Sober Sex Is the Number One Reason to Cut Down on Drinking

It feels shocking to admit this, but for the first five to 10 years of my sexually active life, I was only sober sex several times. I don’t remember this being anything strange or unusual. Many of my friends approached sex this way as teenagers and early twenties – unless they are in a relationship. You go out, get completely messed up, and then go home with someone. Or you text that person after a night of texting all the time. Sex was not an intimate act, nor was it one that required my full presence. I wasn’t exactly enjoying it, but I wasn’t. Negative He also enjoys it. It was a mostly neutral experience, like consuming a pretty average snack.

It’s hard to pinpoint why I only have sex drunk; There was no dark or overly deep reason for this. I think it probably had 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 kind of person, which made me feel a different kind of good. I liked the idea that I was the laissez-faire girl in town who felt strong 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 loved the concept of liking sex, but I didn’t know how to actually get there. So it didn’t matter if I got drunk during the show because it wasn’t about the show itself.

I also think I tend to only have drunk sex for the same reason. overall I drank a lot more. Because I had it social anxiety and I found it hard to unwind without it. Even leaning in for a kiss can feel intimidating, let alone being completely naked with another person. So drinking was a way to escape anxiety and skip to the part that was supposed to be intimate; without realizing that by avoiding anxiety I was also avoiding intimacy. But hey, what are your teens and early twenties doing other than figuring all this out? Each day, we learn more as we go, filing each experience away like a human database until we learn something we didn’t know before: that sober sex is much hotter than drunk sex.

I didn’t come to this realization overnight, and I didn’t discover it on purpose. I just stopped drinking and this was an undesirable side effect. We often hear about the benefits when people get sober or drunk. Better sleep, clear skin, better relationships, etc. But we hear less about its impact on your sex life. Yes, making love is harder, especially if you’re single, which I’m not (Moya Lothian-Mclean recently wrote about how sobriety can disrupt a relationship). an integral part of the mating processthis led to less sex for him). And it’s harder to move freely and be experimental with the same kind of abandonment. 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? Sexier than not remembering anyway).