How to Have Sex

TMI: How long have you gone without sex?

The answer: A really, really long time

This one time, I didn’t have sex for a long time. Too long, probably. Try 28 years. Some of that I was in diapers so maybe slightly less. I suppose that’s one of the reasons why sex is important to me, more as a concept — an expression of free will — than as an act.

Sometimes I hear about kids who have sex “too early” and I get a bit jealous. I’m not jealous of awkward, juvenile sex. I’m not even jealous that those people got a head start.

I’m disappointed that my life and body were owned and kept by my overlording dad and his overlording lord.

I’m jealous of kids who didn’t grow up hearing their dad make menacing declarations like, “You can’t date till you’re 30,” so often that they couldn’t tell if it was a joke.

I wonder what my life would be like if my dad hadn’t owned a Christian bookstore that sold bibles in droves and made our family the first to receive shiny copies of “I Kissed Dating Goodbye.”

I’m irate that I was one of the unlucky ones with a childhood that included a “mock” wedding ceremony in our church between me, my dad, his god, and the ghost of a man he’d be giving me away to someday.

I grieve walking away from that ceremony with a ring that broke love, marriage, and sex for me in the name of true love waits.

Most of all though, I’m disappointed.

I wish I could have discovered my sex and found love with him alive. I love my dad for a lot of things today, but I cannot say that.

He died. And I let myself live for the very first time.

At 28, with my dad burned and buried, I had sex.

A lot has happened since the night I bled on the sheets of a man with broken glasses and very little furniture.

I’ve grown to see, feel, and know my sex.

I found pleasure. I became my own lover. I learned what bliss by orgasm feels like. I explored my own body and others’, too.

I played. I dipped into kink and out again, then settled in the middle. I was raped. I learned a different kind of healing. I found myself a true lover who adds to the love I am learning I deserve.

I know now that my sex never really began as much as it was covered, stifled, and then set free. It was there all along. I just had to take it back.

I’ll never be without sex again.

I’m Brett Jenae Tomlin, The Anxious Enthusiast.

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