My wife and I had barely touched each other for six months. Our small house never let us forget it, either, keeping us in close enough proximity to confirm our desire for one another had almost completed its disappearing act.

The marriage was thoroughly sexless by that point, yet it wasn’t the sex I missed so much as the lack of any physical contact at all. Trying to salvage the relationship, we saw a couples’ therapist who encouraged us to express our desires.

“Touch me,” I said.

The next day, sitting at the kitchen table on my laptop, my wife casually leaned on my shoulders and asked what I was working on. The shock of her hands felt so intrusive that I immediately questioned everything I’d asked for.

After twelve years of slowly numbing my desires, I realized I had no idea what I wanted anymore.

We settled on divorce and I found a place of my own. Trying to get out of my head, I dusted off the bike I’d purchased during the pandemic and explored the country roads north of town. One afternoon a buddy joined me, bringing along a woman he’d met online.

She had left a sexless marriage the year before and as we rode side-by-side, I felt a comfort in hearing her stories. Then during a rest break my friend casually asked, “So, how was that sex party you went to?”

“Oh . . .” She paused. “It was incredible.”

For the next ten minutes she detailed the local kink parties she’d been attending. “I didn’t realize I was into any of this stuff,” she said. “But as you walk around and see the kink, all these different things happening—domination, bondage, orgies—you get these body hits, this intuition of wanting to experience something new.”

I noticed my leg bouncing. I’d been telling people for months I wanted to push beyond the edge of my comfort zone. It seemed the moment had arrived.

“Can anyone go to these parties?” I asked.

“If you fill out an application,” she said.

That night, with my new condo in darkness, I scrolled through the questions on my phone. Amongst a request for a full-body photo, nude not required, and my thoughts on consent, they asked what I hoped to get from the experience.

I explained my divorce, the wholesale lack of intimacy in my life, an entire preamble to why I was interested. Then I deleted everything and wrote instead: to awaken my desire.

I pushed submit.

A week later, the text came through. My application had been accepted.

Walking up the dimly lit driveway, I entered a sprawling mansion cleared of its furniture in preparation for the hundred-fifty kinksters now arriving. It had also been redecorated.

Two naked women lay on the kitchen island, their bodies adorned with miniature cupcakes; in the corner of the living room, a St. Andrew’s cross had been erected for flogging; and beside the stairwell, a trio of costumed bartenders served an assortment of aphrodisiac elixirs.

The host encouraged us to wander the house while the remaining guests showed up.

The rooms had been labeled and outfitted for their evening’s purpose. Pillows and candles in the Tantra Room, massage tables in the Erotic Blueprint station, slim mattresses spread throughout the Orgy Dungeon. New arrivals—some in their twenties, some in their seventies, all in varying states of undress—poked their heads in. No touching, we were told, until the opening circle.

The host, a professional dominatrix in a black lace corset, called us to attention where she laid the ground rules. These included: complete sobriety, consent, safe words, and the importance of naming your desires.

“If you desire something,” she said, “ask for it with honesty and clear communication. Then accept the answer you receive, whatever it may be.”

“Creepiness,” she added, “is the refusal to own your desires. So don’t be a creep.”

To maintain a space where people could explore their desires and find their edge without fear, a team of “desire angels” staffed the party whose job was ensuring guests got the experience they had hoped for. These desire angels made themselves known and one of them, a raven-haired woman with a playful smile, caught my eye from across the room.

With that, the dominatrix cranked the music and declared, “Let’s play!”

Within minutes, a woman gripping a leash drug a man on all fours through the crowd. A few feet away, electrified chains zapped a man’s bare back. And a woman now tied to the cross began receiving a howler of a flogging.

It had seemed perfectly reasonable, leading up to this moment, to break the spell of a sexless marriage by attending a fully-liberated kink party. Zero to one-hundred, I had joked with friends who knew of my plans. Now, in the middle of it, and flirting with an out-of-body experience, the only word I could muster was overwhelmed.

Unsure what to do, I made a lap through the mansion, watching those better versed in the scene take action—myself stuck as an observer, unable to engage.

Perhaps noticing my uncertainty, a blonde desire angel in white lingerie appeared by my side.

“How are you doing?” she asked.

“I’m not sure,” I said.

“Tell me your desires?”

“I don’t know.”

She looked into my eyes. “Breathe into your cock. What does it tell you?”

I tried breathing into my cock. It wasn’t speaking.

“Come with me.” She took my hand, guiding me to the Tantra room where calm music played and a few others cuddled amongst the pillows and candles. She sat me down in an oversized chair. “I want to get you into your body, and out of your head.”

She asked again for my desires.

“I think I’d like to touch you,” I said.

“Good,” she said. “You can touch me anywhere except my genitals, and no kissing. These are my boundaries. Now, be quiet and let me worship you.”

She mounted the chair and for ten minutes whispered all kinds of sweet nothings into my ear. The noise in my head seemed to quiet down. When she finished, I thanked her and said I was ready to get back out there.

Knowing everyone at this party was a potential lover, though, inverted the monogamous mindset I’d lived for years. I still couldn’t bring myself to ask anyone for anything.

Am I broken? I asked myself, descending into the orgy dungeon.

Two dozen partygoers filled the mattresses in a tangle of flesh, legs in the air, heads bobbing, guttural noises punctuating the house music. I voyeured for a minute, feeling no closer to understanding my desires, and then noticed a small nook in the room where another desire angel sat beside a floor lamp.

“But how do you know if it’s desire you’re feeling?” I asked her. “What if it’s something else?”

“Imagine a time you were completely excited. Embody that,” she said. “That’s the feeling of desire.” I closed my eyes, manifesting the feeling.

“Now, try the opposite. Embody the feeling of repulsion,” she continued. “These are the ends of the spectrum. Everything you feel moves one way or the other. You need to tap into this to know which way you’re going.”

As I tapped in, a man began screaming behind me at regular intervals. My curiosity turned me around where I found him, nearly-naked, on his knees, one woman whipping him and another squeezing his testicles. The women and I exchanged glances.

I might not know what I want, I thought, but I don’t think I want that.

They had used a phrase at the opening circle: don’t yuck my yum. Despite not understanding my own desires, I sought comfort in not judging others as they explored theirs and resigned myself to not figuring out anything that night.

Then I went into the one room I hadn’t yet visited: the Erotic Blueprint. I’d heard earlier from the man wielding the flog that this was a must.

The Erotic Blueprint is like the five love languages for arousal, the way we are uniquely turned on as individuals.

I lay on a massage table in my underwear and for the next ten minutes, as the practitioner explained, he would do a series of two touches, asking which of them I preferred. Some touches were light, some firm. Some with silk, some with pointed implements. I got whipped a few times. Regular A/B testing.

I soon learned that I have an energetic and sensual arousal pattern, meaning it’s the anticipation of intimacy that turns me on most of all. The taboo nature of kink is an arousal pattern in itself, the lowest on my list, which explained in part why I hadn’t been drawn into much of the party.

Desire was in me, I realized. It simply hadn’t been called out.

I would have been satisfied if the party had ended then. But with half an hour left, I returned to the Tantra room. As far as energy was concerned, this space had the mellow kind I wanted. I sat against the wall, breathing, taking it in.

Then the door to the room opened and the raven-haired desire angel I’d noticed at the beginning of the night walked in. She came straight over and asked if she could join me. I said yes and, now side-by-side, she asked the question of the night once more. “What are your desires?”

I thought for a moment: considering what I’d seen tonight at the party, the edge of my comfort zone long gone in the rearview, my broken marriage, my new life at hand. Then I stopped thinking.

I looked at this woman, earnestly asking what I wanted, waiting to have a real conversation about desire. And for the first time that night, I actually felt it.

“Touch me,” I said.