To help with my back recovery, my chiropractor suggested I train on a piece of equipment known as a pilates reformer. The other day, as the result of a mix-up, I walked into what I thought was a private session, only to realize it was actually a group class. I went and sat on my assigned machine and watched the other women file in. With each passing moment I realized I didn’t want to be there. I wasn’t in the mood to fumble with this new equipment or start my first in-person exercise class of the pandemic. Maybe someday—just not that day. So, I got up, put my shoes on, and quietly walked out. The instructor fretted that something was wrong, and I said no, I’d just thought I was walking into one thing and didn’t feel like doing the thing it turned out to be.
Later, when the person who booked the class apologized for the mix-up, I told them it wasn’t a big deal. (Because it wasn’t.) Twenty-four-year-old me would have sat there, taken the class, felt awkward and annoyed the whole time, and likely spent the day irritated that I hadn't had the experience I’d signed up for. Forty-four-year-old me just walked out, went home, and danced with Jo. Why? Younger me—like lots of younger people—would have felt paralyzed by “making a scene” or “seeming rude” or “offending” the instructor, and would have prioritized avoiding that awkward moment over my own happiness, even as I actively resented doing so. Middle-aged me is aware that life is short. Middle-aged me is aware that life is too full of unavoidable obligations—psychic, financial, emotional, and otherwise—to give energy to imagined ones.
How did I arrive at this place? By spending much of my 20s allowing my body to endure any number of circumstances that my gut told me would be unpleasant, and coming to regret having stuck them out. Sitting through a brunch with frenemies because I “felt obliged” when they asked to hang out. Enduring a painful or bad manicure or massage because walking out “felt impolite.” Tolerating a bad exercise class or rude service at a bar or restaurant because I didn’t want to “make a scene.” And, yes—dare I say it—by consenting to lots of mediocre sex that I knew was going to be unfulfilling before even the act had begun so as not to “hurt” the other person’s feelings.
Each of these episodes resulted in a feeling of regret that varied in degree but was always the result of prioritizing implied social mores over the autonomy of my body. After suffering through enough of these “hangovers,” I learned to care less about the fleeting moment and to care more about myself. To listen to my gut and heed what it is telling me my body wants to do—where it wants to be, who it wants to spend time with. With age come wrinkles and creams and graying hairs, but also the delightful shedding of fucks. But it was with the knowledge of how icky the regret can feel that I have developed the strength to walk away or in some cases avoid certain circumstances altogether. (I left frenemies and their brunches in the dust long ago; bad sex—harder to spot in advance—sometimes still has a way of sneaking in the door.)
And it is sex that lead me to this train of thought, after I read a recent op-ed in The New York Times titled “When We Consent, We Shouldn’t Feel Terrible After, Right?” The piece, written by a recent college graduate, lamented the fact that—as campuses promote consent-based sexual encounters—she still finds herself engaged in conversations with young women who give the affirmative yes and yet feel icky about the act afterward.
“Inevitably, someone will ask, “Well, did you say yes?” The answer is almost always that we did, but despite that, we’re left with an unshakable uneasiness. We said yes, but we don’t know why … The primary fear articulated by my friends in these situations is impoliteness—they often feel that enduring the awkwardness of turning someone down is ultimately worse than having unwanted sex. Being the source of someone’s disappointment should not be worth more than our dignity, yet it is a calculus that seems nearly ubiquitous among young women I know.”
I recognized this as true to what not only women but men that I’ve known all experienced one time or another (or even many times) as they came of age: consenting to sex out of some strange sense of “obligation” and finding it awkward, unenjoyable, regrettable. The kind of story that as we aged out of our 20s and moved through our 30s, I heard less and less.
Where the author and I differ, however, is in how to remedy the issue. According to the writer, the fact that consent-based sex education doesn’t erase the ickiness around regrettable sex is a sign that universities must do more to create sex-education programming that starts “from the assertion that each person deserves pleasurable, mutually respectful sex—not sex that is merely consensual.”
This is like saying school should teach us how to love or how to build self-esteem. It’s a beautiful sentiment that’s disconnected from reality. It is asking an institution to teach us things that each of us must learn for ourselves. What defines “pleasurable, mutually respectful sex” will differ depending on the partners as individuals and as a unit. Knowledge of self is also key to pleasurable sex.
Knowledge of self includes understanding how you, an individual, want to value your body—not in puritanical terms, but in terms of how you treat, and allow others to treat and speak about, that body. In the bedroom, in the context of friendships, in the context of work, even in the context of—especially at this moment—politics. This is not to diminish the strangeness that can linger after less-than-ideal sexual encounters we might wish we hadn’t had, or to underemphasize all the ways in which more holistic sex education starting way before college would be beneficial. But it is to say that consenting to sex out of polite “obligation” is just one of many things young people feel they “should do” until they live through enough emotional hangovers to realize that they don’t need to.
Each of our barometers for feeling pleasure or respect are different and learning how to calibrate and manage those barometers is, in my opinion, an on-the-job experience, not something you can teach in a classroom. In understanding what makes us feel “icky,” we develop standards and confidence to ask for what we want and walk away from what we don’t. Much as parents might wish it for their kids or young people might wish it for themselves, the path to a fulfilling life—which includes sex—is paved with a certain amount of ickiness and even, I'm sorry to say, some potential emotional pain.