You don’t know me all that well, but I have this habit of inserting myself where people haven’t necessarily asked me. On planes, trains, and well, in airport bars. In overhead conversations, mostly, because I can’t help commenting when human experience is just so similar. And, well, I’m a human, mostly. So I comment and write whether it’s asked for or not. Whether my mother would like it or not. Usually that’s an “or not.”

So hello, Liz, fellow frank blogger. I’m Kris. I loved your post and I too have a few things to say about sex.

I’m in my mid-30s, and can write – now that I know my dead father will never read the words – that I’ve got a sex drive that should be criminal. (I warned y’all). It’s so sad, and I’m so hard up, that I’ve reached an all time low even by celebrity standards. Remember when Pat O’Brien left that harassing message, the one about bleeping his lady friend in the bleep and bleeping each other’s bleeps, and doing it all atop the motherboard that makes up Mary Hart’s torso? Well, for some reason it was rebroadcast last night, and I found it all strangely arousing. Yes, I did. It was Pat O’Brien, King of I’m So Creepy I Could be a Substitute Gym Teacher From 1974, and I was thinking I wouldn’t kick him out of bed for having slept with Kathy Griffin. I know where you’re coming from.

I have a history of alternating between perpetual and loving monogamist and all around hussy.** At different points in my life, the latter has sounded so exciting, so very Samantha, so very on the edge, that I couldn’t help but indulge. Which, as those who know me and have seen my yearbook photos can attest, is the exact opposite of who I really am. I’m a nerdling – nay, a full-fledged nerd – and that’s pretty much set in stone at this point in my life. I’ll make a prohibited right on red if I’m alone at 3 am, but at any time should one mention “the marijuana,” my moles start sweating and I’m already dialing 911. But being the girl who chooses red lingerie over black, who chooses lingerie of any color over a Florida State tee shirt, it’s alluring. It’s sexy, it’s spontaneous, it’s hyped. And it’s everything that I’m not.

When I dip my toe in the pool of casual sex, I invariably feel empty. It’s rewarding like a chocolate brownie sundae is rewarding, drawn out and perfectly luscious, but limited. It’s decadent and filling and sinful and fun while it’s all happening. Like two bottles of cab and a large pizza at 3 am, it’s a good idea at the time. You’re the picture of fly by the seat of your pun-intended pants. You’re a woman who drinks cosmos rather than cocoa. But when the whirl is over, when the time has come and gone, and you’ve exhausted the moment and quite possibly him, you eventually feel sick. It never, ever fails. Too much of one thing and not nearly enough of another.

It’s an oversimplification, but monogamous sex is like reaching Eden. It’s being able to bite the apple and get a redo if it doesn’t taste just so the first time. It’s exciting and it’s thrilling, because it’s safe while not necessarily always being so. It’s appreciation. It’s alternately walking hand in hand and being led. Or yanked.*** It’s like a plush comforter you know will cover you in most climates, the one you don’t often throw off for another blanket. It’s sometimes routine and all about the possibilities. And while it occasionally leaves me wishing he’d go off and watch SportsCenter already, it never feels like he’s dropped me off out front and I didn’t know whether to kiss or hug him. Or roll out of the car at 8 mph.

So don’t do it again until then. Because that’s what you deserve, not in an after school special kind of way, but in that way that is true to who you are. Until then, as you said, you’ll make friends with plastics of various odd colors, some with rows of silver pearls, some small enough to fit in the glove compartment. And you’ll discuss sex with friends, and beam and ache at all the glory that awaits, just like a little girl and her hoped-for pink Huffy. And like my single friends and me, you’ll become like toddlers obsessed with the idea of meeting Elmo. Only your Elmo will love sex as much as you do, and will just love beyond love that you are doing it only with him.

I’m sorry for that visual.

As a side note, I wrote this at a bar outside Boston. When I popped open my computer, a man two seats down from me commented that I shouldn’t be doing work. I told him the writing wouldn’t be work.

“So you looking at porn?” he chuckled.

No, sir, I’m not. But that’s an idea.

* Sadly, when all of us will have sex again. NOT. SOON. ENOUGH.

** That one was for you, dearly departed Sophia. I’m kicking Stan in the groin in your honor.

*** If they have blogs in heaven, I’m so, so sorry Dad.