Sex Lives: A Guy Who Had Only Had Sex With His Wife—Then Got Divorced at 30 

A 34-year-old straight man in San Francisco on a childhood porn scrapbook, reading erotica, and butt plugs. 
A woman jots  into her notebook her sexual conquests with a picture of a hot dog leaping into a bun.
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For Sex Lives, GQ speaks with someone about their entire sex life up to this point. 

One of the earliest things I remember being turned on by was a Christina Aguilera music video. I couldn't tell you which one, but I remember there was one of her videos where I was like, “Oh boy.” When you’re a kid in a sheltered suburb of Phoenix, Arizona, you're kind of like… “Oh!” But I started jerking off later, sometime in junior high; I went to a charter school that was essentially a de facto Christian private school, but it wasn't somehow. And we were all there for similar reasons, which was mostly that our parents were worried about us, so we just kind of found other people we connected with. This was before porn was available on our phones or anything. Anyway, my friends cut out magazine photos from porn magazines and just suggestive photos and we put them in this collective binder that we all passed around. It was so different from my 15 year old nephew, who I try to talk to now about what to look at and maybe what to avoid. He has access to everything. I had to download images to my super slow family computer that was in the living room.

I grew up in a very Christian household, for better or worse, and my interpretation of my parent’s guidelines was that I could mess around if it wasn’t penetrative sex. So as a teen I was hooking up with people—fingering people, getting blow jobs—whatever a 14 year old boy’s conception of a good hookup is. I had three or four relationships with people in high school. They didn’t come from families as religious as my hyper-religious parents, but I think it worked out okay because we were still able to find other sexual outlets other than full-on penetrative sex. It wasn’t that I wasn’t interested in having sex, but I felt the pressure from my parents not to. I didn’t think I was going to be banished to hell or anything. (This seems terribly unhealthy now, when I look back.)

Things changed when I went away for college. I went two hours away from home, and the physical separation from my parents made all the difference. I lost my virginity in college, if you take the limited definition of virginity to be penetrative sex only. Honestly, losing it felt almost anticlimactic after all the build up. I lost my virginity to my girlfriend at the time. We had fooled around before and she knew everything but penetrative sex was ok, so she was aware that I was losing it to her. She ended up being my first wife. We got married after dating for three years, and I lost my virginity somewhere about halfway through those three years, but we were young and I probably thought at least on some level, even if it was subconscious, that we would end up together. Which we were for nine years.

Even after getting divorced, I never felt like I had only been with one person because I had had many other sexual experiences with other people throughout the years. I felt like it was all just different levels of intimacy with different people. Post-divorce, I didn’t feel the need to go nuts or to sign up for every single app. I just kind of wanted to slowly feel my way out into the world. I had been attached to this person when I was 18 and then here I was getting divorced at 30, and it felt a tiny bit like Sling Blade. Like the whole landscape of the world had changed. When I was first single, I had several married male friends that were like, “You must be so excited,” and I was like, “I’m not really… I’ll just try to start dating when I’m ready and I’ll see how that goes.” I will say, though, that my ex-wife didn’t really like me to go down on her, so I wasn’t really practiced at that when I was first single post-divorce. I feel like I had no clue what I was doing; I try not to have an ego about it. I realized I was out of my element! Oddly enough, sex was never a component that contributed to the dissolution of my first marriage at all; I felt like we grew together in our sexuality. We tried sex toys together, we liked watching porn together. We even had sex a few times after we separated, which I’m surprised there aren’t more depictions of on film or TV.

I met my current wife two years after getting divorced. Some of the best sex that I had in my life was when I was dating my wife early on. We had sex a few times semi-publicly and that very much stood out for me. We’ve been together now for a few years and my wife is currently eight months pregnant, which has definitely changed sex for us—even just the physical changes have made sex far more difficult, especially because we usually have somewhat rough or aggressive sex, which isn’t necessarily super safe later on in pregnancy. We’re generally very good at laughing and talking our way through it, but her being pregnant has made us have to get more creative. Sometimes even just moving in a weird way would make her feel like she was going to throw up, so it would be difficult for us to stay in the mood. Now we’re at a point where sex could possibly induce labor, so that kind of freaks me out; I’m not trying to cause my child to be born prematurely! Obviously, sex will also stop for a while after the baby is born, but we’ve had so many other points in our relationship— which makes sense for people who met in their 30s—where sex wasn’t on the table for various reasons. Real life shit like grieving a parent, for example. Again, though, we’re very good at talking about it. If we haven’t had sex in a week or so one of us is always like, “Hey, I know we haven’t had sex in a while, here’s what’s going on with me...” Usually then we either watch porn together or maybe one of us gets the other person off.

We also watch porn separately from one another, and I do still masturbate separately from having sex with my wife as well. I wish I could say I use my own imagination, but at this point with what’s available on the internet, I don’t really. When I jerk off I either watch porn or I read erotica—some of my favorite subreddits are erotica or short form written stories. I feel like erotica gets very gendered, but oddly enough my wife, on the other hand, has to see someone come. That said, if I’m watching porn, I don’t need a storyline. Don’t try to give me story. I am very conscious about the fact that porn can kind of desensitize you to things—I’m very grateful for the fact that if I see a pair of tits, that still turns me on and I don’t want that to ever go away. It’s like drugs a bit; I love drugs, but I’m very cognizant of how I enjoy it so that I don’t need more and more to feel something.

I don’t necessarily have anything on my bucket list or any particular act that I still want to do. I’m just happy and content with the person I’m with, and we enjoy having sex together. One thing that I was pretty surprised I was into was using a butt plug. I’m not even sure which partner introduced them to me. It was kind of like, “Oh I have a prostate!” I would like to think there there was no latent homophobic tendency around my initial reluctance. I try to be really aware as a straight guy of not, like, propagating assumptions about what certain sex acts mean, but clearly there was some reason I was hesitant. But I love them now.


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