Peeing on Your Boyfriend Won’t Give You What You Want, but It Will Give You What You Need
When it happens in the extremely occasional television or film scene (the first episode of Billions comes to mind, as well as the movie I See You), it seems so easy: someone squats a bit, or doesn’t even, or pulls out a penis, and voilà—someone else is getting pissed upon. I can’t remember exactly how my most recent ex-boyfriend and I started talking about my peeing on him during the last time we got back together. But I do remember clearly that during our preceding separation, all I’d wanted to do was pee on things.
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My couch, for example. And so I did, having laid down one of the leftover puppy pads meant to keep blood or drainage off my upholstery after some surgery or other. And on my bed. I did it when I felt like it, when I felt a buildup of sensation and urgency in my pelvis, and while it took some time and effort to relax enough to get there even with the leak protection, it always happened. I can’t remember what my ex and I were doing this particular day he offered for the many-th time for me to pee on him, but on that day, I said yes.
He had said, the times we’d talked about it, that it felt like an additional way—a way he’d be honored—to receive me. I think I cried a little bit every time I heard it.
But as beautiful as that sentiment was, it wasn’t an easy or unadulterated yes for me. Peeing on things is different than peeing on people—when I’d been doing it on my furniture, if I imagined someone else present, they were usually more witness than receptacle. And they were often not him. Instead I pictured a made-up guy who didn’t blame me for all of his pain in order to avoid it, like my boyfriend(s!) frequently did.
My boyfriend wasn’t pressuring me. Not for that, though for plenty of other kinds of touch and sex, and in partnerships, my desires get clouded and subsumed by what my partner wants. It’s telling to me that the details about a topic as memorable as “the time my soul mate and I started talking about my pissing on him” are fuzzy, like it’s not the sort of thing I’d remember; parts of me, I can feel in the way that I can’t feel them, were lost then. I was very open to pushing my boundaries. Having never been allowed to have boundaries, I have always been so open to pushing my boundaries. But I wasn’t all there.
I do remember that around this time, I had a Neuro Emotional Technique session where the doctor said my genitals were holding whatever traumatized activation I was struggling with that week. If I was comfortable doing so, he advised, I should clutch them while we cleared it.
“You’ve never had me do that before,” I said.
Genitals hold messy feelings that people haven’t felt safe to express, he said. He said, “Often when genitals come up in NET, people are so mad they want to start screaming, or just pee all over the place.”
He said, “Everyone gets there eventually.”
It was actually where I’d started. Some eight years prior, I’d gone to a naturopath complaining that my vagina felt weird and insisting I had a yeast infection, though my regular doctor had already given me heroic doses of fluconazole, a medication that’s supposed to be taken one time but that I took weekly, despite all my tests coming back negative, because I continued to insist something was wrong.
Something was, of course. My god, so much was.
The naturopath said my vagina was depressed. Stupid as I thought that was then, it turned out to be an understatement. But I couldn’t let myself feel the trauma it was feeling, just like I never feel safe feeling mad around dysregulated males—and yes I do mean males both with and without female experience. Mad is one of the least safe feelings to express about them, so it’s the last feeling I ever let myself access. Back in the time I went to see the naturopath, I would become furious at my then-husband once a day, every day, when I did the dishes, standing at the sink cleaning alone while he played video games. That was the anger I allowed myself, over the injustice of doing domestic work though I also did the moneymaking work, fuming in the kitchen as I listened to him yell in French at the multiplayer shooter game he played remotely with his old military buddies.
There was much more to be mad about. If I had let myself access it, I would have been mad at him most of the time. Eight years later, I didn’t feel mad—not that I could feel, anyway—at my boyfriend in general either, though he’d started gaslighting me again the very first day we got back together. I told myself I deserved it. I always tell myself I deserve it. If I’m being honest, I have to admit that subconsciously—classic trauma!—I was looking for confirmation that I deserved it. I didn’t feel mad at him the day we were laying the puppy pads down on my bed naked together, but I was mad, in an overall and deeply-stuffed-down way, because like everyone I dated after a very abusive boyfriend in my late 20s (shoutout to my past self for picking some nice ones 1997-2006!), he was wonderful except for when he was treating me like shit.
I wonder today if that’s what I was afraid would come out if I peed on him that afternoon, when he lay on the pads, and I straddled him with him inside me to do it, and then: I couldn’t. I wonder if what I was really holding in was a river of justified rage.
“You pooped on my floor,” my ex had said on our first day back together, months prior to the unconsummated peeing. He was referring to my moving out. Fact-check: I did not, either literally or figuratively, poop on his floor. I’d let him move into my apartment after he came over one day sobbing that he had nowhere else to go and needed me to take care of him, then eventually left him the place with a lot of intention and holding and notice, leaving to focus on my own healing—and get away from the storm of resentment he’d been showering me with for years. That day, I’d come back over knowing I’d worked hard to be responsible in relationship, and hoping he’d done the same. Instead, he told me I was “like a bad dog” that needed to be reprimanded, which is a denigrating thing to say to any human, but a particularly horrifying thing to say to me, as I was once locked in a dog cage by a man my dad sold me to for sex, which my ex knew very well.
In response, I had balked. I’d backed up from the close and comfortable proximity we were sitting in, and said that was a fucked up thing to say to me, but said it very gently, and very graciously. That I didn’t stand up and say, “No,” say that I’d seen all I needed to see and walked right back out, tells me a lot about how I valued myself—which is to say undervalued myself—this time last year. Instead I got back together with him for several more months, a testament as well to my faith in people’s ability to transcend abusive behavior even when those people have given me no indication that’s true. By the time I was sitting on top of him with my bladder full and my most precious parts aligned with his, my body had learned the lesson.
DON’T, my insides screamed when I tried to let my pelvic muscles down. I was shocked by the strength of my own reaction.
Psychedelics, psychonauts famously and relentlessly say, won’t give you what you want, but they’ll give you what you need. The naturopath I saw all those years ago subscribed $500 worth of salves and supplements before suggesting psychedelic therapy to treat my vaginal malaise. When I finally booked a session, what I wanted was to come out feeling totally fine about my hellscape of a marriage and the whole galaxy of lies I’d been telling about my gender and my father and my sexuality. Instead, I came out with the panicked realization that I had to burn my entire fucking life down.
Trying to pee on my boyfriend as I straddled him, I took off on an emotional roller coaster I hadn’t remotely anticipated. What I wanted was to envelop our laps in warm, flowing liquid without incident, after which we’d both feel happy and close, and he’d be safer and nicer because I’d shared ever more of myself. What I needed, apparently, was to recognize what our relationship was doing to my self-esteem.
“That turned out to be a whole journey,” I said, climbing off of him when I gave up after a long stretch of privately scream-arguing in my head over whether to give, keep giving, give beyond what I wanted to give, to this person. He’d been patient, his hips still under mine as I bent my head to his shoulder and shook, fighting silently with myself, which incidentally is also how I spent much of my time on psychedelics, every time. When he asked what happened, I told him what I’d felt, though I didn’t want to admit to either of us—like I didn’t want to admit after that first psychedelic session that I was going to have to get divorced and somehow surmount unfathomable antagonisms to live as myself, so much so that I almost immediately threw myself off a nearby cliff instead—that what I felt was constantly reinforced by how he treated me.
“I feel,” I said, “like no one can love me.”
“You feel like no one can love you if you pee on them?” he asked.
“No,” I said. “At all.”
I don’t remember how long it was after that that we broke up, or more precisely that I left, but it wasn’t long. It was after another fight, after he broke an agreement but said it was my fault he broke it because I’d made him make it by being so impossible to deal with that it forced him to agree to things he didn’t want in the first place. I wish I could say I’d trained myself and my ears well enough to recognize that crazymaking loop of illogic as abuse after so many decades of experience, but it was the face of the couple’s therapist we’d hired, and his ears; having a witness to our dynamic let me hear how another person heard the narrative, which was that the cause of everyone else’s behavior was me.
I’ve written before (oh! my little early-transition face in that photo!) about how I was told before kindergarten that my rape was because of my transness; I don’t think there’s anything that you couldn’t at least partially convince me was my fault. Recently I was seeing, and then exploring non-romantic life-building with, a guy who started turning his feelings about my not giving him everything he wanted into agitation and then unkindness at me. And I did push back, and put him on some timeouts that ultimately became permanent. But I still spent many, many hours wondering if I’d somehow been asking for it.
So many intimate relationships I’ve not just experienced but witnessed are characterized by one person primarily taking their shit out on their partner. Where my house is parked as I write this, there are not one but two couples within earshot consisting of one who yells at the other. “My anger is a gift to you,” the ex-boyfriend I tried to pee on said once, because it meant we were intimate enough for me to receive all his moods, an intimate gift of him throwing tantrums at me and only me. But a present isn’t a present if the recipient doesn’t want it and repeatedly begs you to stop. Sharing isn’t love when it’s just dumping unprocessed emotion all over someone else, expecting them to receive it saying please and thank you. Peeing on someone who hasn’t asked for it is assault.
A tiny spontaneous song I wrote while working on this piece:
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