Hugging is all very well, but we need to talk about sex
HURRAH! THOSE OF us in England and Scotland are finally allowed to hug again (Wales was a few weeks ahead; Northern Ireland is hopefully not far behind). Boris Johnson is urging caution now that we can officially ‘make a personal choice’ on whether to keep our distance from loved ones, and the etiquette of when and who to hug will take time to work out. It’s a huge step: the conversation about grandparents longing to hug grandchildren has spanned the whole pandemic. But the one about single women longing for a hug – and perhaps, after said hug, to go to bed with someone? Not so much.
No sex please, we’re British. That squeamishness has coloured Government guidelines on it – or lack thereof – over the past year. The estimated 7.9m single people have been forgotten, or perhaps ignored.
At first, our isolation was only supposed to last a few weeks. As those stretched into months, I learned the term ‘skin hunger’, which described the ache that I was feeling, not just from lack of connection (I live alone) but of touch, especially at a time when I was scared and sad and needed the reassurance of a bear hug from a friend. New rules announced at the beginning of June 2020 made sex with anyone you didn’t live with illegal indoors (it was already illegal outdoors, in case you thought you’d found a loophole). The announcement of support bubbles a few weeks later offered a glimmer of hope, assuming you lived alone and not with housemates – but we could only have one.
Single women had to choose between friends and family or romance; between sexual and social intimacy. I chose social – my best mate and her husband, and, in November, my bubble expanded with the birth of their first child, my godson. Most of my single friends chose a sibling, parent or friend. But that meant months without sex or a snog or a cuddle on the sofa.
As some restrictions eased over the summer, the idea of sex seemed fraught, not fun: it wasn’t properly talked about, so how could we assess the risks? The only real advice came from the Terrence Higgins Trust, which advised ‘not kissing [and] wearing a face mask during sex’. Romantic, eh? And was that worth two weeks of self-isolating afterwards lest you infect someone else, especially with a new partner who might be rubbish in bed? A few of my single friends slept with new app matches, or even exes, but most didn’t: my own drought has hit 18 months and counting.
Matt Hancock, blushing and smirking like a schoolboy on Sky News when asked to clarify the rules in September (which only allowed contact for ‘established relationships’), exemplified the problem: he was too mortified to speak about sex on TV. He’s the Health Secretary and he couldn’t bring himself to use the word ‘sex’. Never mind the impact on our bodies – oxytocin released by skin-on-skin contact is shown to boost our immune systems, and decrease our levels of the stress hormone cortisol – or our mental health.
Hancock is married with three children; Sunak married with two; Johnson lives with his partner and youngest child. This is a Government that seems to think everyone lives with their spouse and 2.4 children in a home with a garden big enough to entertain in. And these are the men deciding, sometimes simply by omission of anyone not in that situation, what sacrifice it’s acceptable for me to make: how isolated I can cope with being and how long I should wait, as a single woman in her mid-thirties (and worrying about her biological clock). So thanks for the go-ahead on the hugs, boys, but I think it’s about time we started talking about sex.