of feeling too much. But I keep returning to those two peculiar words: human being. Being. Actually fucking being. Collecting experiences and allowing them to change us. Being here, in this body, on this extraordinary Earth, with the terrifying privilege of loving people who may alter us forever.

I want us to become more alive.

And I think the people we love can sometimes show us how.

There is another thing I have never understood about modern romance: our peculiar embarrassment around the people who loved us before.

Why are we so determined to pretend that previous lovers were merely mistakes, unfortunate chapters to be erased before the next person arrives? Why must every old love be reduced to a lesson about what went wrong? Why are we uncomfortable admitting that somebody who did not stay might nevertheless have given us something magnificent?

I do not want to erase the sailor I met at 20 nor the one I met this week.

I do not want to pretend that their hands, their generosity, their wildness, their wounded little boy, their extraordinary appetite for life and that ridiculous week at sea did not help make me the woman I am.

They belong to my history.

Not as a man I am still waiting for, but as men who opened a door.

And I hope that when I meet my husband, I will be able to speak about the people who taught me how to love without either of us feeling threatened by their existence. I hope he has stories too. I hope he has loved deeply, made mistakes, been changed, discovered things about himself through other people. I hope he has lived enough to understand that we do not arrive at marriage as untouched pieces of paper.

We arrive as entire libraries.

I do not give a fuck about body counts anymore.

Nothing will scare me, for I have also lived, fucked and loved.

And I have finally come to understand that the man I marry will not have spent his life waiting untouched for my arrival. Why did I think I had to wait for marriage?

God, I hope he hasn't waited either.

I hope he has been ravenously alive.

I hope he has travelled, desired, made love beneath foreign skies, lost himself in beautiful women, had his heart broken open and discovered entire continents of himself through the bodies and souls of other women. How could I possibly wish for a wild, erotic, insatiably curious man and then resent him for having lived as one?

And I am beginning to understand that you cannot truly adore another person's aliveness while secretly wishing they had been less alive before meeting you.

I want him to have been alive before me.

God, I hope he has been.

I hope there are women who once made him feel as though the Earth had stopped turning. I hope he has known the unbearable beauty of wanting somebody, the peculiar intimacy of learning another person's body, the grief of saying goodbye to someone he genuinely loved. I hope he has been courageous enough to let people change him. I hope there are stories he can tell me about the women who taught him tenderness, the women who challenged his understanding of himself, the women whose love made him a better man. I want to hear them without turning his memories into a competition I was never invited to enter. I do not want to be jealous of the life that made the man I love. I want to honour it.

Every woman who loved him, every life he lived before mine, every experience that taught him how to become the man standing in front of me. I do not want jealousy to make an enemy of the very experiences that helped create somebody I adore. What an extraordinary honour it would be for two people who have tasted so much of this world to stand before one another, with nothing to conceal and nothing to apologise for, and still say, out of everything I have known, I choose you.