I got home from New York two weeks ago and I have been luxuriating in my solitude.
I love my spouse, my friends, and my family very very much, so do not take that last sentence as a slight toward any of them. I just also love spending time alone. Not only do I love it – I need it. My brain seems to run at an optimal level when I’ve been afforded big chunks of 100% solo time recently. I think I’ve always been that way.
But since this is a newsletter ostensibly about sex, it bears mentioning that my sexuality also seems to benefit from me getting adequate alone time.
I remember that when I ended a 3.5-year-long relationship at age 22, I had this huge, expansive sense of sexual freedom – not just because I was able to date and fuck people who had been off-limits to me in my monogamous partnership, but because I felt like I was rediscovering my own body as my own body, rather than being a body that another person partially “owned” or at least had a vested interest in. My partner hadn’t demanded that I shave or stay clean for him; he hadn’t expected me to be sexually available to him at all hours of the day; he certainly hadn’t seen himself as the primary arbiter of my body – and yet somehow I had felt obligated in these ways nonetheless. I had felt it was my duty to look and feel and smell and taste a certain way for him. And now that I was single again, those responsibilities were just… gone.