I’m at a friend’s birthday, and we’re standing in a smoking area surrounded by so much paneled wood that it looks a bit like a sauna. Under the fluorescent red of the outdoor heater, a friend complains about someone he slept with the night before.
“They never want to leave anymore, do they?” he says.
I laugh. “I wouldn’t know, I literally never have sex anymore.”
He asks me when the last time was, and I tell him the date, which in my mind is a while ago, but not a while-while—at least, until I see his reaction. He gasps, rubs my arm, and asks me if I’m okay, as though he isn’t sure how I’m still on my feet, moving through the world.
I wake up the next morning panicked. I worry that when I’m older and everything on my body has moved downwards, I’ll be sad that I didn’t make the most of my 20s. I worry I’ll regret that, instead of going round to guys’ houses, I’m spending Sundays hungover in bed and weekdays watching hot women from LA making sea-moss smoothies on TikTok—worry that I won’t get to write an Annie Ernaux-style memoir called something sexy like Another Woman’s Son about these years and the men who were in them because there weren’t ever enough of them. I start to think I might die alone.
This isn’t a new feeling for me. I get it often enough that I’ve gotten quite good at reasoning my way out of it. I remind myself that just because I’m not having sex right now doesn’t mean I’m not a sexual person—that going without sex can actually make you experience your sexuality even more intensely.
There’s a scene in Sex and the City that encapsulates this view. Samantha is drinking coffee with a hot yoga instructor while he tries to explain to her why he’s celibate. “Didn’t you like it?” Samatha asks, “it” meaning sex.
“Oh, I loved it,” he says. “I’d have sex morning, noon, and night. Sometimes three women a day, and I was always ready for more.” Still, he assures her that where he is now is “so much better than sex.”
To explain his point, he uses the example of really good foreplay. “Your sexual energy is just starting to awaken. Now imagine a three-year foreplay where all that sexual energy is coursing through your body but it never gets released. It just recycles, builds, rises, until your entire being is humming with that electric sexual energy.”
Samantha begs him to come back to her apartment, but he assures her: “The only thing hotter than sex… is not having sex.”
I kind of agree with the hot yoga guy. I’m so horny at the minute, most of which is to do with the fact I’ve come off the contraceptive pill because I’m getting a blood test done. At lunchtime-ish each day, I find myself crawling over from my desk chair to my bed and stretching out, wondering whether it’s a work-from-home day for my flatmates or I can be loud. I spend all of a night out dancing with my friend, and we joke that we fancy each other, and then I start worrying that I actually might fancy him because I have all these pent-up feelings and nowhere to put them. It’s like I’m watching Normal People in lockdown all over again. I can’t concentrate. I’ve gnawed down my nails.
My friend replies to a text I sent her, worrying that I’m not having enough sex. “I think the question is: is the end goal of romantic interaction always going to be sex? The last time I had sex was April but my make-out session last week was hot as fuck, and I was so satisfied. I could have easily invited him in, but I didn’t want to. Does that make it any less of a significant encounter? Not for me.”
She reminded me of some really good kisses I’ve had recently. One when I was walking to the bathroom in a club and then this guy grabbed my arm and almost without talking we made out for ages. Another with someone I went on a date with, at a bus stop: the tickle of their stubble on my top lip, standing on my tiptoes to reach them. And then I think about other much smaller things that are as good as sex: your head on the lap of someone you used to like-like and kind of still do, a text that makes you fold your lips into your mouth to hide your smile.
And then, of course, there’s actually having sex, and I remember now how often, when I do, I’m struck by how normal it is, how easy. Part of me laughs at how much of a big deal I’m making about it right now. I guess because it’s not so different from those other things.