Am I Wasting My 20s By Not Having More Sex?

I’m at a friend’s birthday, and we’re standing in a smoking area surrounded by so much paneled wood that it looks a bit like a sauna. Under the fluorescent red of the outdoor heater, a friend complains about someone he slept with the night before.

“They never want to leave anymore, do they?” he says. 

I laugh. “I wouldn’t know, I literally never have sex anymore.”

He asks me when the last time was, and I tell him the date, which in my mind is a while ago, but not a while-while—at least, until I see his reaction. He gasps, rubs my arm, and asks me if I’m okay, as though he isn’t sure how I’m still on my feet, moving through the world.

I wake up the next morning panicked. I worry that when I’m older and everything on my body has moved downwards, I’ll be sad that I didn’t make the most of my 20s. I worry I’ll regret that, instead of going round to guys’ houses, I’m spending Sundays hungover in bed and weekdays watching hot women from LA making sea-moss smoothies on TikTok—worry that I won’t get to write an Annie Ernaux-style memoir called something sexy like Another Woman’s Son about these years and the men who were in them because there weren’t ever enough of them. I start to think I might die alone.

This isn’t a new feeling for me. I get it often enough that I’ve gotten quite good at reasoning my way out of it. I remind myself that just because I’m not having sex right now doesn’t mean I’m not a sexual person—that going without sex can actually make you experience your sexuality even more intensely.

There’s a scene in Sex and the City that encapsulates this view. Samantha is drinking coffee with a hot yoga instructor while he tries to explain to her why he’s celibate. “Didn’t you like it?” Samatha asks, “it” meaning sex.

“Oh, I loved it,” he says. “I’d have sex morning, noon, and night. Sometimes three women a day, and I was always ready for more.” Still, he assures her that where he is now is “so much better than sex.”

To explain his point, he uses the example of really good foreplay. “Your sexual energy is just starting to awaken. Now imagine a three-year foreplay where all that sexual energy is coursing through your body but it never gets released. It just recycles, builds, rises, until your entire being is humming with that electric sexual energy.”