My Adult Opinions

Moving to a new city alone isn't an enviable thing. Mark had done it several times now, always because of a job transfer. He was known in the company as the "mobile man," not because of his incredible phone usage but because he seemed to be the first one to accept a transfer. Mark knew that, if he wanted to move quickly up the corporate ladder, he had to be a team player. He had to be the go-to guy. He had to be the one that everyone could count on to get the job done, no matter where it took him or for how long.

As a result of this intense devotion to his job, Mark hadn't been in a relationship for a really long time. He had a girlfriend, years ago, but she left him because she couldn't keep up with Mark's pace. He missed her so much but he respected her. She had tried, she really had. She had made the first three moves with him, each time sacrificing her own teaching position and vowing that she'd find work at another school once they got settled. Each time, though, "settled" only lasted six months to a year and they had to pull up the tent stakes and go again. She finally couldn't take it anymore.

That was three years ago and meant, Mark realized suddenly, that he had not had sex in three years. He wasn't a fan of casual sex. He wanted a more loving relationship where intimacy ended with a caress, a kiss... not an exchange of business cards or phone numbers and a vague promise of a drink sometime. But Mark was human and had needs and, since he would never use a woman simply for gratification, many nights he would find himself looking at pictures of beautiful women on his computer. Without even being aware at first, he'd touch, caress and stroke himself to the wealth of images in front of him, until he found the release that would finally let him sleep.

This night was different. One of the guys at his new office recommended that Mark sign up to a dating site. This site was new and was considered a stroke of genius because it was marketed only to people in the local area. This meant that, even though you were meeting someone on-line, chances were good that you could also meet in person quite easily, if that were the goal.

Mark pulled up the homepage and discovered that members were able to blog their thoughts and not just have profiles. A photo caught his attention. The woman looked so very much like his ex. He opened her blog and saw she had only submitted one story. In it, she detailed how, for career reasons, she hadn't had a relationship in years but that she was incredibly regimented about casual sex. It wasn't her scene. Then, in a few sexually-charged paragraphs, she went on to detail how she wanted... needed... someone to stroke... to caress... yet that someone had to understand her lifestyle and what it meant to her to be trying to climb the corporate ladder. She had moved a lot, she said, but eventually she wanted to find someone who could get her to settle down. She thought it might be time. Mark scrolled to the bottom of her blog and clicked the "register" button. He thought it might be time, too.