The value of different relationships

I'm not feeling so great right now. I have had an absolutely fantastic day with my boyfriend. It was brilliant. We got to laze about naked while it was really hot outside, we had some fantastic sex and we spoke for hours about all kinds of different things. I love my boyfriend so much, we really connect on both a physical and a mental level. This was day 2 of a so far fantastic week for me, and I really didn't want anything to ruin it.

Except it did. I hate it when my boyfriend goes home. Not only for the obvious reason that he's leaving, but it means I have to go back to my parents (who I unfortunately still live with). EVERY time I come back inside from saying goodbye to him, it starts. The tirade begins, and the general gist of it is this - my boyfriend is using me because all we do is go up in my room and have sex. We need to get out more. I argue back, but they just don't listen.

To be fair, most of our relationship does take place in my bedroom. This is mainly because it's the most convenient place we have where we can both be together, and admittedly, with the door locked there aren't any clothes being worn. And we have sex a lot. Does this make our relationship worthless?

There seems to be this idea (not just from my parents, but society in general) that a man and a woman can't be behind closed doors without being at it like rabbits. Whilst me and my boyfriend do have sex while we're together, we also sit and talk about all kinds of random crap. We've always talked about random crap, years before we were together. He managed to end up as my boyfriend because we'd spent so long talking about random stuff, we really got to know each other on a level that I'd never got to know anyone on before. However, because we have sex as well, does this cancel out this quality time?

My parents seem to think my boyfriend is just using me for sex, because we have sex every time he comes over. Is it unnatural for a guy and a girl in their early twenties to be having sex when they see each other once a week? To be honest, we don't go out much. I'll admit that perhaps we should, but not at all for the reasons my parents think. My parents seem to think that having a relationship is all about going random places. Sometimes I think my parents went to so many places (I've been subjected to so many stories) that they hardly knew each other beyond their knowledge of the places the other liked to frequent. My dad spent a few years working away in London. He'd spend Mon-Fri working in London, and then on the Friday night he drove the few hours home and then they'd go to the pub together. Personally, this seems insane to me. Once or twice perhaps, but if I'd been working away and hadn't seen my boyfriend for a week (which is usually the norm for me, actually), the last place I'd want to be is the pub. I'd want to be at home having some quiet, quality time with my partner. When my parents rant and rave and I ask where we should go, they don't really have any suggestions. The beach, the moors, places like that. Places they know full well that I absolutely hated when they dragged me there as a child, and places I'd refuse to go to if my boyfriend asked me to go there with him. Their only other suggestions seem to be the pub or the cinema - neither of us drink and I hate being around drunk people, and I have quite bizarre tastes in films. Without going to detail, if it was made in Hollywood, I probably hate it, and the more up to date it is the more I hate it. You can imagine that it's rare that a cinema shows a film I want to see (once or twice a year at the most). I also have bizarre tastes in music. The contents of my MP3 player, with only a very few exceptions, consist of soundtracks to the crazy films and plays I like, along with one artist who I particularly like. I would really love to see her in concert actually. The problem there? She's American. Most of her concerts are in America, and although she does a few over here, they're small affairs. She's an independent artist and isn't terribly well known. No gigs at the O2 arena or anything like that. Occasionally she'll fill a theatre, but most of the time she performs in pubs and bars. All of these are in London, several hundred miles up the road from me, neither practical or affordable to get to even if I got the weekend off work. They say we should go and get food somewhere together. We've been to get KFC a few times, but it's wrong because we come home to eat it. When my parents were dating, they kept a bottle of vinegar in their glove compartment because they went to the chip shop that often (you couldn't make this stuff up). I think that's terrible! It's not something to boast about!

The only suggestion I have to add to this list is shopping, but I hate shopping with other people. I can't stand it. I much prefer to go on my own because my taste in shops is embarrassing, and the shops I do go in I end up coming out of without having really looked at anything because I'm worried the other person is getting bored.

This isn't to say we've never gone anywhere together. As I said, we've been to KFC a few times, we went to the Rocky Horror Show together, we saw Alice in Wonderland and New Moon in the cinema, and we'll be seeing Eclipse when it comes out. He came with me when my amateur dramatics group got together to watch the video of our show. We've been to the chip shop a few times. I took him to the leisure park I work at and went on the rides. I'm sure there's more I'm forgetting. My parents forget all this stuff however, because we only go out every few months, rather than every week.

In a relationship, I don't look for someone to go around doing random things with. I want someone who I can be me with. When I was single, I rarely went out anywhere, and I spent most of the time in my bedroom anyway. However, now I have a boyfriend, this is suddenly terribly wrong. Someone please tell me if I'm wrong, but am I supposed to suddenly change who I am now I have a boyfriend? Am I supposed to start enjoying things that I hated before?

Even now, my parents go out together on the weekends. That's great, but they have to do that. I really don't think they're actually capable of sitting down in a room and being able to hold any kind of lengthly conversation without it turning into an argument or my dad needing to turn the TV on. When my parents go out, a lot of the time they don't even stay together. Dad will be wandering on twenty meters ahead of Mum. She can't look at anything and she gets highly frustrated by it. Me? I find it difficult to be anywhere with my boyfriend if we're not holding hands.

Me and my boyfriend, we could talk for days. We never run out of things to talk about. It can be the most random things, but we get to know each other better through these things. Today we spoke about hats, tattoos and piercings, amongst many other things. It sounds arbitrary, but it led onto so much other stuff, I feel like I know him that little bit better now.

As I mentioned earlier, my parents say my boyfriend is using me for sex. To quote my dad: "He could have two other girlfriends on the go for all you know!" I've told him that he doesn't know what he's talking about. Sometimes he asks me to enlighten him, but I refuse. He says it's because I'm talking out my ass, but in fact it's because it's deeply personal. Being a parent does not give you automatic rights to know what goes on in your child's relationship (at least when your child is now an adult themselves), even when it's going on under your roof. There are some choices and personality factors that I would never expect my parents to accept or even understand.

Those of you who've read my previous posts will know that my boyfriend is polyamorous. I'm okay with this, I accept it. However, as much as I think it, I can't tell my parents that actually, under the right and agreed upon circumstances, it would be okay if he had two other girlfriends on the go. The only way it would be unacceptable to me would be if he hadn't told me about them, which given the fact I know he's poly would be a stupid and incomprehensible thing for him to do.

My boyfriend is not using me for sex. If anything, I'm using him for sex. If one of us is going to end the day without having an orgasm, you can bet your life savings that it'll be him, not me. If he can't give it to me, I will get my toys out and give it to myself. I LOVE sex. It's fantastic and absolutely fascinating. However, no matter how much I love sex and how much we do it, there is more to our relationship than that. I'm aware that, no matter how unbelievable it seems to us right now, that as we get older the sex will slowly dry up. But at least when it does dry up, we'll still have our personalities and be able to occupy each other with talk about what we're going to do when we're running the country, which games are the best to play, my boyfriend's love for prime numbers, the computers we want vs. the computers we have and so on and so forth. I'm trying now to think of the last casual conversation I heard my parents have. I honestly can't remember.

People are different, and the relationships they have are different. This is what my parents can't fathom, no matter how much I tell them. Me and my boyfriend do more than have sex, but if that's all we did, would our relationship be completely worthless? It's open to debate, but it's not the case anyway. Personally, I judge the success of a relationship on the happiness and compatibility of the two people involved than how many photos you've got in your photo album. I will rest in the knowledge that if a disease wipes through the world, making all our genitals disappear and collapsing the world economy, we'll live a penniless existence in the woods, happy enough just being with each other and talking until the world's end while making bets on which of my parents is going to kill the other first.