Porn
(A true story.)
Sam had a relationship with Sophie. Years previously Sophie had been a porn model. She didn’t want Sam to know.
The two fell in love. But Sam suspected there was something which Sophie was not telling him. Although he loved Sophie, he wanted to know the truth; if he wasn’t told the truth he felt he was being used. Sophie didn’t want to reveal the truth; she had a deep fear that her questionable past would scare off her partner. She feared the things she had done in her past would mean she would spend the rest of her life alone.
Sophie had a great deal of emotional baggage from her period making pornography. In their loving relationship, Sam spent many hours listening attentively to Sophie, caring for her feelings, and he tried to cure her sense of loneliness by encouraging her to open up - assuring her that her past would not damage their present relationship. Part of her wanted to open up about her past, and to be able to trust her man. He made some progress. The counselling which Sam gave to Sophie was his act of giving love, but he was not aware of this at the time. Sophie had never experienced such attentiveness, and this caring made her fall deeply in love with Sam.
There were coincidences. Sam had what many people would call a photographic memory. Somewhere in a dim corner of his mind he conjured up a picture of a pretty girl. He must have been in his early teens when he briefly glimpsed the image. The girl was naked, kneeling up, her breasts pushed out, a piece of straw in her mouth. There was a vague recollection that the image had been glimpsed in somebody else’s porn magazine in a school playground. The girl’s face was also recorded. Sam had ended up, twenty years later, in a relationship with that girl. He eventually recognised her, when that memory worked its way into the fore-ground.
Sophie feared that men would always end a relationship with her if they found out about her past. Sam wasn’t concerned about her past. The past did not exist any more; it was nothing more than an illusion. The present reality of their relationship was is only concern.
Sam looked into Sophie’s feelings about her past. The English love poet Louis MacNeice described it:
“One lies lonely by limbs he half remembers,”
So it was for Sophie. She spent the rest of her life dealing with the hedonism she had been involved in when she was younger. Sophie had to find ways to be positive about her past, which could not be undone. And she knew the memories would never be erased. At times her past made her suicidal. Friends of hers who had also made porn had suicided. Sophie decided to live, but it was constantly painful for her.
“It never goes away…” she cried when she broke down during the period of confronting her past.