I hear it all the time: "I can't have sex without using. It just doesn't work."
And underneath that statement is a belief that sober sex is somehow inferior, broken, or impossible.
You've convinced yourself that the substance unlocked something real, and now without it, you're stuck with some lesser version of intimacy.
But here's what I need you to hear: The problem isn't that sober sex doesn't measure up. The problem is the ruler you're using is designed to make you fail.
You're not struggling because sobriety took something away from you.
You're struggling because you've accepted a definition of sex and intimacy that was never real, never sustainable, and never about connection in the first place.
The Script You've Been Given
Let me be direct: Porn carved your brain.
Not metaphorically—literally.
From the time you were a teenager discovering your sexuality, pornography has been teaching you what sex is supposed to look like.
It showed you the positions, the scenarios, the bodies, the sounds, the pace, the duration. It created neural pathways that fire every time you think about sex, and those pathways lead to a very specific destination: performance.
Porn taught you that good sex is:
- Visually impressive
- Physically demanding
- Endlessly energetic
- Measured in time and intensity
- A showcase of your abilities
- A conquest to be won
And then hookup apps turned that performance into a marketplace.
Suddenly, intimacy became transactional.
You learned to present yourself as a product, to evaluate others as commodities, to measure your worth by your stats and your ability to deliver on expectations.
Every encounter became an audition.
Every connection became a transaction.
The queer community handed you this script and called it liberation.
