You don’t have to be a huge pop culture fan to recognize one of the biggest hits of 2010, when Katy Perry sang “I kissed a girl and I liked it“(I kissed a girl and I liked it.) For some people, it was just a good song with a dance beat. For others, it was the reality of discovering their sexuality.
Alyssa Kriegel, a 49-year-old woman, published a book about the discovery. I recognized Katie’s words after her divorce from a 25-year marriage to a man.
After a quarter century of living together, Robert, her college boyfriend and best friend, announced that he was gay and ended the relationship. The then partner claimed that he had fallen madly in love with another man.
Understandably, Kriegel was left adrift. A busy therapist in New York, she came to terms with the fact that her marriage was practically sexless.
Newly single and with no sexual confidence, she entered the dating world after more than 20 years. She was determined to prioritize her own pleasure for the first time in her life.
That’s when she began studying her menstrual cycle, taking hula hooping lessons and flirting with a young bartender. It didn’t take long for her to venture into online dating, becoming increasingly bold in her sexuality, experimenting with BDSM, swapping partners and having sex with a woman, among other practices.
“It was as if I had fallen down a rabbit hole, into a world where nothing was as I knew it, and everything was surreal and new,” she wrote in her new book, From Sexless Marriage to Sex Gods.
She met Michael, her sex club partner (they ended up attending three sex parties together) online, and they hooked up because his wife left him for another woman.
“I think we’ve been in very similar situations where we didn’t feel wanted and were very curious about what was going on over there,” Kriegel told the Daily Mail. She joins her new companion, and they are both willing to experience everything they “come across, at least once.” From alien to mutant, completely shaped by the experience.
From the beginning, she saw dating not as a way to fall in love, but as an amazing experience. What did she like? What didn’t she like? “It became an exploration of what I like, not just sexually, but also in relationships, and what I like in a partner. I got to have three or four different guys…but none of them were really a complete package.”
Now that she is approaching 60, she can say with certainty that she is in the healthiest relationship of her life, living with a man who is “experiencing” new things with her, as a couple. “And what I think keeps the relationship going is that we prioritize sex as an important part of our relationship.”