What Is A Healthy Sex Life?

When I was 9, I learned that a healthy sex life was one that you shared with your husband.

One that led to the birth of children, to the start of your family, was quiet, private, rare and driven by a sense of obligation to that family and not by desire.

So when I turned 10 and started to realise I couldn’t see myself with a husband in my future, I learned to accept that I was wired wrong, and that I would likely never have a healthy sex life because my brain was defunct.

When I was 16, my boyfriend asked me to have sex with him and I said I wasn’t ready. Weeks later, he told me that he had slept with someone else. We broke up, and I met a boy who made me laugh and sang to me. 

He told me I didn’t deserve the way my ex treated me, he said that I deserved better, then took me to the terrace of an old building in a neighbourhood I didn’t recognise and egged me on to go down on him. He went on to do this to me for a year and everyone told me it was normal.

So I learned sex was about putting on a show for people who said nice things to you, even if they didn’t always publicly treat you that way. Because their preferences came above mine, and if I didn’t give them that, they’d go look for it in someone else, just like my ex had.

At 19, my first proper boyfriend told all of his friends that we hadn’t had sex yet. His friends then whispered little fears into his ear about how he wasn’t ‘keeping me happy’.

So when I decided to have sex with him and he said he wouldn’t wear a condom, I let him. When he finished and rolled over and went straight to sleep without a whisper of affection my way, I learned that healthy sex was about giving the other person an opportunity to unwind and relax.

Because a healthy sex life, I had learned, was about showing my partner that he made me happy, so he could gloat about it to his friends and feel socially validated.

At 21, my girlfriend asked me how I liked to be touched. She held me close and asked me what I wanted. Kissed me softly and then bit me, just the way I liked it. We’d have sex every day for hours before anyone felt ready to go to bed, and even then she held on to me.

So I learned healthy sex was sometimes soft, sometimes messy, but constant. Frequent. Intense. And long-lasting. On good days and bad, low days and sick ones, sex was always going to happen.

At 25, I was told I had been living with severe depression my entire adolescent and adult life and was put on SSRI’s to mediate the gloom. Sex was a rare occurrence by now, mostly produced only after a few drinks and a significant amount of dissociation.

Healthy sex was now something that didn’t need me to be mentally present in the room at all. It was whatever the other person made it out to be, and as long as the other person finished, everything was peachy.

At 26 my medication changed because the previous ones made it difficult for me to eat and didn’t help me with my sleep at all. With the new meds, I clocked out within moments of taking my medication, which meant that a healthy sex life was now about engaging in sexual activity mostly during the day or right before I took my meds.

Eventually I found out that what I had was not ‘restlessness’ or ‘stress’, it was trauma. Years and years worth of memories stored haphazardly in the crevices of my mind and replaying at random like a stubborn TV playing a horror movie on loop no matter how many times I tried to turn it off. When that realisation got too much for me to handle, I was put on benzos for emergency anxiety relief.

What does all of this combined mean for my sex life now?

It means I spend most of my nights craving my partner’s affectionate touch while simultaneously feeling my skin catch fire every other night.

It means I pop SOS anxiety meds just to have sex sometimes, but that often means that my parts go numb, and I need more time and consistent stimulus to feel myself get anywhere close to finishing.

And when I do, I feel guilt and shame because sex was supposed to be about my partner finishing and finding validation, so why did I take so long? Why did I ask for more kisses or more contact or less touch here and more touch there? Why didn’t I just give?

I wish I could end this on a lighter note, but the truth is, I’m still lost. I still don’t know what a healthy sex life looks like. I don’t know if my partner looks at me and thinks of our sexual connection as a healthy one.

I don’t know what I should change or how I can someday be the type of person who just… has sex.

Without the need for alcohol or anxiety meds before the act.

Without needing the promise of a cuddle after.

Without continuously stressing about how I should have worn that other outfit or shaved first or turned the lights off or put some makeup on or been on top.

I wish my head wasn’t filled with ideas of what other people thought healthy sex looked like. Maybe then I would have had five minutes to figure out what that phrase means to me.