Dear Level

Your Bad Habits Are Ruining Your Sex Life

A man who acts like a child is the biggest turnoff of all

Elisabeth Ovesen | NYT Bestselling Author
LEVEL
Published in
5 min readMay 8, 2021

--

Photo Illustration: Save As/Medium; Source: Getty Images

When I think about unsatisfactory sexual experiences, my mind goes back to one guy in particular. Fred and I had been friends for a little less than a year when I decided to sleep with him. I wasn’t interested in him romantically, but I wondered what he was like between the sheets. So, one night, after dinner and a movie, I told Fred to take me back to his place. Seconds into our coital excursion, I knew I’d made a mistake.

It was my first time in his apartment, and right away everything I thought I knew about him proved to be untrue. He wasn’t the swaggy, more mature, debonair-yet-thuggish New Yorker I thought he was. He was a messy, thirtysomething kid with two roommates and what looked like a month’s worth of dishes in the sink. His bedroom was littered with dirty clothes and his bathroom reminded me of what you’d find at a roadside gas station. The more time I spent in his apartment, the more disconnected I became. Still, I thought I was being judgmental and petty, so I tried my best to focus on all the things that brought me there in the first place.

While we were doing the deed, however, I couldn’t focus. My eyes kept wandering around his bedroom. It was like a real-life version…

--

--

Elisabeth Ovesen | NYT Bestselling Author
LEVEL
Writer for

3x New York Times bestselling author, art enthusiast, and design girlie living between Los Angeles and New York City