I Slept with Over 100 People. Then I Got #MeToo’d.

For the latest installment of the Secret Lives of Men, we spoke with a man whose pursuit of sexual freedom collided with the realities of power, consent, and consequence.

Names and identifying details have been changed. The account references allegations that circulated during the #MeToo era; no criminal charges were filed. This story is not an adjudication of those claims but an exploration of how a public reckoning—and years of compulsive sexual behavior—forced one man to reexamine desire, power, and responsibility.

For most of my 20s and early 30s, sex dictated where I went, who I texted back, and how late I stayed out.

I didn’t collect experiences so much as burn through them. Threesomes for birthdays. Foursomes that started as jokes, staged with the flimsiest pretense—everyone in on it, no one pretending otherwise. Open relationships that were technically mutual but tilted in my favor. Sex with women, men, trans women, sex workers. Road trips where hookups were lined up in different cities, like stops on a tour. Days when I had sex in the morning, again in the afternoon, and again before midnight.

There’s a scene in the most recent season of The White Lotus in which Sam Rockwell plays Frank, an old friend of a main character, who launches into a rambling monologue about desire. He talks about chasing sex to the point of exhaustion, realizing that what he thought was attraction might actually be something else entirely: the confusion between wanting someone and wanting to be them. He describes being drawn to women, to “ladyboys,” to anyone who seemed to embody something he was missing. At one point, he wonders aloud whether sex is less about bodies than about identity, whether he’s been trying to sleep his way toward an answer about who he is.

When I watched it, I felt seen. That blur between desire and envy, possession and identification, has shaped most of my adult life.

I grew up in an evangelical missionary family in which sex was everywhere and nowhere. We talked about purity and temptation, about guarding your heart and asking for forgiveness. What we didn’t talk about was curiosity, what it meant, or what to do when it arrived early.

Some of my first sexual experiences happened before I understood what they were. I don’t remember them clearly, and I don’t consciously carry them as trauma. What I do remember is how early sex lodged itself in my head. When I was in elementary school, I was already fixated. Playboy and Penthouse magazines were passed around at school, pages torn out and folded into pockets and hidden under rocks or in drawers. The Internet poured gasoline on everything. Chat rooms. Anonymous role-play. Sex was everywhere, but wanting it made you bad. Indulging in it made you weak. The contradiction was never resolved.

As a teenager, I learned how to hover right at the edge. I dated girls from my church and youth group. We made out in parked cars, basements, borrowed rooms—places that felt private enough to be tempting but still close enough to home to feel contained. There were plenty of late nights that stopped just short of what technically “counted.” I was deeply invested in staying good on paper. If I didn’t cross certain lines, I could still tell myself I was doing the right thing.

When I finally had sex, in my early 20s, it wasn’t tender or transformative. It was decisive. Once that line was crossed, the others stopped feeling important. I cheated on my first girlfriend. We broke up. And then things accelerated.

My life became organized around sex. Most of my spare time went toward finding it, planning for it, and recovering from it.

I went to one Sex Addicts Anonymous meeting. I didn’t stay long enough to decide whether the label fit. What I knew was simpler: I wasn’t particularly happy, and I didn’t know how to stop wanting more.

I got into a long-term, open relationship that lasted several years. On paper, it was intentional and ethical. We talked about boundaries, read the right books, and used the right language. We told ourselves we were doing something more honest than monogamy.

The openness was mutual, but it wasn’t symmetrical. I was the one pushing for more freedom, more flexibility, more exceptions. I had more partners. More stories. More nights that bled into mornings. My girlfriend was generous about it—too generous, probably.

For a long time, the arrangement worked—at least in the narrow sense that nothing forced it to stop. But over time, the structure started to feel less like freedom and more like insulation. I could say “I love you” and mean it while quietly making sure there was always another door open.

Eventually, the relationship ended. Not in a blowup, not over one specific betrayal, but under the accumulated weight of it all. I told myself it was simply the cost of living, honestly. I hadn’t yet seen it as a pattern.

By my mid-30s, I had slept with well over a hundred people. I stopped counting somewhere after that, partly because it got harder to keep track, partly because the number itself stopped meaning anything. If someone wanted my body, my time, my attention, then I could borrow their desire and wear it for a few hours like proof that I was okay. And when that feeling faded, I went looking for the next body.

One of those relationships was with a woman I’ll call Ava.

We met on a dating app when she was 19 or 20, and I was nearing 30. I remember her as warm and direct, openly sexual, with an ease about her that made people feel welcome. She laughed easily. She was curious, expressive, and looking for connection in a way that felt familiar to me.

The first time we slept together, she cried afterward—not because the sex was bad but because she wanted more than I was offering. I told her, honestly, that I wasn’t looking for anything serious. I meant it. She continued to see me anyway.

What followed was a dynamic that felt easy to me and uneven in ways I didn’t fully acknowledge at the time. We saw each other when I reached out. We had sex in my apartment, in borrowed rooms, once in the bathroom of a motorcycle garage where we broke a sink and laughed about it.

A few years later, she moved to the West Coast and told me she was thinking about doing porn. She floated stage names over text, half joking. She had the word Luna tattooed on her arm, after a song she loved, and I suggested she use it. Ava Luna. She liked the way it sounded.

We lost touch after that. Then I learned she’d died of an overdose in her early 20s. Her videos were still online.

I think about the ways I failed to see her as a whole person, not just someone who was available to me. I think about how easily I mistook sexual openness for resilience, desire for consent, and affection for safety. Those assumptions allowed me to move on without ever really asking what she needed or what it cost her to keep coming back.

Meanwhile, my professional life was settling into place. By my early 30s, I was running a small but growing design studio in coastal New England, supplying custom goods to hospitality clients. It was a tight, relationship-driven industry. Reputations traveled quickly, and boundaries were often informal.

Then, during the height of the #MeToo reckoning, an allegation surfaced.

A woman I’d dated years earlier said that I’d slept with her when she was too intoxicated to consent. The claim began circulating privately—forwarded emails, quiet warnings—before appearing publicly on social media. Within days, it spread into threads and posts, with people weighing in and drawing connections of their own.

One post read: “I stayed quiet for years because I didn’t think anyone would believe me. But watching powerful men continue to be protected has made it clear that silence only benefits them.”

Another added: “This isn’t about one bad night. It’s about a pattern.”

Soon after, a trade publication picked it up. The headline was careful but brutal: Local Design Founder Accused of Sexual Misconduct Amid Industry Reckoning.

The fallout was immediate. Employees left, accounts paused, and contracts disappeared. Friends stopped replying. Conversations that once ended with drinks ended with “We’ll be in touch.” Dating became nearly impossible—my name, linked to the allegation, was one search away.

What unsettled me most wasn’t only the public reckoning. It was the realization that I’d built my sexual life around instincts I could no longer trust. I had relied on chemistry, on “vibes,” on the assumption that desire itself was consent enough. I hadn’t asked harder questions about power. I had thought of myself as attentive and harmless. But safety isn’t something you get to declare for yourself. Intention doesn’t cancel impact.

Dating after that became a minefield. I disclosed early. Some people walked away immediately. Others stayed, curious but cautious, asking careful questions, weighing risk. Every date carried the same subtext: Am I safe with you? I started moving slower.

Around that time, I met my wife.

We matched online. She was calm, direct, newly divorced, not romanticizing anything. I told her my about my past early. I didn’t want to hide anymore. She listened, asked questions, and took her time.

In time, Covid collapsed the illusion of endless choice overnight. For the first time in my adult life, novelty wasn’t available. I could either sit with one person or sit alone.

Before I told her I loved her, I told her I wanted a kid. I wasn’t sure I was built for lifelong monogamy, but I knew I wanted to be a father. I told her that even if we didn’t stay together, I thought we’d be good to each other. She told me she wanted to stay with the person she had a child with. The conversation didn’t scare us off. It anchored us.

I’ve been monogamous since early 2020. Our sex life is good. Not endless. Scheduled for once a week, give or take. We both finish. We both care. And sometimes it still feels like withdrawal. My body remembers abundance even when my values no longer align with it.

I don’t cheat. I don’t cross physical lines. But I notice how often situations still present themselves. I’m flirty. People respond. At a work event out of town last year, two women I’d been talking to all weekend started making out and pulled me in with them. It was obvious what was being offered. I said no. I told them I was married. It felt good to be wanted and hard to turn it down. Both things were true.

With my wife’s knowledge, I still sext sometimes, mostly on Grindr, occasionally with men I don’t intend to meet. It stays on the screen.

Sometimes I watch Ava’s porn videos. Now, with distance, I can see why her death unsettled me so deeply, though our time together was brief. It wasn’t who she was, exactly, but how familiar the motion felt: The way she moved through sex as if speed itself might offer protection. I recognize that now because I did something similar for years. The difference is that I got to age out of it. She didn’t.

I don’t miss the numbers. I don’t miss the logistics. I don’t miss waking up next to someone whose last name I’ll never learn. What I miss, if I’m honest, is the feeling of being endlessly chosen, without having to choose back in any lasting way.