Non-Smoking Diary: The Joys of Sober Sex

Your narrator shares a story about booze and recklessness, intimacy and cringe, and the soft pleasures of being clear-eyed when you used to be long gone

by Sarah Hepola

Your Smoking Diarist is on a tight deadline right now, with no leisure time to chain-smoke and pontificate at 4am. (Next week!) In lieu of our weekly audio, we’re sharing an excerpt from an essay that ran in New York Magazine’s The Cut this week. It’s part of a month-long series about “the health and wellness stuff nobody talks about.” Here we go:

Back when I was drinking, sex was easy for me. Without booze, I was modest, a chronic overthinker who flinched when she undressed, but pour a bottle of Malbec in me and I became an exhibitionist, all my windows open. It’s not that I didn’t care about being so vulnerable with another person; it was that I couldn’t feel: The self-consciousness that tyrannized me in daylight turned to an endless series of Why not?s. The high stakes of any erotic engagement — where this was headed, what he thought about me, what I thought about him — would suddenly evaporate. It was like sex happened to me, and the sex could be amazing or it could be lousy, but more than once I woke up with a blank space in my memory where the sex should be, lying beside a man with a five-o’clock shadow and a slight snore, and I thought, Damn, this again?

Drinking problems can be defined in many ways, but unmanageability was central to my self-diagnosis. By my mid-30s, I couldn’t manage my finances, and I couldn’t manage my friendships, which were growing weaker and more superficial as drinking took center stage. And I sure as hell couldn’t manage these sexual entanglements that were unpredictable and entirely predictable at once: a friend from college; a British line cook I met at a bar; a random guy in Paris, where I’d gone on a magazine assignment. Did I like them? Did it matter? I was never sure if I wanted these midnight tussles to turn into a real relationship or if I never wanted to see the guy again, but I did know I yearned for connection, a life lived side by side, and yet I was growing more isolated. I’d become a big-city cliché: the single woman with her overloved tabby, the most familiar men in her orbit being the ones working at the bodega or the wine shop. I used to think the red flag for alcoholism would be some catastrophic loss — a job, a home, a marriage — but I’d held on to my career, I’d held on to my things (I didn’t have a marriage to lose), and yet I’d lost something far more grave: I’d lost myself. Finally, after several years of trying and failing to moderate my drinking, I could see that alcohol wasn’t opening the door to some bigger life; it had trapped me in a rather small room. I quit at the age of 35.

Life without alcohol felt pale and slight at first, until it became Technicolor and overwhelming. Even the most casual interactions turned fraught with anxiety without any substance to numb my nerves, my need to please, my overthinking mind. I stuttered with stress buying toothpaste at CVS (what kind?), getting my hair cut (what style?), just imagining the doctor’s office (no way). So the concept of going out with a man was like cannonballing into the deep end when you haven’t even learned to doggy-paddle.

I’d grown up fast, though it felt slow to me. Thirteen was the age I started drinking to help me avoid the awkwardness and insecurities that inevitably arose with any sexual opportunity. I thought beer and tequila and Chardonnay were a perfect work-around, but they only proved a temporary bypass to the hard work of learning to be intimate with another human. When I finally quit drinking, I was thrust back to my former self: jumping when a man met my eyes, shuddering at the thought of a blowjob. (People put a penis in their mouth? But how?)

Read the rest here.