RUIN ME, PLEASE

Part 12 (The End): What I Cannot Return From, I Return To

Apr 04, 2025

The way romance readers compulsively return to the trope of the virgin and the rake reminds me of the way we often inadvertently choose romantic relationships with people who reopen our core wounds. This is so common it has become spiritualized self help folk wisdom; a dating cliche as predictable as the plot of a paperback romance novel. There is a fervent craving for resolution of the initial trauma–to play out the same story, but secure a different ending this time…This time, it will be different…This time, it won’t ruin me.

But, much like romance novels, the ending is guaranteed. Rather than resolving the trauma through these addictive, intense, irresistible attraction loops, we usually re-traumatize ourselves and reinforce the damaging beliefs that led us to confuse bleeding wounds with bleeding hearts in the first place. Despite already knowing how the story ends, we return again and again and again.

People-turned-ritual-objects-of-desire evoke our attraction to our own grief, arriving in the story of our lives with a longing so activating it’s easy to see why it is often confused with love. We become absolutely convinced that the thing that hurt us will heal us. And for a time, it does. And in a way, it might.

But there is a pivotal moment. A plot point. An opportunity for the character to complete their arc. In real life, few make it through. In the stories, we suspend disbelief, gloss over the plotholes, and allow ourselves the comfort of a fantasy. In real life, this fantasy merges with reality to become a destructive delusion, rather than a careful negotiation between the boundless, transcendent nature of what we desire and what is within the scope of possibility (or reason).

But this particular fantasy is not an escape so much as a straight shot into the reality of Weller’s fourth gate of grief: what I expected and did not receive. I expected gentleness I did not receive. I expected commitment I did not receive. I expected protection I did not receive. I expected a love story I did not receive.

We are attracted to the feeling of our own unresolved grief that another person evokes in us, because grief is the rite of passage to elderhood so many of us now know we are missing (thanks to Jenkinson and Bly and Weller and fam). Elders know life owes us nothing; they know what it means to go on living when you will never know the love you desired or when you looked for it in all the wrong places.

We are attracted to the story of the virgin and the rake because we long for our loss of innocence to become a return to innocence; we long for the demure virgin to integrate her inner whore and become the tempestuous mother, for the devilish rake to integrate his honor and become the saintly husband. We long to become who they will become in the warmth of their old age wrapped in a happy ending–for what we will become in the cold absence of our own happy ending, that can only either transform us through deep acceptance, or trap us in eternal bitterness.

Many of us have such damaging early experiences of eroticism we never even make it through the first passageway; our innocence is stolen by confused, reactive messaging that purports sex is either dangerous/precious or unserious/meaningless before we even have sex for the first time. Sexual oppression gives way to hookup culture, everyone shoves themselves into a reactionary extreme, everyone yells at you on Facebook if you dare to diverge from either pole and wonder what might be missing. There is so much we do not understand, so much left unresolved. The regency romance novel is a subgenre unique in its ability to hold traditionalism and subversion at once; a resolution of a cultural level trauma many people don’t even know they carry.

When, then, will we arrive as a culture to a place where we are as enamored by the mother’s seduction as the maiden’s? When, then, will we know how to engage in erotic ritual beyond the narrow scope of intense sex positivity, rigid sexual morality, and the romanticization of codependent delusions? Why is it always this same exhausting story where one person clings as the other runs away? One person creates meaning where the other creates meaninglessness? One person passionately appeals to safety and commitment where the other stubbornly digs their heels in around excitement and freedom? Polyamory vs. monogamy, blah blah blah. It’s all so boring and overdone, yet we can’t stop circling for that resolution that never comes.

Much like the paperback romance novel is the second class citizen of literary fiction–relegated to the back corner of the library and the free pile at the thrift store–erotic ritual is relegated to the realm of westernized new age tantra and overconfident explanations of sex magic dependent on a childlike belief that “manifestation” means masturbating while I imagine myself materializing my dream man. OUR ORGASMS CAN CHANGE THE WORLD! People become as literal in their interpretations of love stories as they do in their interpretations of sex magic.

Listen, I have felt the sigh of relief extend through my matriline as the tightening, spasming muscles of my cunt released into a rolling cacophony of bliss. I’m not dismissing the notion that we somehow “store” cultural, collective, ancestral trauma in our bodies. I am saying it’s an oversimplification, and we don’t know what we’re doing.

Our self styled sex magic teachers don’t know what they are doing, either. I’ve read all these books, I’ve taken all these classes, I’ve attended the sex parties, and I am here to report back to you that things like consent and surrender and non-goal oriented sex and semen retention and having orgasms without someone touching your body are not the pinnacle of sexual mastery, let alone sexual maturity, let alone a point of arrival in the deepest discoveries of erotic ritual. This is not so much a discovery as an unsolved mystery.

In a way, every single person in the western world is the virgin; oblivious to her desire, oblivious to her desirability, oblivious to her power, oblivious to her responsibility, oblivious to her vulnerability, beholden to her own ruin to defy the socially sanctioned, controlled, predetermined function of her erotic pleasure. I don’t have any answers either, nor do I have any tidy conclusions. There is no resolution here. We’re all going to be left with blue balls, I guess. Sorry.

Here is what I do know: romance novels are as serious as they are unserious. Like all mythologies, the story of the virgin and the rake is an important cultural map for returning to the site of our initial trauma and transforming it into something useful for our larger system of relationships, beneficial to our own…dare I say it…healing? And I don’t even believe in healing. But something like that; learning, changing, maturing, opening. The development of self knowledge, personal responsibility, and capacity to love–to love without forgetting how to love, without forgetting that we need love, without forgetting that love is the whole point of the story.

Life shapes us through ruining us. When we are ruined, there is no return to innocence. There can only be a return to softness. Longing. A childlike way we reach for one another in the dark beneath the bed sheets. Please, please. Ruin me, please. I want you to ruin me.

PART 1: I Want Men on Their Knees

PART 2: Toxic Femininity

PART 3: The Other Free Love Movement

PART 4: Reformed Rakes Make the Best Husbands

PART 5: The Alchemical Marriage Bed

PART 6: Attraction + Obstacle = Desire

PART 7: It’s Not a Romance if There’s Isn’t a Happy Ending

PART 8: Eternal Virgin

PART 9: Mother F*cker

PART 10: You Were Meant to Love Me Truly

PART 11: The Woman in the Mask Who Lives in His Head