Catron felt during the staring contest “not just that I was really seeing someone, but that I was seeing someone really seeing me” — like a recursive reflection of a mirror in a mirror perhaps.

Despite the easing of taboos and the rise of hookup apps, Americans are in the midst of a sex recession.

“That is what is strange—that friends, even passionate love, are not my real life unless there is time alone in which to explore and to discover what is happening or has happened. Without the interruptions, nourishing and maddening, this life would become arid. Yet I taste it fully only when I am alone.”

Of course, there are downsides to each model of relationship. People whose friendships primarily consist of sporadic deep dives probably feel a higher degree of loneliness day-to-day during dry spells in-between the deep dive nourishment. (If you’re in an intimate romantic relationship, this can be okay because you tend to share minutia/quick hits with your spouse so don’t need to lean on friends as much for this.) People whose friendships primarily consist of regular quick check-ins and texts and workday lunches probably feel some lack of depth with some of their so-called “close friends.” They realize that after years of “how was your day?” conversations and staying up to speed on the real time relationship drama or work battles that will someday be easily forgotten — they realize that they’ve never explored life’s deeper questions with their friend.

“I wanted just to be there, enjoying the mundanity of a place that would soon be mythological to me. I also wanted to tour it like a stranger and send away dispatches — to friends who would never see it, to myself who could never go back, to no one in particular.” “Some pictures I texted to friends. Others I posted to my Instagram, which is slapdash and homely, with about as many followers as it deserves — I use the app like I once used Facebook, as a way of being ambiently with people I like, or to set up a dopamine drip while I’m doing something I’d rather not. My friends, flung out over the continent, were posting their own holiday or non-holiday pictures, and as much as I love my parents I felt homesick, as one does, for my independence. I live in a new city now, and Instagram was the simplest way to reconcile two lives.”

“But what happens if I can learn to measure love’s effect, and this love, which feels so real, doesn’t register?” “Reading this, I can’t help but think of those late-night phone calls, the easy seesaw of our conversation, our shared laughter. Also, the ways our bodies move together like practiced dancers, improvising to the same song. We, too, find shared rhythms easily.” “Does recording our sex occur to me? Of course it does. My urge is to clamp a hand over the mouth of that thought, much as, for many years, I used to clamp my hand over my own mouth at orgasm to stifle the sound. If I can hardly bear my own autoerotic sounds, how will it feel to hear those made in the company of my lover? Consider the mild discomfort of hearing a recording of your voice on, say, a voicemail. Multiply that discomfort infinitely. My lover has told me that I am noisy at orgasm (which she relishes), and though I suspect she is right, I have never heard myself. I am happy for this deafness. Some things I don’t want to notice, to reflect on, to consider.” “With her, more so than with any lover before, I follow my pleasure without fear of shame.” “My lover nods. This is news to only one of us. “I guess it’s not out of character,” I say. She shakes her head and smiles. When she turns back to her reading, I sneak a look at her while feigning interest in my work. I want to memorize this moment—sunlight dappling the floor, her long legs crossed at the ankle, the small rasp as she turns the page of her book—in which I feel utterly at ease, able to share my delight in multiple things with her: my strange study of our lovemaking, the recorded fact of it, her total acceptance and actual pleasure in this obscure corner of reflection. If there is a test, it feels like we have passed it. This moment, alone, is different. It is full of things I had not known before.”

“When you talk to someone on FaceTime, there is a little square of your face in the corner that gives you a self-awareness you would not get on a date. It’s as if you’re holding up a tiny mirror in front of yourself during the entire conversation.” “We have so many options that we throw people away with our fingertips. We reject potential soul mates within seconds and then cry over three glasses of wine to our best friends about how there is nobody out there.”

In the years I worked at a sex shop, I saw how the pressure to have great sex — in a world that will never be a level playing field — can inflict its own kind of damage.