When a woman says she likes to have casual sex, what do you think of? There’s much that could be written about whatever mental image she conjures up, W H Auden’s judgments about women who ‘love to talk about men under the clover’, or those who believe them, but for now let’s just consider what I’m referring to when I use the phrase.

Ah – hang on. Let’s start with what is sex? I’m not embarrassed to admit that I had to look this up in order to write this article. I was, however, disappointed to note that this rigid definition hadn’t shifted much in the 20 years since the first time I remember asking my older friend: Oxford Dictionary:

I was 19 when I asked my friend if I was still a virgin. I’d been going out with my boyfriend for over a year and I was pretty sure I wasn’t. (Still, you can’t be too careful.) I was hoping for some kind of affirmation, which is maybe why I remember the dull thud in my ribcage as I waited for her to speak.

“A dick going in and out of a pussy.”

My friend’s definition was perhaps less clinical than Oxford’s but no more forgiving.

My stomach lurched. I wasn’t supposed to have sex. I had fucked up … And so sex became: Penetration, then shame.

I would pretty much try to have sex with him because it felt really good. And what difference did it make, if I was going to marry you anyways? And we dated six years, because I didn’t want to get married so let’s just live together in sin! No, I would really much rather get married. But I don’t wanna do it before I’m ready. I wanna do it right, once… or whatever the hell he said.

So… we had sex. But unfortunately, it came at a price.

Anyway, for me sex had always been fraught. My body, as it can, had put itself on heightened guard. It was resisting with a built-in undercurrent, I guess you’d say, the pressure of shame: that kind of tension had transcended itself so completely and completely, that tension was sex.

If you’re having trouble picturing sex under these conditions, then you’ll have made it.

I did not.

I would cry afterwards, always – so, yeah, I have googled ‘crying after orgasm’ multiple times more times than I actually want to admit; Google told me that other people also cry after sex, so I never really looked more into it, I just started to avoid sex or anything sexual altogether.

Penetrative sex is no longer the standard

Fast-forward 20-something years and, fortunately, I have a much more expanded view of what sex is – it can be (and often is), yes, ‘a dick going in and out of a pussy’, though it isn’t, at least I think, and can’t be, any more narrow than that and still be considered sex (at least in my book) as well as straight up heteronormative af … and ripped straight from the sex-negative religious cultural mythology I was raised with.

Turns out that despite what Oxford, Webster, The Church and my parents provide, what sex is remains largely up for grabs. What is it that I’d consider sex today?

It’s “just sex,” I told myself. It shouldn’t be that important.

I thought to myself: what is the right word? Then it hit me: it feels… casual.

‘Holy shit,’ I thought. ‘If my 18-year-old self knew I was actually, like, having sex just for fun, she’d start spinning and whooshing and fainting and passing out.’

And yet, our sex is relaxed, friendly, natural, informal, unpretentious. Me, I feel no shame outside the parameters anyway laid out for me at the cusp of adulthood; in an easy, consenting sexual banter, my biology \’sings\’.

Giving in to my sexual cravings

Which is to say: after 22 years of sex – damn it, sex! – I have finally arrived at a point in my life where I can wholeheartedly enjoy some sloppy fucks. And not only have they not been devoid of intimacy, but they’ve been full of it. Pardon the mundane thing, but I never in my wildest dreams thought I would like sex this much, just for itself. I had no concept of how it was even possible, considering the crushing shame I was saddled with growing up.

Deconversion from religion, naming my religious trauma, and reframing sexuality as something positive and life-giving: these are some of the greatest gifts I’ve ever received. I will never emerge from these experiences the same person I was before. I’m forever changed in ways that I’ll always hopefully be grateful for.

I now crave sex for the intimacy I find there with my partner.

In fact, I struggle to have sex when this kind of intimacy hasn’t been established. I’ve learned how to have sex outside those parameters. But I don’t want to.ital-mashing. It’s not erotic. It doesn’t appeal to me.

It is bizarre to me that people find sexually attractive people they can’t possibly know at all, so yet another reason why the concept of casual sex seemed so strange to me is that it means having sex with someone you can’t possibly know.

Yet here I am, in an established relationship, having ‘casual sex’, with sexual attraction arriving at my doorstep for the first time in my life, at age 40.