“You're not doing it for intimacy, you're doing it for fun”: The rise of having sex ‘for the story’

It’s a hot summer night and I'm lying in bed with a very beautiful Italian man. We met three times in April and had magical chemistry but chose not to sleep together because we didn’t really have an emotional connection. It's now the end of July and he's about to leave the country for eight months. Emotional connection be damned – I want a real memory to topple the fantasy of sleeping with him that has only grown more powerful during the silence since our April fling.

He asks if I’m submissive. I say, “Yes” because I’ve often wondered if that might be the case. He bounds over to a sex chest for some binds, and tries and fails to tie me to his bed for a comically long period of time. He can’t make those knots hold for love nor money. We burst out laughing, and he moves to Plan B, tying me up in a fashion that results in my legs being stuck in the air.

There has already been so much confusion en route to this scenario that I don’t say anything in case the night swings off its axis. Instead, I revel in the absurd humour of the situation, knowing that this is another silly story I will regale my best friend with. The next day I send her a 20-minute voice note, giving her an in-depth account. She tells me that one phrase – “Not the most straightforward pleasure but certainly intriguing” – would be the title of my Yelp review.

This isn’t a one-off. When I cast my mind back across my sexual history, there are all kinds of reasons disconnected from pleasure and relationship-building that have prompted me to just crack on. Is emerging with an entertaining story a consolation prize when true sexual intimacy isn’t on the table? Or do I actively sabotage sexual connection by treating the whole experience like an undercover reporter? And am I a lone weirdo or is this a thing?

It turns out, I’m not alone. In May, Frances, a 23-year-old film student from Paris, had sex with an Italian who gave her a fake name in the toilet of an NYC karaoke bar. Her friends had set a challenge for the evening: anyone who had sex that night would get a free brunch. At the bar, ‘Diego’ and his friends came charging into their karaoke booth, and shortly afterwards, he led Frances towards the bathroom. “I knew it was going to be terrible because we didn't actually talk beforehand,” explains Frances. “He never asked my name. He didn't even try to get to know me but I was fine with it. That night I didn't mind putting his needs first. I wanted the story!” Frances’ suspicions about the quality of the sex were right: “It was terrible. The toilet was dirty and he even took a piss before we did it. Two birds, one stone I guess. At some point, a girl knocked on the toilet stall and I froze. She asked someone who was also waiting why it was taking so long. I was mortified but Diego didn't care!"

Amazingly, it didn’t end there. The pair had a second round back in the karaoke booth in front of both their friends. “I got bored and Diego was hot and ready to go again so I was like, ‘Why not?’ Diego's friend was all over my friend, so she didn't really pay attention, but I can still distinctly hear her saying, ‘Oh my god, no, Frances!’”

What went down for Frances is what sex therapist, Dr Lohani Noor calls “performative sex” where you enjoy the performance of sex as opposed to its physical intimacy. Frances relates to this – she’s scared of intimacy and has never dated, preferring one-night stands, especially ones that involve penetrative sex and giving blow jobs. As Dr Noor says, performative sex is a way to, “Snatch up a little bit of attachment and physical affirmation. You know, ‘My body's okay, it's okay to be held and to be touched.’ You can snatch that in short bursts with people you don't know very well and then run away.”

Having sex for the story isn't always about the lack of intimacy – sometimes it's a case of seizing the opportunity to tick something off your sexual bucket list. That's how one freezing February, Poppy*, a 24-year-old trainee doctor, found herself in Hyde Park at 2am, having sex up against a tree with a man she maintains is the best-looking guy in London. “I always thought it'd be cool to have sex in the park and I did it with somebody who I was quite happy to never see again,” she says. They had been on two previous dates and realised they had nothing in common, no real future. On the night in question, they had been out separately in west London and decided to meet. As they were miles away from their flats, they met outside, drinking as they walked through the streets until they arrived at Hyde Park. They hopped the fences for more privacy away from the main road and to continue drinking. On a previous date, they had shared their joint fantasy of park sex. Now that actually doing it was on the cards, they sat on a bench weighing up the pros and cons of going through with it.

Eventually, they decided to do it. “It was freezing cold,” says Poppy, “We both realised it was bad sex halfway through but I didn't want to be like, ‘Can we stop?’. It was us being very British and feeling we must commit to our decision, with a splash of not wanting to be the first to back out.” Poppy found the public aspect exciting, especially hearing the conversation of passersby outside the perimeters of the park. But afterwards, the mood was melancholic. “It made us both a bit sad. Whilst we were waiting for his bus and my Uber, we were talking about our last relationships and how much we missed them. I remember thinking, ‘Oh my god, this is the most ridiculous thing that's happened to me.’ And I haven't seen him since.”

Despite the fact that the sex was terrible, Poppy does not regret it in the slightest. In fact, she found the experience empowering, in no small part because of how much her friends loved hearing the story. She’d been at the pub with them before the park rendezvous and afterwards rejoined them at a house party. Poppy and her friends regularly voice note each other about their wild, often public, sexcapades. “We are constantly doing things for the ‘headlines’,” says Poppy. Why does she think that is? “It's both acclimatising to not being uni students anymore and acclimatising to life after the pandemic. My friends and I throw ourselves into these silly situations because we couldn't do anything for a year and a half, two years even.”

Is it possible for a story to have greater mileage than the experience itself? As the late, great American writer Joan Didion famously said, “We tell ourselves stories in order to live.” During my encounter with the Italian, though entirely consensual, I found it easier to follow his lead than to express my own more faltering desires. Speaking to Dr Noor, I float the idea that telling a story afterwards is a way to reassert yourself. She agrees, “It's really great to claim power retrospectively, especially when we know that we willingly took ourselves into that situation.”

For some people, sexual storytelling is an actual livelihood. Anonymous 38-year-old sex blogger Girl on the Net (GOTN) says that she tries not to do stuff “just” for the story, but she’s sent so many promotional items that one ex jokingly referred to testing them out as “chore sex”. GOTN is firmly of the belief that storytelling enhances sex, whether that’s imaginative storytelling beforehand to build anticipation or luxuriating by retelling the story after the fact. “There's a lot of fun that can be extracted from telling those stories and even lessons learned. I can go, ‘Well, that's not something I'm going to do again but I'm glad I got to do it that time.’ I think we all do stuff for stories. Some of us are just more honest about it than others.”

There are some sexual opportunities that are so serendipitous that they sound like they’re straight out of a Hollywood script. This is what happened when writer Gen, now 29, then 22, spotted her high-school crush on the dating app Bumble. “We matched and from that point on, I was like, ‘Right, I must sleep with him. There is no other option. This has to happen.’” Two weeks later, on their one and only date, they slept together on a mattress on his floor in a dingy part of Brooklyn. “I could not wait to text my pals in our group chat about it after,” says Gen. “I felt like I sought out this story, and was doing it for the sake of my 15-year-old self.”

Although she was on a mission from the get-go, she says she would not have completed it had there not been a spark. She is now in a committed long-term relationship and says, “I don't regale my friends with stories about our sex life, because that feels like a violation. But for a silly one-night stand or a crazy story, it makes it better if you do have someone to share that with because you don't have the same intimacy in the act. You're not doing it for the sake of intimacy, you're doing it for fun. Those things are amplified when you're able to share them with other people.”

One thing that has been weighing on my mind is whether it’s exploitative to publicise a sex story. Dr Noor makes a distinction between debriefing with friends, which is fair game, and telling a story via social media or wider publication. “If you are using your body to have sex for the story then you are responsible to ensure that the person you are having sex with understands that that is what is going on…. It’s not just your story!” This is where it all gets very complicated. If my connection with the Italian was too weak to communicate my sexual needs then it is certainly too weak to communicate that I will be anonymously mentioning him in a feature for Cosmopolitan UK.

Perhaps the trick is to keep moving forwards and do things better in future. Dr Noor says that it’s totally normal for the type of sex you’re interested in to change over time. “One of the things about the sex-positivity movement which I think is frustrating is the idea that everybody should be out there having wild, crazy sex. Lots of people don't want to, it's not right for them and they're not at the right place,” she explains. “The key is to work out who you are now, what you need now, and get the right sex for that phase of your life.”

It can take a hot minute to figure out what the “right sex” is for you. To those busy having what might be seen as the “wrong sex”, take heart. Storytelling is a way of making sense of what (and who) you're doing. And hey, at least you’ve got all those juicy tales to send to the group chat.

*Name has been changed