Welcome to Love, Us, a column for telling queer love stories in all their glory. (And by glory, we mean all the big, beautiful moments and otherworldly little details that make making and falling in queer love so, so fun.) Read more from the series here.
I didn’t have sex at all in 2020.
Sorry, that might have been too much too quickly. I’ll start over.
Hello, my name is Garrett. I’m a Virgo sun, Capricorn rising, Libra moon. I live in San Francisco, and I didn’t fuck at all in 2020. Not once. Not even a handjob! There wasn’t so much as a finger in my ass last year that wasn’t mine, and although I do love my own angel-soft-yet-decidedly-strong fingers, after a while, one does get tired of one’s own handiwork.
I blame my perpetually un-fucked year on the global pandemic we’ve all been living through. Perhaps you’ve heard of this? It’s not great! I don’t think I’m painting with too broad of a bush here when I say that essentially every waking moment of the past 403 days (but who’s counting?) has felt like walking around in a suit made of little bees that are on fire and also singing the chorus of “Happy” by Pharrell screamo-style on loop. The facade of normalcy behind which we were all operating pretty much shattered to reveal a Charybdis-esque chasm that sucked all social structures into it, with dating, intimacy, and sex being notable losses.
It’s not necessarily that pre-pandemic dating (particularly online dating, which is famously an unmitigated hellscape) was so wonderful, but more so that losing it brought into focus how deeply necessary it is to get one’s rocks off. To let out one’s ya-yas, if you will. I’m hesitant to say there’s a light at the end of the tunnel because, again, this has really been more like a chasm, but as more and more people have started to get The Jab, dating, intimacy, and romance (in person) are becoming viable options again. It begs the question: what the hell is it going to look like now? After a year of park dates and virtual dates and Zoom sex and introspection and masturbation, are we really rushing back to business as usual? Or, is this a gorgeous window of opportunity to reinvent what dating looks like in a post-pandemic world?
“I think that those of us who’ve been single for a significant chunk of the pandemic,” W Magazine columnist Harron Walker reflected over the phone recently, “have had a lot of time to think about what our priorities are and what we want and what we wished we’d maybe had during this past year. I feel like I’m leaving the pandemic knowing very confidently that I want a relationship,” she said. “I want someone who prioritizes me. I want someone to prioritize in my life. I want to build a life with someone.”