"Don’t assume you feel comfortable with the same things you felt comfortable with in the before times... You’re a different person now. We all are."

Says one expert quoted in From "The Back-to-Sex Special: How to Prepare for the Post-Pandemic Summer of Sex/It's time to have sex again. Here's how to get ready, according to the experts" (Inside Hook).

The Hot Vax Summer discourse makes it sound like everyone is about to have the horniest summer of their lives, and if you don’t, you’re doing it wrong.... For many people, the prospect of impromptu hookups with random strangers never held much appeal, and holds even less in the immediate aftermath of a pandemic....

“It might take some time to feel comfortable opening back up, and sometimes our mind might be faster than our body. So, honor your body’s pace.... Embrace the awkward..."...

“If your sex life has been mostly with yourself during the pandemic, you might be feeling a strange mix of emotions as you prepare to put yourself back out there — excitement, anxiety, maybe even dread — so it’s important to check in with yourself emotionally as you go,” says Kocak.

That said, remember that sex is something our bodies are literally built to do. No matter how long it’s been, you’re probably not as sexually inept as you fear. “It will be like riding a bike,” says Sparks. After all, she adds, “You never really forget how to have sex.”

It's not like riding a bike! You don't fall off if you're doing it wrong. And what makes you sure you were doing it right in the first place. With a bike, you were doing it right because you made forward progress and didn't fall. With sex, you rarely fall off and you aren't traveling from one geographic location to another — e.g., from your house to the park. You may think you're "traveling" through some abstract landscape from titillation to satisfaction — and there are probably towns in Pennsylvania called Titillation and Satisfaction — but you most likely began and ended at the same geographic coordinates. 

And if you've been assuming you're doing it right because it's "something our bodies are literally built to do," that's a crazily broad definition of what it means to do it right. But thanks for taking me back to the time when I was a little kid and asked my mother how babies are made. I have never forgotten her explanation, the sum total of it, verbatim: "Well, you know how men and women are physically built."

Overcast sunrise with bikes and geese.

 

Time: 5:42 a.am. 

Did I bike there? No. And bikes are forbidden there. I ran — getting back to my sunrise run (after several days of babying myself after a wisdom tooth extraction). 

Even in Madison, rules are transgressed. Not by me, though. I'm a rule follower, one of the class of persons who are restrained by rules that are not actively enforced and that those who only follow enforced rules do not follow. I regard that as a fundamental unfairness. 

And yet, I can see that willingness of some people to break rules is part of a dynamic that works against excessive restraint. A rule that everyone follows, though there is no enforcement, is probably an excellent rule.

"But the troublemakers were as bizarre as they were inescapable... There was the mysterious tent urinator, who found a way to pee on the side of another man’s tent..."

"... every night for six straight weeks (and whose identity is an as-yet uncracked case). The man who always took photos of me changing flat tires to send home to his wife, because 'she was never going to believe that a woman could do this.' The woman who had never ridden a bike before the trip. The daily hitchhiker who 'didn’t do climbs' and thumbed for rides up hills. The racer who wanted everyone else to ride farther and faster each day. The relapsed gambling addict who snuck into town every night and couldn’t be trusted with group funds. The sexual harasser who hounded me daily with lewd comments unfit to print. And in every group, there was always one person who tried to rile up a mutiny because he wanted out of the cooking rotation. It was hard to know who these people were in their daily lives, when they weren’t pushing their bodies to the limit and sleeping on the ground. I had to imagine that the mysterious tent urinator wasn’t similarly taking out his frustrations on a coworker’s office chair. Maybe all that misdirected rage could be chalked up to exhaustion, homesickness, and electrolyte imbalance?"

From "I Loved Bike Touring—Until I Got Paid to Do It/Seduced by the idea of turning my hobby into a paycheck, I led bike tours across the U.S. throughout my twenties. As I learned, some passion pursuits are best left pro bono," by Caitlin Giddings (at Outside). Excellent illustration, by the way.