It was a man who told me about it first. “I just think it’s really important to constantly check in with someone when you’re having sex,” my friend said out of nowhere. We’d been talking about dating and I’d confessed to having regretted a few of my own sexual experiences. “Like, there’s a difference between consent and enthusiastic consent,” he continued. “And I always want to make sure it’s the latter.”
I was dumbfounded. Not because what he’d said was new information. But because it was something I’d always felt but never allowed myself to put into words: that consent can carry more nuance than we are comfortable giving it. That perhaps it exists on a spectrum. On one side, you have that enthusiastic consent my friend described. On the other, you have something much more complex – a set of feelings that many of us are still trying to understand.
