That DnB Kind of Love
When sober sleepovers were milestones & sex in recovery
I love writing anything that taps into millennial nostalgia. I went to a dinner party recently and spent 45 minutes talking to a friend about millennial pride. I’m talking late millennial—if you were born in 1992 onwards. The cultural divide between early and late millennials matters. I was more part of the Indie Sleaze, Y2K, lo-fi photo dump era. We didn’t relate to the original Girlboss™, cheugy aesthetic, “wine o’clock,” flower crown Millennials. I ran an opshop-combat-boots-side-fringe-heavy-eyeliner look during those years. I had bleached hair I never brushed and always looked like I’d just got out of bed.
In high school, I used a fake ID that belonged to my second cousin’s ex-girlfriend. My friends and I would go out in Christchurch (pre-earthquake). We danced in the windows of a Japanese nightclub in Sol Square and drink cheap shots at the Russian Vodka Bar on Poplar Lane. When I started at Otago at 18, our nights played out much the same, except now we were sneaking vodka into the halls and heading to bars like Starters, Monkey Bar, and The Cook. That was the scene where romantic connections sparked if you made it through the night without spewing or passing out. I think all three of those places have shut down now.
Most of my young romance happened in the drum and bass scene. Nothing was more exciting than being front left at Truth or The Upbeats, locking eyes with a 19-year-old in a sweat-soaked long tee, pupils like dish-plates. If they appeared at your side, it was on. If their hand grazed yours: confirmed. The make-or-break moment was whether you could thrash in sync—turning your body into theirs, their arms up around your shoulders—gig middy status.
From there, you’d expect a Thursday, Friday, or Saturday message around 4pm:
“You drinking tonite?”
“Can you suss?”
The progression of a uni DnB relationship was a beautiful thing. After a semester of this ritual, the next phase was the sober sleepover.
I remember the first night I went home with my university boyfriend. We’d been at a dress-up party—I was dressed as a baby with a pinned nappy and bib. I realise this doesn’t reflect well on him, but we’d already been spading at gigs for six months, acknowledging each other with an upto-nod in the halls dinner line.
We lived in different towers of the hall. I was in the old part; he was in the new Annex wing. That first night, I slept in his king single, then snuck out once he’d fallen asleep—I didn’t want to risk the walk of shame dressed in a cloth nappy. But I’d left the safety pins from my costume in his bed, so when he rolled over and realised I’d left, they stabbed him.
This was early in the twenty-tens. This was Kate Moss and Pete Doherty, Britney and Kevin Federline kind of love. I remember the exact moment I fell for him. It was Re-O Week in the middle of a Dunedin winter. We’d been partying for a week and were lying in bed when I should’ve been in a health sciences lab. It was snowing. His room smelled like stale bong water. He wrapped his arms around me under the duvets in that narrow single bed. And that was it. I was in love. I have no idea when we had our first sober ‘sleepover’ but it was further down the track when we’d got more serious.
I know this series is about the pain and horror of addiction. But as I’ve written before—two things can be true at once. I can feel nostalgic for those years and still know I’ll never relive them. Addiction is progressive. I can’t go back to casual—I will pick up where I left off: alone, curled in a ball in the afternoon, half-dead.
Still, it made me think about what is better in recovery. And there’s a lot:
✦ Friendships, because you’re no longer a pathological liar
✦ Mental health, because you’re not artificially hijacking your brain’s reward system
✦ Exercise, because you’re no longer in a permanent state of comedown and withdrawal
✦ Self-esteem, because you live with integrity now
✦ And the whole point of this essay: SEX
Sober sex—once a novelty, now the default—is just so much better.
Sex and drugs were so intertwined for me. It reminds me of when Cat Marnell wrote about Coke Sex for Teen Sluts in Vice—horrid, dry, shaky encounters. It was confusing. I entangled the two because being high made it easier to feel wanted without feeling vulnerable—and because, neurologically, both lit up the same reward pathways. My brain learned to crave them together.
It took a lot of undoing to break that pattern, but the turning point was when I started having sex in recovery.
Ritual was a big part of addiction for me— “the getting, the using, the finding ways and means to get more.” The back-road meet-ups, the portioning, mixing, timing, the thrill of doing something I wasn’t supposed to was just as addictive as the high itself. Sometimes more. The actual effects of the drug were often anticlimactic.
The same was true for drunk sex.
I love being seduced. I love to seduce. Being part of that gig scene, with multiple chances each week to flirt or be flirted with, was its own high. But like the drugs, the sex itself was often anticlimactic—disconnected, selfish, and ultimately dissatisfying. The word that comes to mind is dry. Dry mouths, dry…
The first date I went on in recovery was in a bar. I decided to be open about my addiction history (I probably lied about how long I’d been out of rehab), but it was great. He was accepting and curious, and we talked for hours. He walked me back to my car, looked at me for a moment, then pushed me against the driver's side door and kissed me.
It was the hottest thing I’d ever experienced because I was completely alert, present, and wholeheartedly into it. I still remember how it felt when he slid his hand inside my coat and held my waist.
That moment was the catalyst for rewiring my relationship with sex and I’ve never gone back.
Another reason sober sex is so much better: the intimacy. The vulnerability. It’s now a fully conscious choice to be with someone. I have the confidence to let them see me, to allow another person to witness me enjoying myself.
I used to need a substance to feel wanted. Now I want with intention and that’s harder in a different way. Feeling more means it hurts more when it doesn’t go anywhere. Rejection stings. So does disappointment. Even though I don’t miss the chaos. I do miss how easy it was to disappear inside it, and exit before anything became emotional collateral.
It used to be about the chase and the ritual. But sober sex doesn’t leave me dry-mouthed and hollow. Presence is just as intense, maybe more. There’s no comedown or confusion. Just the strange new thrill of remembering everything.