The woman who was only afraid of being without sex for a year, and how looking for it found love

I was in one of those moments Moria in life: “With harem and much-bad-as-never, mega, all divine, divine”. And she was sure that she had separated because of Jeronimo, or because she had enough of imagining what life would have been like if she dared to go with him. Because the truth is that with Máximo she felt cared for and safe. And Maximus was everything Cecilia admired in a guy. It was even everything that Cecilia's family and Cecilia's friends admired in a guy. The kind of man who fits well in any situation.

They had a good time together and could have continued to have a good time until death separated them if it wasn't because she decided that she wasn't going to be Meryl Streep in the van in the rain like on the Madison Bridges, and decided to open the door and run behind the one who was Clint Eastwood in her scene.

But Meryl Streep-Clint Eastwood stories work only for the duration of the storm, Cecilia now tells Infobae: just a few months after leaving Máximo for Jero, she was alone for the first time in twenty years. Then he made the account: since he was 19, he had jumped from one bridegroom to another; and from the other, to a husband. She was about to turn 39, so in addition to the fact that the result was round, there was a more important subtext for her: the 40 were just there, that was crisis or opportunity.

If in the end she chose “opportunity”, it was thanks to the wisdom of her preadolescent children: “What you need is a chongo, mom,” the biggest one told her, and Cecilia says she got the phone out of her hand just before the fatal click that could have made her photo go viral with the hashtag #UnChongoParaMiMamá. “I was a little angry,” she says, “but deep down I was amused by what the possibility sounded like: I needed a lover.”

She didn't laugh so much when, around those days, at a party, her friend Mariana, who had become a girlfriend with a creative advertising “Don Draper wave”, told her among negronis that from her last partner to the publicist, she had gone a year without sex. That night he couldn't sleep. She says that she heard the phrase already unfolded from her friend's voice, in a sharp echo of gum, like a curse: “A year without taking, a year without taking”.

Cecilia swears that early that morning she made a kind of tacit pact with herself, after a long examination of conscience: “It was true that I hadn't always been good, but it wasn't that bad either! I could learn to take it alone; maybe it was time. But in no way did she deserve or be willing to tolerate more than that. It was too much. I told myself that wasn't going to happen to me. That I didn't have to go for a year without sex. The experiment began that same day: from that moment on, for me, every guy I came across was material that could eventually be taken to bed.”

He says they met Ezequiel on a Tuesday at the Alvear bar. He was smaller and more capable than not so cute, but he was a cancher and told her what she wanted to hear. Besides, he was the first. The second drink had already been allowed to give herself a few kisses, and the third, when she asked for the bill and proposed to go to eat, as they had agreed, she was funny and told her to be charged to room 318, and he: “Well, if he is, we stay”.

Tempted by laughter and desire, they asked in Concierge, and no, that suite didn't exist. But, on the other hand, they had 316 free, and if it was all the same... It was a quick move: a second later she saw the boy hand the concierge his card to spend a night with her in the decadent luxury of the most elegant hotel in Buenos Aires. “The likes must be given to her in life,” he told her, and she was flattered. He says that the bellboy who accompanied them to the room held back to the formality of asking them about the luggage.

“He told us that the spa was still open: “It was full immersion — he tells and laughs. We slept together and hugged all week. We went to the theater and to eat, and we walked hand in hand in Palermo. He read to me in his bed and modestly what he had written about me in a wake. He told me his pains and wanted to know mine. He was almost a boyfriend, too soon. And I knew from experience what he didn't: no night was going to beat the first. He set the rod very high. I explained it to him as if I were talking to my son and he understood me right away, millennials are more alive!” , says Cecilia with laughs.

Broken the spell with the proper glamour, Cecilia quoted Lorenzo ——a fifty year-old executive who had been sending her direct messages on Twitter for a while—— one noon at a table in the Duhau. Nor was it a question of lowering any star, especially now that I was looking for the mime of an older man. But Lorenzo complimented her too much and told her (also too much) about him, about God! , of his children and of his wife! , in that order.

“I feel that God is the greatest gift in the world and protects us,” he told her before asking her out again, as lunch was averaging. Cecilia replied that she would rather not see him again while the most expensive wine on the menu was finished, and she left smiling after coffee, with a petit four in her hand: “You still have God, who is the greatest gift in the world”. Before seeing her walk away on the white stairs of the garden, Lorenzo gave her a hug and asked if she could continue favoring her tweets.

“I had always liked the one from Legales, Sebas, but now I also thought it was a good thing,” says Cecilia now. For some reason, or for one reason, because I didn't plan to spend a year without sex, all of a sudden all kinds between 27 and 57 years old fit into the category 'to be caught. ' 'Cogible', as the men say. Well, they all say, but I'm shy or modesty. So, all of a sudden, they were all 'chongos', as Moria says. That's it, all chongos.”

Pedro, for example, felt sorry because he saw him “so lonely and so big” smoking at the door of the bar on the way back from work. One day he invited him to fire and the rest of the solidarity came from him: “All the sadness that inspired me had the color of his apartment in Palermo. Tube light and a student living room inside with a single carob table and a leather armchair full of unopened bags from the LaVerap. We picked up and talked almost non-stop until the next morning and I let him call me 'slutty' because I thought it fit the context well. It was a strange and tender night in its own way. And the truth is that while I watched that huge beast move on top of me, I just fantasized about the heavy calm of its embrace. When she finally gave up, I felt a little prettier.”

Cecilia says that she discovered in therapy that something in her when she sought refuge (temporary) in that giant being whom she considered helpless spoke of its contradictions. In fact, his psychologist said it much less correctly: “You screwed the fat man because you wanted him to call you the next day. You considered it an acquired right. And now you have a problem because he didn't call you.” Cecilia defended herself as she could, and she says that it was not correct either: “Well, it was a chongo, nor that it was important!” “The fact that we are talking about a chongo in this session makes it important,” the analyst told him.

He says that six months after the experiment began, he hardly remembered Jero or the inconsequential end of the story that had broken his life in two; the years of clandestine promises, his ultimatum to fulfill them all at once, or her frustration over the months of series, pyjamas and delivery, as if would have been a couple with a thousand years of marriage on them. And he also says: “I always missed Máximo, that security without the demands of Máximo, that loving me as it was, with everything and my miseries, in a way that almost never loves anyone”.

But it was okay. He felt good even knowing that he had let go of the person with whom he would have spent the rest of his life had he not come across “that weather accident” that Cecilia says was Jero on his way, because “from a distance, even Clint Eastwood is nothing more than a guy all wet and with a jacket that falls short in the middle of the route” . At least, he already knew he didn't have to go a year without taking.

He was obsessively taking accounts like he had never done before. “I had sex at least twice a week. He led a light life,” he says. The biggest effort I was forced to do was concentration, so as not to mistake the name of the chongo on duty. I let Jero know, the day we last met. 'I have plenty of chongos', I yelled at him. I was proud. I was really proud, even though I cried a little. Maybe more for Máximo than for Jero, and maybe more for me than for him.”

I had given everyone on Tinder the same surname (Tinder): “They all seemed equally stupid to me,” he laughs. I hadn't wanted to go out with any of them, but I didn't block them because some nights, when I was bored, I would answer their chats. One was a cook and sent him pictures of regional foods, another had “a terrible, black and shiny t-shirt with a V-neck, which he preferred not to see” in his profile picture, and the third “it was pretty good, but it was kind of depressive”: he liked heavy metal and confessed that he was saving up to ask her out.

The guy she met at the bookstore never hid that he was married (he wore a ring!) , but she didn't even notice it and by the time it got revived she liked something. He was the first to move her a little beyond sex, and her analyst decreed that she had become accustomed to loneliness. Cecilia says she was having fun with Jorge. I wanted to see him. She was happy when she was doing well and ran out to buy cheeses for Valenti when she told her that she had a remote possibility of escaping under some pretext from home to eat with her. All day online imagining the next meeting. He was a chongo like the ones before: he made him the boyfriend, he courted her.

When Diego, a separate film director who talked a lot, but took her to good places, invited her to dinner at his house in San Telmo, he said yes without desire, because he didn't want to spend the night alone. After dessert, Diego wanted to play his role as a chongo, but Cecilia felt uncomfortable. “I lied that I had to look for the boys and I almost had to run away when the guy doubled the bet and told me it was okay, that I didn't need to do it, but that he could do things to me for seven hours straight. And what a good thing, thank you very much, that it was always good to know that a man was willing to do those things to me for so long”, he says.

And then, he says, he had a moment of enlightenment: “There I understood that I was doing everything wrong. Not only because I went out with half-unpresentable guys, but because for the same price I slept with them in exchange for spending some time with each other,” says Cecilia. There was no business: the escorts were paid and I offered sex to accompany me. All the other way around. And I missed Máximo. And Máximo would give a thousand turns to any of those jerks, including Jero's jerk. And the most stupid was me, who in the midst of the storm with Jero, who was the dumbest being on the planet, had made Maximo go a year without taking (or at least that's what I thought, because we never know)”.

Cecilia doesn't regret it. He says that, deep down, he had no choice but to forgive himself. “Because we had to continue, and Máximo was no longer going to come back to tell me that everything was going to be fine as he did.” He says that's how — “luckily, and because I didn't plan to spend a year without catching” — he noticed someone who had always been around, one of the few who hadn't looked. Fede was a very close co-worker, they had a past and friends in common, and in their experiment there had been a single rule from the beginning: never with anyone he was obliged to see again the next day.

But one afternoon they all went out after work and found each other differently. And suddenly, for the first time in a long time, she felt like she wasn't sure about anything anymore, just that she wanted to see him again. I didn't know if Fede was shy or sensitive, but I did have something. And yes, it's true, she says now, at that time she saw something to everyone, but with him it was different. When he was with Fede, he felt more clumsy, as if he were younger. As if all that experience of a woman who knew them all had been disarmed in five seconds.

“I realized that I was serious about the afternoon we spent laughing and talking about nonsense, without any urgency of going to bed, just with the plan of hanging out. I went back to my house wanting to continue seeing him, to keep laughing and talking to him. To hear him laugh. And I knew it was him.” And that was how the chongos ended for her and she began a new experiment, that of the insecurity of wanting.

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