The different stages of sexting during the quarantine

In an episode of the fourth season of Friends, Chandler and Joey find with immense pleasure that the porn channel is free on their TV, and after hours spent in front of the screen, with very much surprise they find out that all the women they meet, in the elevator, on the street or at the post office, don't jump right on them, just like in a hard movie.
I don't know whether it was the number of films made free by Pornhub Premium or the rediscovered success of dating apps, first of all, Tinder, but initially the return to normal life, the notorious phase 2, I imagined it a bit like that. 

We have experienced many phases within the quarantine, a continuous oscillation of mood that has made us go from infinite excitement to placid resignation, from the first weeks, all chats and horniness, to the last ones, almost chaste, at times even zen. Sexting has become the companion, the ally, sometimes the enemy, of our imprisonment, scapegoat for embarrassing messages and thoughts that the global pandemic has almost legitimized. 

Phase #1: anything goes

The start of the quarantine coincided with an unprecedented chat frenzy. We felt the need to text everyone - digging into our address book and Instagram contacts - even those with whom it had ended badly, those we had not heard in a lifetime, those with whom we had gone out only once or those with whom there has always been a cordial relationship, but nothing more. We had to make sure they were all well, that they were safe at home, in most cases we were looking for a distraction, a chat with which to occupy the time between one Netflix show and another. Those who we had not texted, have texted us, in the same way, asking us the same questions, even those who had disappeared with perfect ghosting and who we were definitively missing were resurrected. It was a great collective moment in which everything was possible, we didn't care about rules, social norms and etiquette, we even dug out that guy we made out with at a party three years ago. Every excuse was good, every sentence a foothold to build a conversation with a minimum of sense. 

Phase #2: return to puberty

Like hormone-prone teenagers, for those of us who have not spent the lockdown with a partner, during the first weeks we felt trapped as if we were about to have the most incredible fuck of our life and suddenly that had been precluded. So close and yet so far. We tried to channel all this unexpressed energy in hot chats, every photo on Instagram was an opportunity to dream, to send dirty messages, to try to embark on a wild sexting session. We took selfies, photos from new angles, we experimented with videos, we used new backgrounds, in rooms and outfits that we had never tried, hovering over the bathtub and in poses that not even Victoria Beckham when she tends her leg like a 10-year-old gymnast. 

Most of all those messages, those videos were only a prelude to what we imagined would happen shortly thereafter. By deceiving ourselves a little, we naively thought that in a few weeks we would return to our daily life made of aperitifs, strategic events to meet dates and nights in which the expression Netflix and Chill had a completely different meaning. We were self-convinced that we would have sent those messages and those proposals even if our life had not been distorted by a global pandemic, in short, that those people would have seemed interesting even if the world was not about to end. (Liars).  

Phase #3: peace of mind

Reluctantly we realized that this was not the case and those chats have slowly lost some of their appeal, their interest. What is the point of sexting if other months would have passed before putting it into practice? Indeed, all that imagining and running with the imagination once concluded, did nothing but put us in front of our current reality, still within the four walls of our house with one hand in our underwear. 
If in general sexting is not liked by everyone, a transversal love/hate relationship that applies to both men and women, in this case perhaps the girls were the first to lose interest in imaginary scenarios and dick pic (rarely requested). As when we have been single for a long time, we reached a moment of balance, that peace of mind, a Zen oasis, in which the penis was at the bottom of the ranking of the fundamental and necessary things to survive.

Phase #4: the light at the end of the tunnel

With the press conference of a few days ago, Conte awakened us from this torpor: the perspective has changed, as has the purpose of those messages and the goal of those chats. We no longer play on the level of the present, but of the future: better to get our hands on and find someone to hook up with as soon as it will possible to leave the house again. There are those who will make a surgical selection, choosing only the most deserving ones, and those who will celebrate the newfound freedom by sleeping with as many people as possible. But most of all it is better to already think of plausible excuses with which to stand up everyone we promised a drink or a coffee at the end of the pandemic. It's time to draw conclusions of the chats of the last few weeks, who replied best, who seemed the most interesting and available, who sent the best photos, who is better to delete from the address book, even in the case of a second global pandemic. Who, among all my contacts, will earn the title of 'partner' for which it is worth filling in yet another self-certification form? 
Whoever you decide should win, just be sure to make those 15 seconds of normal life special.