Stories are written by people who don’t necessarily work or study in fields related to sexology. They convey emotions, perceptions, and subjective perspectives. Opinions voiced in the stories are those of their authors, and in no way represent Les 3 sex* position.

Translated by Nelle Tremblay

I have always considered sexuality to be an important aspect of my life, whether or not I was in a relationship. In my head, though, there are two kinds of people: those who have an active sexuality, and those who don’t.
It’s totally black or white.

My grandparents: don’t.

My brothers and sisters: do.

My colleagues: do.

My fifteen year-old cousin: definitely not !

I don’t even need to reflect on it. It’s as if the answers are already pre-set in my head. As if somebody else had put them there for me. Probably to save me some time. Thanks buddy.

It was all good and well until the friend of a friend, after one too many drinks, hit me with what felt like a shovel in the face.

A shovel full of words. Not the shovel that you use to shovel your doorway in the winter, but more so the one that hits the preconceived ideas off your brain and bruises your ego without notice.

Said incident happened during one of our beloved girls night at my friend’s Anita’s. The kind of nights that can be summarized by drinking while talking about our lives. You might have guessed it, the amount of time spent on conversations related to our sex lives is directly proportionate to the number of drinks we guzzle.

It is thus during this particularly drunken evening between a strap-on conversation and another one on the importance of tenderness that this comment was thrown at me : “Woa, you’ve been with your boyfriend for 8 years! That’s one long period of time! You’re probably not having much sex anymore!”

Huh ? What the f*** ?

I felt that my face and my brain lagged to respond for a couple seconds, pouting between incomprehension and surprise.

A girl I barely knew was declaring herself as the expert on my sexual life. The room clearly felt uneasy. She gloriously tried to laugh it off. It didn’t work.

I was faced with two choices: Helping her get over the awkwardness or making it worse. I can’t tell if it’s the alcohol or the babel she had created in my brain but I chose to add fuel on the flames. I asked her to explain the reasoning behind her comment.

Clearly the atmosphere took a hit, but she confessed, slightly reluctantly, that she had a hard time imagining two people in a relationship for more than ten years having an active and satisfying sexual life.

My relationship was close to the limit. Our sexual sphere was automatically summed up by a constant desire loss, a dull and barely stimulating routine as well as a clear lack of surprise and novelty.

For this girl, sexual passion could be compared to Halloween candies: we started off with the good intention of making them last but after a month or two we would realise that only the less good ones were left. We would extend them until there was none left and be left to hang for the rest of the year.

My boyfriend and I were at the end of our pumpkin. We had boring candy sex and within two years we wouldn’t be having sex anymore. None at all.

I realized that to her too, there were people who had a sexuality and others who did not.

Two categories: yes or no.

And I felt that we were quite a bunch to have been declared sexually inactive.

Involuntarily.

Just like that.

Without any further questioning.

The difference is that now I knew it, and it bothered me. And all of a sudden, it hit me. I was doing the same thing! #facepalm

I was thinking to myself that my parents were too busy to have a fulfilling sexual life, that my grandparents were too old, that my cousin was too young, etc.

People were either sexually active or completely inactive.

I was categorizing them according to different criteria. Her very own threshold was the length of the relationship.

I also realized that what had been put in our heads without us noticing, supposedly to save us some reflexion time, had a name: prejudice. They were prejudice. To realize I was holding some in me hurt. To realize that it could hurt people that I love hurt even more.

I had no idea that my brain would be challenged when I got to Anita’s place waving my bottle of wine around. And I’m pretty sure her friend sitting on the flowery couch didn’t know she carried a weapon of mass reflexion in her mouth.

The important thing is that we ended the night by talking about our prejudice and rash judgments. We couldn’t help but realize that we were lacking shade of meaning and so we decided to give ourselves an objective : to build a new category.

The ‘’maybe’’ one.

This is a big category. It’s one that cannot be bothered with age or profession or the length of the relationship, even the presence of the relationship. It accepts everyone. Some more easily than others.

I must admit that it rapidly became my favourite category.

P.S.: In your sexual life, it’s Halloween whenever you want. #dontforget