Let's hear it for sex.

Mind the gap(s)? No thanks.

A million years ago, when I was 24, I went to a bar, had a few beers, said yes when a guy asked me to dance, gave him my home phone number, went out with him a few times and, fast forward, married him and lived reasonably happily ever after.

He was then—and still is—eight years older than I am and finishing the last year of a surgical residency. I was broke, getting a graduate degree that seemed unlikely to produce the big bucks, and when I told people what I did, they did not perk right up and say wow, which, as it turns out, they often do when you tell them you’re a specialized surgeon.

Was there a power imbalance? Probably. I didn’t care. I was slam-dunk, can’t-stop-thinking-about-him, is-it-too-soon-to-have-sex in love, and that—then and now—was what mattered.

This view has become, somewhat astonishingly, old-fashioned. Over the past decade we’ve started talking about sex as if its primary meaning were power rather than passion. And an odd coalition has formed around that idea. On one side are men online complaining that women now control the sexual marketplace. On the other are universities, media institutions, and professional workplaces increasingly convinced that acceptable sex occurs only between perfect equals—a category that, on inspection, barely exists.

The result is that attractions that once looked like ordinary adult life now come with warning labels. Fall for a co-worker and it’s suddenly a power imbalance. Date someone older, richer, more established, or simply further along in life and the word predatory starts to circulate. Age gaps, status gaps, education gaps—every difference demands explanation.

Meanwhile, young adults are having much less sex than previous generations. Roughly 30 percent of men under thirty report no sex in the past year, up from single digits in the early 1990s. Dating has declined. The median age of first marriage is now about thirty for men and twenty-eight for women, both historic highs that climb further with education. A third of Americans say they’re lonely, and some studies suggest one in five adults has never had sex at all.

None of this suggests a culture drowning in reckless desire. If anything, people seem increasingly cautious and unsure how to approach one another. When every attraction carries the possibility of moral scrutiny, hesitation becomes the rational response.

Please don’t mistake me. I believe with every fiber of my being that sex between two people should be something both want and won’t later regret. My objection is not to consent. It is to a culture that sees sex through the lens of power first and lust or love often not at all.

Human beings routinely fall for people who are different from them—older, younger, richer, poorer, more accomplished, less so. We compare ourselves endlessly across age, money, beauty, education, experience, and we rarely match up evenly. That messy asymmetry is not a social failure. It is how intimacy actually works.

And right now we are not exactly suffering from too much intimacy.

Honestly, we should be standing up for sex in all its tangled forms. The next time someone tells you a relationship is inappropriate, ask why. If the answer turns out to be some perceived gap—age, status, experience—you might remind them that who people choose to love, and yes, to sleep with, is mostly their business.

Most of us do not need to be protected from our choices. We only need to be left alone to make them—and to accept that sex, love, and romance have never been neat. They, like life, are messy—and that’s exactly what makes them worth wanting.

(if you’d like to read more on this subject, I highly recommend Freddie De Boer’s column, The Incel’s Veto and Other Observations, which inspired my rant.)