How to Have Sex

TMI: How long have you gone without sex?

The answer: A really, really long time

Brett Jenae Tomlin
Sensual: An Erotic Life
3 min readNov 10, 2022

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Photo by LOGAN WEAVER | @LGNWVR on Unsplash

This one time, I didn’t have sex for a long time. Too long, probably. Try 28 years. Some of that I was in diapers so maybe slightly less. I suppose that’s one of the reasons why sex is important to me, more as a concept — an expression of free will — than as an act.

Sometimes I hear about kids who have sex “too early” and I get a bit jealous. I’m not jealous of awkward, juvenile sex. I’m not even jealous that those people got a head start.

I’m disappointed that my life and body were owned and kept by my overlording dad and his overlording lord.

I’m jealous of kids who didn’t grow up hearing their dad make menacing declarations like, “You can’t date till you’re 30,” so often that they couldn’t tell if it was a joke.

I wonder what my life would be like if my dad hadn’t owned a Christian bookstore that sold bibles in droves and made our family the first to receive shiny copies of “I Kissed Dating Goodbye.”

I’m irate that I was one of the unlucky ones with a childhood that included a “mock” wedding ceremony in our church between me, my dad, his god, and the ghost of a…

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Brett Jenae Tomlin
Sensual: An Erotic Life

Brett lives in Dallas with her partner and their dogs. She loves to write about living broadly and bravely with anxiety.