Sober sex is reason number one to drink less

It feels shocking to admit, but I’m pretty sure that for the first five to ten years of my sexually active life, I only sober sex a small handful of times. I don’t remember this being anything strange or unusual. It’s the way many of my friends approached sex in their teens early twenties – unless they were in a relationship. You went out, got completely trashed and then went home with someone. Or you message that one person you always messaged after a night out. Sex was not an intimate act, nor was it an act that required me to be fully present. I wasn’t particularly enjoying it, but then again I wasn’t not enjoy it too. It was mostly a neutral experience, like eating a fairly average snack.

It’s hard to pinpoint why I only had sex while drunk – it wasn’t for some obscure or overly profound reason. I think it probably has something to do with the fact that I didn’t yet know how to tell the difference between what made me feel good and what made me feel like a certain type of person, which in turn made me a gave a different kind of good feeling. I liked the idea of ​​being a laissez-faire city girl who felt powerful enough to be free with her body. But I wasn’t necessarily in touch with the physical or emotional aspects of sexual intimacy. In other words, I liked the idea of ​​having sex, but didn’t know how to actually achieve it. So it didn’t matter if I was drunk during the act, because it wasn’t about the act itself.

I also think I tended to only have sex drunk for the same reason I did drank a lot more in general. Because I had social anxiety and found it hard to get away without it. It can be scary to even lean in for a kiss, let alone be completely naked with someone else. So drinking was a way to bypass that fear and move on to the part that was supposed to be intimate, without realizing that by bypassing the fear I was also bypassing the intimacy. But hey, what else are your teens and early twenties for but to figure all that stuff out? Every day we learn more as we go, archiving each experience like a human database until we know what we didn’t know before: that sober sex is infinitely hotter than drunk sex.

I didn’t come to this realization overnight, nor did I discover it on purpose. I just started drinking less and it was an unintended side effect. When people sober up or cut back, we often hear about the benefits. The improved sleep, the clear skin, the better relationships and the like. But we hear less about the impact it can have on your sex life. Yes, it’s harder to have sex, especially if you’re single, which I’m not (Moya Lothian-Mclean recently wrote about how being sober has put a relationship on hold integral part of the mating processwhich led to less sex for her). And it’s harder to be free and experiment with the same abandon. But the sex you have is much more satisfying. Not just physically, but mentally too (is there anything sexier than suddenly remembering what someone did in bed? Certainly sexier than flat out not remembering).