I’ve been writing about young people sex. It’s an easy and comforting place for me to go because those memories have stayed with me, and the passion and excitement I had as a teenager were powerful drugs.
But I am not a young person. My desires have changed and mellowed, my need for affection has lessened, and the frantic and desperate grasping of my youth has largely left me.
Do we call it middle-aged sex? Forty-something sex? Tired, lazy, loving sex?
I’m already bored of it. Do you see the problem?
The pandemic has made an already tired me more tired, but I’m still trying to rage against the dying of the lust. If the mind is the biggest sexual organ, then I have no excuse unless you count two martinis and a glass of wine.
The last time we fucked, we were drunk and cute and it was hot and sexy like it always is. I held her down, she told me we shouldn’t be doing it, and before too long I was coming inside her as she begged me not to. Minutes later she got off with the Hitachi between her thighs while I whispered in her ear; we fell asleep sweaty and tired yet oh so content.
It wasn’t the same as those long afternoons where we only stopped to drink water. It wasn’t a weekend of rarely getting out of bed and fucking until we physically had to stop. It wasn’t making out in the car at the view or slipping a hand into her shorts under the blanket while our friends pretended not to notice.
But it was hot and sweet and kinky and loving, and I suppose if that’s the sort of sex I have at forty-five during what is hopefully the tail-end of a global pandemic, then I guess I’m doing okay.
But writing about it is another matter.
I am no longer a young person, the world is complicated and messy, and my life is not a vast longing for a kiss. And yet, letting myself be here, be now, and exist as I do, is a challenge.
What’s odd is that I still feel nervous about sex. Maybe anxious is a better word. Will I do alright? Will I get hard? Will I stay hard? Will I whisper the wrong thing at the wrong time, and will she wake up in the morning wondering if she’s made a horrible mistake?
They’re not persistent thoughts, but they live with me all the same–even on a good day.
And maybe that’s the mystery of sex––the magic of it. Even after all these years of fucking, sucking, biting, scratching, and coming, I can still get anxious. I can still get caught up in my mind and body, and I can lose myself to so many things.
And when I stop to think about it, one of the things I’m most grateful for is that even after all these years of fucking, sucking, biting, scratching, and coming, I can still write about it. There are days when it feels like every ounce of my sexual energy has gone into writing, and days when my desire fuels my typing instead, but here I am doing it anyway.
No matter how long it’s been, how much has changed, and how old I get, I somehow make my way back to finding sex fascinating, and fuck if that isn’t a blessing.
So, in the spirit of taking things as they are, I suppose I'm doing alright. We still fuck even if it’s not as often, I still write, and my god are we still in love.
So, if I go back, on occasion, to those lust-filled dreams of my younger days, I hope you’ll come along with me. And when I find the words to stay here in the present maybe you’ll come with me then too.
And in the balance of life, in this mess of change and grief and joy and stress, maybe all of us can take a deep breath and remember there is no wrong way to love.