Episode 1: Fuck like God’s in the room

“Fuck like God’s in the room.”

What does that even mean?

The first time my friend Claire said it to me, I laughed. Of course she did. Claire, with her bohemian wisdom and the kind of sobriety that turns ordinary conversations into accidental sermons, tossed it out like it was the most obvious thing in the world.

“Fuck like God’s in the room.”

She said it like advice. Like a blessing. Like a challenge.

At the time, it sounded ridiculous.

Because if God had been in the room where I was having sex, I’m pretty sure He would have filed a formal complaint.

Picture it: me, mentally perched in the highest corner of the bedroom, my head nearly grazing the white popcorn ceiling, watching myself starfished across the bed while my partner grunted and thrust above me.

My eyes were shut tight, and my thoughts floated above me like cartoon speech bubbles.

Please let this be over.

When are you going to get a job?

I can’t keep doing this.

Maybe if he meets someone else, we can end this misery.

We probably need more lube.

Please, God, let this be over.

And before you ask, yes, I know.

How are you in the corner?

Why are you even up there?

Because I wasn’t in my body.

I had left.

I had checked out and floated above it all, watching this sad excuse for intimacy with my partner, the father of my children, the man I had once chosen and could no longer recognize.

I let him have sex with me. I gave permission.

But make no mistake: this was not pleasure.

This was survival.

It was maintenance. It was obligation. It was the slow erosion that happens when love leaves the building but routine stays behind to pay the rent.

And somewhere in the middle of that emptiness, Claire’s words came crashing back to me.

Fuck like God’s in the room.

No.

No, this could not be what she meant.

Because surely no God, no deity, no being with even the slightest understanding of sacredness, would want this version of intimacy for anyone.

Not this disconnection.

Not this performance.

Not this disappearance.

What am I doing?

That question became the beginning of the end.

The relationship had been dying for years. We both knew it. It was like trying to force myself into a jacket I had long outgrown no matter how hard I pulled, it wouldn’t zip.

And then, eventually, it exploded.

The carnage was everywhere.

There was grief. Rage. Shame. Relief. There was the terrifying freedom of finally admitting that something was over long before you had the courage to leave it.

But there was also my community.

My people. My sisters. The women who filled me up more honestly than any man ever had.

They helped me clean up the wreckage.

And somewhere between therapy sessions, school drop-offs, and learning how to sit alone without mistaking loneliness for failure, I stepped into a new season of my life.

The last time I had been single, I was twenty-seven. Drunk. Wild. Still introducing chaos as my personality.

Now I was forty-one.

Twelve years sober.

Ten years deep in therapy.

A mother.

A woman who no longer confused being wanted with being loved.

Where do you even begin again after that?

Honestly? I had no idea.

But I knew this: if I was going to have sex again, I wanted it to feel different.

I wanted the kind of intimacy that didn’t require me to leave myself behind.

I wanted the kind of sex the God of my understanding would want for me.

Present.

Joyful.

Chosen.

Alive.

The reawakening was quiet at first.

Parts of me I thought were long dead began to stir.

They stretched.

They breathed.

They asked better questions.

What do I actually like?

What turns me on?

What does desire feel like when it belongs to me and not to someone else’s expectation of me?

For the first time in a long time, I was in my body.

Fully.

No longer offering myself to anyone or anything I did not want.

I wanted to wear my sexuality like a loose-fitting garment, something that breathed in time with me instead of something I had to squeeze myself into for someone else’s comfort.

And then, of course, there was him.

His name doesn’t matter.

The moment does.

I pulled up to the address and stared.

This was not what I expected.

I got out of the car, looked up, and laughed.

Because the building in front of me was, unmistakably, a church.

Actual stone steps.

Tall heavy doors.

The kind of place where guilt usually enters before you do.

Are you kidding me?

He lives in a church?

I stood there smiling not because I was nervous, and not because I was afraid, but because in that exact moment, I finally understood what Claire had meant.

It was never about religion.

It was about reverence.

About presence.

About refusing to abandon yourself in the middle of your own life.

About understanding that pleasure can be sacred when you stop treating yourself like an afterthought.

I placed my hand on the door, smiled to myself, and whispered:

Fuck like God’s in the room.