How An Erotic Penpal Helped Me Survive the COVID-19 Pandemic

Dave and I had a friendly arrangement that sustained both of us during the worst weeks of the pandemic.

I met Dave in the summer of 2007, when we were both entering a teacher training program in the New York City Public Schools. We became instant friends, sharing the same sense of humor about working with kids and surviving in New York City on meager paychecks.

That summer, Dave and I explored our new city together. We rode the Staten Island Ferry and visited Ellis Island, taking silly photos on the boat ride back.

Dave was with me for the next two years, every Tuesday and Thursday night, when our cohort would sit bleary-eyed through graduate school courses after a full day of teaching. He was right next to me singing karaoke till 3 a.m. on my 26th birthday, and at my goodbye party three years later when I decided to leave New York for good.

You’d have thought that Dave and I would have been perfect for each other.

The thing is, I already had a boyfriend. A serious boyfriend, who was getting his own graduate degree at a prestigious university in another state. My boyfriend (now husband) knew and loved Dave. He expressed no jealousy about our friendship, and I felt confident that Dave was very solidly in the “friends only” compartment of my brain.

There were a few moments when Dave hinted at having feelings for me, or when he referred jokingly to me as his “forever crush.” Somehow this never made our friendship awkward. Dave dated various women during this time, and we stayed friends.

Even after I left New York, we saw each other less but maintained a close friendship. Dave brought his girlfriend Jessica to my wedding, and they married a few years after that.

In the winter of 2020, I hadn’t talked to Dave in months.

We were both married with kids at that point, and we had often commiserated over the many ways that kids could suck the life right out of you.

I knew that his marriage to Jessica was strained, and I had spoken to him about my own struggles in a sexless marriage. He joked often about the unopened package of lube that stared at him every morning from his medicine cabinet, mocking him for the lack of sex he was having.

When my own marriage struggles came to a head and my husband and I decided to open our marriage that winter, everything suddenly seemed open to me. I hadn’t really thought of Dave in a sexual way in the past, but now it seemed like I could do anything I wanted.

So I surprised Dave with a text one afternoon.

“So…we are trying out a new thing where we sleep with other people.”

“Would it be completely crazy if the next time I came to New York we hung out… in a different way?”

I waited anxiously for him to return my text. It seemed unlikely he would be down for cheating on his wife. He was never that kind of guy.

What followed, however, was an exuberant declaration of “I’m 100% down for this plan” from a guy who had not had sexual intercourse in over three years.

Of course, actually seeing each other was not going to be an easy feat. At first we mostly joked about the strings we would have to pull to arrange for such a meeting, especially since we lived over 4 hours away from each other. But then our texts became more direct. We even shared some awkward attempts at sexy photos.

Our back-and-forth flirtation lasted for several weeks. During that time, I dated other men and started to feel alive again. I would even share the stories of my new sexual adventures with Dave, and that just made it more fun to await a chance for us to meet in person.

And then a bomb hit that shattered the plan into a million tiny pieces.

“Have you heard the news?”

“It seems I shouldn’t be traveling to New York City anytime soon… let’s postpone the plan for a few more weeks.”

COVID-19 ended up lasting a bit more than a few weeks, and Dave and I never slept together. However, the sexual anticipation we had built through this scheming poured itself into a new form of expression: Dave’s erotic stories!

It started with a surprise text late at night, prefaced with “please scroll down to the bottom and delete immediately from your phone after you read!!!”

What followed was an exemplary piece of erotic fiction that Dave had typed out on his phone while sleeping on his couch. It was titled “Creative Writing #1: The Boat.”

The premise: we are frolicking on a whimsical beach one night and hop into an old rowboat together. The boat drifts out under the stars.

“You suddenly sit up and look at me from across the boat. I am sitting on the wooden bench in the back. You walk over and pull your dress up as you sit on my lap. You grab my face with both hands and start kissing me. Here is where the flashes start.”

This could have been awkward. It could have been weird. And yet something about our ease with each other and the world collapsing around us made these exchanges feel completely natural. His story was fun to read, and I was flattered to be featured as the main character.

For the next few weeks, surrounded by all of the unknowns of the COVID-19 pandemic, Dave and I developed our own rhythm of erotic exchanges.

He would text me with multiple-choice checklists for his next story:

Choose the location:

a. A forest

b. A train station

c. A fancy event

Choose a detail:

a. bondage

b. voyeurism

c. food

Once I made my choices, he would respond with impressively-written erotic stories featuring me as the object of his desire. His writing got better and better.

My favorite story was his last, which he entitled “Creative Writing # 6: France.”

It was a 6,000-word, Four-Act masterpiece. It involved a furtive international trip, a black-tie ball, and a Gatsby-esque capitalist who happened to have a sex room in his mansion in St. Tropez.

Somehow, this playful exchange was exactly what each of us needed in our lives. Both of us had felt lost in our marriages, lost in the emotional wasteland that life with children had become. It felt safe to show this side of myself to Dave, a man I had known for over a decade.

Amidst these erotic exchanges, we joked about what it would look like some day for us to get through this pandemic and finally have our moment of passion. We would one day crawl out from under the rubble of pandemic parenting like survivors emerging after a war.

But that’s not how this story ended. Soon after Dave wrote me his last story, I fell in love with a man I had met while my husband and I were trying an open marriage. Things got messy, and I turned inward again. Dave’s sexual overdrive also leveled off a bit, and his stories tapered off. He too started trying to figure out what to do with his own deeply unhappy relationship.

When the worst of the pandemic was over the following summer, I didn’t board the train to pursue an illicit sex affair with Dave in New York City. Instead, I brought my oldest son on a trip to see the Statue of Liberty. And Dave was right next to us on the Staten Island Ferry that day.