Sex or ego. Choose one.

When you kiss someone for the first time, there’s a comfort in the proximity, in the blurring of features that comes with standing too close together. Makes it easier to surrender thought in exchange for the experience of lip on lip, the ability to hone in on how your shirt is almost touching theirs, on the heat of another thigh moving closer to yours. If you had a full view of their face in the act, you wouldn’t be able to go through with it. Your asshole of an ego would kick in and ruin everything with its whining insecurities.

“His eyebrows did a thing. Is he not enjoying this?”

“Her cheek twitched. Too much teeth?”

There is something pleasant in not being able to distinguish features, to clang your glasses together because your depth perception is off, to miss the mouth entirely because you can’t guess the trajectory of a jaw.

And this is why, “Sex or ego, choose one.”

When you step into an intimate space, you have to wilfully put your ego aside. To kiss another person is to risk banging teeth. To have sex is accepting that your partner will be witness to the many awkward things that your body does (and hopefully find them adorable). Even to hold hands with someone is to negotiate height, leg length and gait. It’s the small price you must pay to love or even just to get off.

That’s why you drink alcohol. Not because it summons courage, but for the way that it drowns the ego, enabling you (finally) to shamelessly pull down your pants and offer up your warm bits for inspection and adoration.

The best thing about going in with no ego? Should disaster strike and you are rejected, you simply pull your pants back up and hope for a better result next time.

And the second best thing about going in with no ego, should disaster not strike?