Reply to the Diarist: When Sex is Going Through the Motions
After being ghosted, a gay grad student turns to sauna cruising and casual sex. The encounters are sex-positive and plentiful, but emotionally procedural. An ENM.life commentary on why not all sex reads as desire.
Source: The Cut, Sex Diaries
Published: 2025-12-12
Summary
This week’s Sex Diary follows a gay grad student navigating heartbreak, cruising culture, and casual sex in a European sauna. After being ghosted by a man he cared about, the diarist turns quickly to sex as a way to keep himself moving. He goes from encounter to encounter with efficiency and openness.
The diary is frank, sex-positive, and unapologetic about pleasure. Bodies circulate, consent is clear, and shame is largely absent. What’s missing, though, is tension. The sex unfolds without anticipation or emotional buildup, and even moments of loss or disappointment are quickly rerouted into new physical encounters.
Rather than a story about desire flaring, this diary reads as a story about chasing something elusive. Sex functions as regulation, not revelation. The sauna becomes less a site of longing and more a place to keep moving forward without dwelling too long on what hurts.
My Reply to the Diarist
Dear Diarist,
I want to be upfront. This one didn’t land as especially hot for me, and I don’t think that’s a failure of imagination on my part. The sex here felt more like going through the motions than moving toward desire. Bodies changed, spaces shifted, encounters happened, but there was very little anticipation or emotional tension to lean into.
What stood out most was how procedural everything felt. Even the ghosting barely had time to echo before things moved on. That’s not wrong or unhealthy. It just framed sex as something to check off rather than something to ache for. The sauna read less like a place of longing and more like a transit hub for touch.
And that’s okay. Not all sex needs to be transformative or charged. But for me, the erotic spark comes from stakes, from waiting, from the sense that something might matter. This diary felt comfortable with sex, fluent even. Comfort just isn’t the same thing as heat.
Warmly,
Harper
The ENM Angle:
This diary is a good reminder that sex positivity and erotic charge are not the same thing. Ethical non-monogamy, open sexual cultures, and cruising spaces can be healthy, affirming, and deeply consensual, while still feeling emotionally flat.
From an ENM perspective, this is sex decoupled from attachment, and intentionally so. There is no deception, no betrayal, no secrecy. Just momentum. The question the diary quietly raises is whether motion alone can help him process boredom and disappointment, or whether it simply postpones it.
Neither answer is moral. But they do lead to very different interior lives.
One-Line Takeaway: Sex can be honest, consensual, and abundant, and still not be the place where desire actually lives.
