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What happened next didn’t feel like liberation so much as demolition. After midnight, I started texting with a sweet, respectful software engineer I’d seen a few times before, aboveboard, within the parameters of Aaron’s and my rules. Eventually it became clear that I was, at that moment, again going to break those rules. I slipped out wearing nothing but a sundress to go meet the guy while Aaron was dead to the world. When I walked through my own door at four a.m., knees buckling and hair a mess, there was a large part of me that wished Aaron would wake up and demand to know where I’d been—not just because the despair was starting to creep back and an angry confrontation would have been more satisfying than nothingness, but because I knew it was over, and I wanted him to do the honors.
He didn’t. I don’t want this, I thought: not this relationship, not an affair, not a life devoid of the erotic. A few weeks later, I moved out.
I thought back to the best sex I’d had in recent memory: the topaz pellet, my sweaty face on Rob’s couch, limbs tied up, lava lake of desire completely exposed. I was so disarmed, so trusting. That wasn’t the kind of sex you had with a one-night stand. Despite our best efforts, Rob and I had failed to keep it “casual,” and that was with our respective partners acting as emotional buffers. The high stakes of seeing Rob had also heightened the hotness. It wasn’t just sex but forbidden sex—a classic trope, of course, a source of eroticism that depended on dishonesty and the risk of negative consequences. That kind of thrill felt both inaccessible and antithetical to a slut with integrity. I wanted my hookups to be both fulfilling and morally sound.
Almost right away, I was confronted with a dilemma that has long complicated the success rate of casual sex, even between two upstanding humans. How could I have satisfying sex while feeling safe but not bored, cared for but not smothered in sentimentality? How could I stay true to my feelings but not be “too much”?
Facetious critiques of the theory and its resulting law expressed concern that enthusiastic consent would make sex artificial and sterile, requiring awkward checklists. Others gave the false impression that fishing for one “yes” and moving on was good enough, rather than interpreting consent as a fluid, ongoing process. Friedman would later clarify that enthusiastic consent is a more active process than just following rules or waiting for a green light; it’s “a humanizing ethic of sex.” Truly internalizing the values of consent, she wrote, must include “emotional literacy”—the ability to be vulnerable, and to be trusted with others’ vulnerability.