Catching Feelings

Catching Feelings

If you are not in a relationship for a while and you still want to be sexually active, if you are in the dating game, possibly having a few f-friends, that sort of thing, then you might encounter the problem that the heterosexual matrix calls „catching feelings“. Catching feelings is like getting a cold. It fucks up your game, because your stakes are too high, like a sickness, it makes you vulnerable. The feelings you might catch, are somehow ugly, they look like strings to other people, sticky, they make them avoid you. Plus as a person with a female gender role, you are always under suspicion to be catching feelings anyway. So you constantly have to perform ’not catching feelings‘.

I admit that, emotionally, I’m not the smartest person in the world, but to me catching feelings has been one of the most confusing phenomenons I encountered in the heterosexual matrix. It was a long way out, though it is actually fairly simple.

To unpack this box, let’s start with: If catching feelings is a problem, it is implied, that you should be able to have sex without feelings, if you want to be sexually active outside of committed relationships. In fact, that you can only have sex without feelings. (Of course, I was never able to have really good sex, when at the same time trying not to catch feelings.)

Noticably, in this idea of navigating sexual encounters, all feelings are the same. If you share one, it is like saying I love you, basically. All feelings translate into love & neediness. Which means, to have any feeling, at all, is only allowed and safe in a proper monogamous relationship. Any feeling, that you show or share, therefore equals some kind of marriage proposal. To feel out of wedlock is a sign of emotional incontinence.

In other words (and that’s what I couldn’t get my head around for ages): the problem of catching feelings was defined by people who are in total panic, when it comes to their feelings. They are trying to contain them at all costs, either by getting married or by exercising feeling control on others.

However, real intimacy and therefore good sex, is obviously about a huge bunch of feelings. Who would deny that? Some of these feelings catch you, some you might be able to catch, if you are lucky, and if you actually try. Feelings like fear and trust, courage and loneliness, pain and relief, loss and triumph – it is about letting these feelings be and sometimes about letting them go. Important detail: Those feelings are very much my feelings. And then there are also your feelings, long before they might become our feelings. They might very well never be our feelings for each other. But when we are truly intimate, – you, me, her, him, them – we are still willingly enabling them, allowing them to be and to pass, holding the space for them.

Therefore the heteraclub is about catching feelings, that’s for sure. It is about how it makes you feel, how it makes us feel to be intimate, to touch, to open up, to make space for pleasure. Of course, it is. Anything less would be totally irresponsible and absolutely no fun.

Come, catch some feelings with us!