Love lockdown: Dating my right hand during COVID-19

It is bad enough when you’re not getting sex on your own terms, but when it’s basically enforced by the government, it only makes sense that your d*** wants to rebel.

I was unfortunate enough to have been in the midst of a pre-existing dry spell when lockdown was announced, so while I can’t remember exactly the number of days it has been, it feels like it’s around 62 years.

It’s usually around the two-to-three-month mark that I start to go a little d*** crazy, drop my standards and f*** the first willing man I find. You know, just to get back into the swing of things. Now I don’t even have the luxury of dragging my self-respect through the mud.

We were told that it’s illegal to have sex with anyone outside our household, so while the rest of us recoil at the idea of bonking our relatives, everybody in Somerset should be fine.

The recent laws around having ‘support bubbles’ hasn’t done any favours to our sex lives because only people with boundary issues bang their besties.

And so “my hands” were recently added to the list of the things I’m grateful for – which clearly they should have been anyway, but you don’t realise how much until you need them to w*** four times a day. I’m quite literally having more w**** than hot dinners.

Two days ago, I w***ed over my hot neighbour because he was mowing his garden shirtless, like a horny teenager that was born before the internet was around.

The day before that I masturbated to the first guy I ever had true feelings for at seventeen. Just to clarify, that’s a guy I banged twice over 12 years ago. Wouldn’t be surprised that if in a few days I was shooting my load to the hot check-out boy at the Tesco Local. Or romcoms.

Don’t get me wrong, I enjoy Bridget Jones’s Diary but watching Colin Firth and Hugh Grant slap each other like school girls (and Year 7s at that) isn’t really my idea of foreplay… yet.

One day I forgot to w***, and the following day my orgasmic spasms resulted in what felt like a small hernia. Although being carried out on a stretcher with my gooey d*** in hand would spice up lockdown life, I’m not sure neighborhood watch would approve.

Then last night I dreamt about sex. I was literally throwing it back onto a stripper’s floppy d***. We know from pretty much every psychological paper ever written that our truth lies in our subconscious, and mine was currently a shameless bottom.

While conscious-me cringed at the thought, it demonstrates the very real effects on our bodies and minds when we go for sustained periods without human touch, intimacy and a good facial.

“Start Zoom dating!” we’re told by any lifestyle magazine willing to overlook the fact that the only thing more boring about sitting and staring at your walls all day, is making small talk with a stranger about it. Clearly written by a journalist whose seen one too many episodes of Love Is Blind.

The reality is that dating like it was won’t resume for quite some time, so what next?

Perhaps couples will split, realising having a man with no personality doesn’t cut quarantine. Perhaps the singles will lock-in a man before another lockdown. Or satisfy their sexual starvation by binging on orgies. Perhaps the hospitals will instead be overrun with chafed penises.

Like the government, I’ve got no idea. But at this stage in the enforced dry spell, I feel that a socially distanced hand-job is well within my right: both as a human and a horny gay man.

You can follow Anthony Gilét on Instagram, or listen to more dating disasters on his podcast Cocktails & Cocktalk