Let me say the number and let you sit with it.

Ninety-plus times. Thirty weeks. That’s this year so far, and the year isn’t done.

I did the math because a recent article made me curious. Ninety in thirty weeks puts me on pace for well over a hundred and fifty encounters this year, good sex, playful sex, silly sex, the kind where we’re laughing halfway through, fantasy, the kind that goes nowhere near an orgasm and counts anyway. Compare that to my first forty-eight years on earth, when I had one sex partner and, by my own generous count, maybe a thousand encounters total across four and a half decades. In the twenty years since, four partners, over four thousand times.

Read that again. It took me forty-eight years to reach a thousand. It took me twenty to quadruple that number four times over.

Trust me, I am not a sex god; I just finally, at long last, after half my life had already been lived, began to really enjoy sex. It interests and excites me. So I don’t know what to do with this except confess it and then try to understand it, which is what this whole publication is for.

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Here’s what aroused my curiosity. I read a 2018 Atlantic piece by Kate Julian called “Why Are Young People Having So Little Sex?” And I mean I read it, highlighted it, argued with it in the margins. The headline stat: the average American adult went from having sex sixty-two times a year in the late nineties to fifty-four times by 2014, and it’s kept falling since. Teenagers are launching their sex lives later. Twenty-somethings are having fewer partners than Gen X did at the same age. Fifteen percent of people in their early twenties report no sex at all since becoming adults.

Julian spent the piece chasing reasons: anxiety, dating apps that behave like slot machines, porn, screens, sleep deprivation, economic precarity, a generation raised to fear rejection so much it would rather not risk the ask. Emily Nagoski’s brake-and-accelerator model of desire kept surfacing in the research: for a lot of people, the problem isn’t a weak gas pedal, it’s a brake that never fully releases.

And I sat there, sixty-eight years old, having the best sex of my life at a rate that would have exhausted me when I was young, thinking: I have gone completely sideways from the culture, and I want to know why.

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So here’s my thoughts laid out plain.

For forty-eight years I lived inside a religious system that told me my body was a hazard. Porn and masturbation were forbidden, which of course meant I thought about almost nothing else. I was a regular, furtive user of both. That’s what happens when you tell a sexual creature that his wiring is sin: you don’t kill the appetite, you drive it underground, and it comes back louder.

Then the marriage ended, the faith unwound, and eventually I landed in Barcelona with Gina. And here’s the part that still catches me off guard: in the twenty years since, I’ve rarely watched porn. I rarely masturbate. The thing I couldn’t stop doing when it was forbidden, I mostly don’t do now that nothing forbids it.

Meanwhile, the actual, partnered, skin-on-skin sex went up. Way up.

That’s backward from what you’d expect, and it’s backward from what most of the culture assumes about appetite and access. Take away the fence, and the thing you thought was insatiable just… isn’t. Justin Lehmiller’s research on fantasy backs this up from another angle: the more political and moral restriction a culture places on sex, the more intensely people fantasize about breaking free of it.

Repression doesn’t reduce hunger. It manufactures it. And Joshua Grubbs found a related fact, and for me a personally damning one: religious people report feeling addicted to porn at far higher rates than secular people using porn the same amount. The usage is identical. The shame is not. What I called my addiction in my first half of life was really the moral crime scene I’d built around the behavior.

Take away the religious shame, and I turned out to be a fairly moderate guy with a body that likes to be touched

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But here’s the part I keep pondering. I got there almost by accident, by removing obstacle after obstacle that I didn’t even set out to remove.

I’ve never been part of hookup culture; that whole landscape didn’t exist for most of my adult life. I carry no economic pressure that would eat into desire or time. I have very little anxiety now that religion is out of the picture. And I address my psychological health with therapy and one guided psychedelic trip a year. I take no medication. I’m secure enough that Gina using a vibrator doesn’t threaten me; it delights me. I’ve never opened a dating app in my life. Nobody lives with us eating into our privacy or our energy. I’m not tethered to my phone. Spain doesn’t put the low hum of physical fear and angst in my body the way America increasingly did. I sleep eight hours most nights. I exercise. I watch the news, but not to the point of noise poisoning.

Please hear me, that’s not a virtue list. It’s a joyous accident of geography, timing, and a hard renunciation of a belief system that was actively working against my body. Most twenty-somethings in Julian’s piece don’t have a single one of those positive conditions, let alone all of them stacked together. They’re drowning in exactly the things I don’t have to deal with.

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I want to be honest about the edges of this too. TMI warning, quit reading now if you need to. I’ve never had anal sex. I’ve never received oral sex (the girth and small mouths are the honest reason there, not modesty, and believe me, I’m not bragging; it has been a real problem through the years). I’ve never had sex with another man. None of that is off the table; I hold it all as open curiosity rather than closed doors. I’m increasingly open to other shapes a sexual relationship might take.

Orgasm, I’ve learned, is a destination. Great sex is a journey that may or may not arrive there, and the older and wiser I get, the less inhibited I feel about that not mattering. But don’t get me wrong, I love a great orgasm.

There’s a research paper I’ve been sitting with: Meston and Buss’s exhaustive catalog of 237 reasons humans give for having sex, everything from “I wanted to feel closer to God” to “I was drunk.” Attraction and pleasure sit at the top for both sexes. Emotional closeness and love sit close behind. What strikes me, reading it at sixty-eight instead of twenty-eight, is how much of my own list has simplified. I’m not chasing status, reassurance, or proof of anything anymore. I enjoy the attraction, the pleasure, the play, and the adventure, and with Gina it is an expression of our love and emotional closeness. That’s a shorter, cleaner list than the one I carried most of my life, and it may be part of why the sex itself got so much better, along with getting so much more frequent.

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I don’t have a tidy ending for this, and I’ve stopped trusting people that pretend to have one. What I have is a genuine puzzle: a sixty-eight-year-old man living out the opposite of every demographic trend line in the Atlantic piece, for reasons that seem to trace straight back to the wreckage of the religion that once tried to strangle this exact part of me. The young people Julian interviewed are pulling back from sex because the brakes are jammed: anxiety, screens, economic dread, bodies they’ve learned to distrust. My brakes were jammed too, for decades, just built out of scripture instead of Tinder and Instagram. Different culture, same result: a heart and body that couldn’t relax enough to enjoy.

What released mine wasn’t a technique or a hack. It was leaving the culture that built the brakes in the first place.

¡Que siga la aventura!

Sensual | Curious | Communal | Free