Nice guy mask
Context
With the help of an actualist (who doesn’t write here) offline, I indirectly got to expose the ‘nice guy’ identity which had been repressing sexual desire the last two decades. I tested this all by expressing my direct sexual interest to the woman I recently fell in love with, and also as a way of ‘officially’ ending the relationship with her and moving on (because she was still contacting me as if to ‘keep me’ to serve some purpose or something). The message I sent was something along the lines of asking for FWB arragement:
Gotta be honest: while the emotional heaviness is gone, the sexual desire is very much still there. I’m not looking for strictly friendship. I enjoy our conversations, I want us to be physical too. Is that something you want too?
I really fought tooth and nail with the actualist because I was afraid of directly asking her this. In the end, I decided to just ask and see what happens – both from her standpoint and my own reaction to it.
Trigger
She basically vanished from that point—no response. This caused a surge of fear, and I was no longer feeling good.
Exploration
I realized that this fear is of the ‘self-image’ I had unwittingly built myself as a nice person who doesn’t want sex right away or something (in the eyes of women) coming crashing down. This image also, in part, lead me to fall in love with her sooner than latter because the sexual desire had no other acceptable outlet. Incidentally, in the past I would misapply actualist happy-and-harmless using good feelings for this very reason (“I’m a ‘nice guy’ that is happy and harmless”).
As a result of this, I felt somewhat bottomless, so to speak, as there is less of an identity to hold on to on these matters. Felt a bit raw. But, instead of rebuilding the ‘nice guy’ mask (or building new masks to counteract it: lover, loner, being-bad, aloof, etc.), I decided to just sit with it. Accept the unknown. Actually, I came to like it! It is so freeing to be close to the body, to be sensuous (just feeling good even!) … rather than clamping myself into identity buckets out of need for spurious security. There is a tiny lingering ‘bruise’, but the feeling is largely gone. And I’m feeling good.
Edited to add: This ‘nice guy’ is of course not nice at all. Totally opposite to actualist harmlessness (not wishing malice/ sorrow; rather, wishing well; asking for sex doesn’t violate harmlessness 
it is rather ingenuous).