Tomorrow, sex will happen again
Maybe.
Sometimes, I wonder if I will ever fuck again. The majority of the time, this thought is submerged in the chilly waters of my deep subconscious. But when I have a snatched twenty minutes to lie flat on my back and remember myself as a sexual being, it’s right there, in flashing neon letters: ‘WHEN WILL I KNOW THE TOUCH OF ANOTHER?’
A running joke my best friend and I have is the agony of being reminded what sex is like. With such activity off the table for most of the calendar year, my libido enters what I’ve come to think of as a state of sexual cryosleep. This makes life bearable. But every so often there will be a reminder. Sometimes these prompts are understandable: intermingling limbs on a TV show, or seeing the couple at the adjoining restaurant table exchange sticky glances. Other times they’re a testament to just how chronic the skin hunger is, like getting set off when sampling the blow dry function on the fancy Japanese toilet at a Halloween party.
Celibacy is incredibly in vogue at the moment for young women, for multiple reasons that broadly amount to a howl of dissatisfaction with the dating landscape. But I am not celibate, ok? I fuck! Intermittently! I’ll show you my list!
My problem is different: I’m semi-sober. I drink when two requirements are satisfied: 1) am I ‘comfortable’? (i.e. not drinking to make myself feel cheerier, less tired or more attractive). And 2) when a hangover won’t torpedo plans the next day. So drinking is usually restricted to the odd dinner with the girls, or at my personal happiness climax: plugging in my USB at a club night, about to plunge into a world of Beyoncé remixes for two hours. Never do I drink on ventures like first dates.
Can being part-time sober really impact your sex life that much? Before I changed my relationship to booze, I would have been sceptical. But it’s become depressingly clear that even if alcohol is the opposite of a biological lubricant, it’s an almost integral one for the mating process. Since the end of my last relationship, just two of my initial hookups with people have been while completely sober. Only one of those was after a first date. Of course, it was in Berlin.
The general numbers are also down. ONS would call them ‘depressed’. According to every single healthy metric, this is a good development. I am having much less sex than in comparable periods, but the sex I am engaging in is intentional and pleasurable — often sensational. And sober repeats with people that I’ve had inebriated first time encounters with are, most of the time, equally great.
For me at least, being sober, single and sexually active, has heightened all the best, delicious parts of sex, while lessening shame and insecurities. Perhaps this is because it’s such a decisive, intimate thing to clearheadedly realise that yes, you do want a near stranger to literally penetrate you, sometimes in broad daylight. There’s no time to fuck about with feeling embarrassed or shy regarding such choices. The only option is to actively enjoy them. More than drily functional consent, it’s an enthusiastic ‘yes… please…PLEASE’.
The flip side of this, of course, is that on the very rare occasions I’ve got to the sex stage with someone in this semi-sober era and it’s bad, it’s grit-your-teeth-and-think-of-England stuff that might be less of an ordeal if three sheets to the wind. Oddly, the partners in question haven’t seemed to notice. Perhaps they’re just great fakers. But it’s striking to me that, even when most of the time I’m not drinking at all, and the rest it’s one or two spicy margaritas at best, it’s still the rare moments when I’ve had my inhibitions artificially lowered by booze that are most likely to see me get laid.
This is frustrating because once you have crossed the alcohol moderation rubicon, there is nothing in you that wants to go back. I speak not for those who find it difficult, even impossible, to cut down their intake at will, but for people who, on a random day, decided to stop after one, and found they were lucky enough to do so. I can’t ever bring myself to drink to a level where sex is easily attainable again, not just because of the multiple compromises it would entail but also because that’s not even the type of sex that fills my fantasises. Increasingly, the sex I long for is the sort I’ve only experienced in loving, committed partnerships, where laughing is as much an aphrodisiac as the brush of a lacy Savage Fenty number against skin. Unfortunately, there’s multiple reports you have to ‘date’ to attain this. More as we get it.
But some days, when I’ve been bludgeoned over the head with reminders of what sex is like (tip: do not attempt a Normal People rewatch as an incel) and my skin is feeling particularly starved, I miss being satisfied with the blacked out, bottom tier fucking you find at the bottom of a Cafe Patron shot glass, where anyone will do and anyone will screw. The bliss of horny, inebriated ignorance. ‘Sex is good’, I think, bidding the calming ‘but X is better’ refrain to follow. Yet sometimes, I just can’t quite summon up the kicker.
As someone who sober-dated for 3 years, I feel ya. Had more than one date question how I ever made it work without alcohol, and my best matches were fellow non-drinkers, or at least people who don't rely on it (non-Brits, usually).
“Sticky glances” too good