Why does he like balloons so much?
I have been intimately involved with a man for a year. He claims he loves me but does not show it; he kisses, hugs and feels me but would rather masturbate than have sex. He also has this uncontrollable impulse to lie. I have never encountered this before, so I know it’s not me. He has a fetish with balloons and is constantly watching videos of them. I don’t think he’s gay because he looks at other women, and he has had a previous girlfriend. I’m wondering what is wrong with this man and what went on in his life to make him want to lie and just masturbate.
Let’s see if I understand you correctly. Balloonboy lies, he doesn’t have just a sexual fetish but also an unrelenting compulsion to indulge it during waking hours, his way of intimacy feels like rejection–and deep down you’re not entirely convinced there isn’t something wrong with you? What’s wrong with you is your confusion of lave with a conundrum. Let me break it to you gently: Balloonboy has a sexual fetish shared by an unknown number of others who call themselves “looners.” They’re latex-lovers turned on by the feel and smell of Balloons; they enjoy inflating them and rubbing against them. They find high emotional drama in Balloons expanding and potentially popping. You are a mere afterthought to a man who can get excited only (it’s the “only” that makes it a fetish in the strict, clinical sense of the word) by fantasizing about balloons. But you are an accessory to his brazen lying; maybe the danger of getting caught assuages the guilt of his deviant desire, or maybe it intensifies it. Masturbation allows him to concentrate on his own fantasies without being distracted by an actual human being. In other words, he’s incapable of a real relationship. Your concern with how he got this way is distracting you from the real question: Why have you been so willing to put up with so little for so long? Don’t worry about bursting his Balloon; he may not even notice when you walk out the door.
COPYRIGHT 2004 Sussex Publishers, Inc.
COPYRIGHT 2004 Gale Group