My mother doesn’t think she’s a feminist, but she is. She chose to quit working to raise her children, and probably identifies more with Carmela Soprano than Hillary Clinton. But since I was young, she always told me that I didn’t have to choose the same life as she did. “Don’t just get married and have kids because people say you should,” she’d tell me. “Make your own choices.”

She told me this so many times, I internalized it as a sort of dating M.O. Give me a rule, and I’d do my best to break it. If I wasn’t supposed to slip a guy my phone number for fear of looking “easy,” I grabbed a cocktail napkin and asked the bartender for a pen. If “giving it up for free” allegedly meant I’d be undesirable for a longterm relationship later, I thumbed my nose and got some—no-strings—whenever and with whomever I wanted.

In my mind, the best way to ensure patriarchal values weren’t interfering with my sex life was to openly defy them. Any safe, consensual sex became A-okay in my book. And that has been the standard by which my love and sex lives have operated for the past decade, which is something I write about fairly openly.

I’ve written about dudes I’d never call my boyfriend, but whom I’d see for years at a time in a purely sexual way. I wrote about how I felt it was 100% fine to fuck on a first date, because someone who would later use that as the excuse to dump me isn’t a guy I’d want to date anyway. This felt incredibly empowering. I was making decisions based on what I wanted in the moment—not what I hoped some man might do in the future.

The internet being what it is, I received a lot of unfiltered feedback. (My Twitter mentions are a disaster.) I’ve been called a “slut” pretty often. I’ve be told that my loose views on sex were the reason I wasn’t married; that no man would ever want a woman like me. To prove all the trolls and haters wrong, I doubled down on my enthusiastic quest for all of the fun, feel-good sex. It was my choice to be as casual as I wanted to! I was using my sexuality to fight the patriarchy! I was a modern day Gloria Steinem!

My sex life was fun (and sometimes less fun), and when I talked about it, I felt powerful. But there was always a little voice in my head telling me that this wasn’t what I really wanted. For me, casual sex offered up intimacy in short order. I’d get close to a person for a few minutes (or, if I was very lucky, hours), and then the intimacy would disappear once our romp was over. I was trying to pretend that that was enough, but I was looking for more than just physical intimacy. I wanted the emotional kind—something that hung around after I re-hooked my bra and slipped out the door.

I always knew this, in the background, but honestly I feared the kind of loneliness I might have to endure while waiting for something more meaningful. But accepting anything less than what I truly wanted went against the “choose your own path” lessons my mom had spent my life passing down to me. This became real to me when I woke up next to a guy who I’d been seeing for about a month, and just felt…nothing. Not in a self-loathing way—I don’t regret the casual sex I’ve had—it was more of a shrug emoji. Sleeping with him seemed pointless, like I’d been eating candy when I wanted a meal.

On some level I had always known I was a person who craved connection, and let’s just say the ones I was getting from sex weren’t deep enough. Plus, they were stealing my focus away from finding the real thing. So I got dressed, collected my things, and left that guy’s apartment.

On the subway home, it dawned on me that I absolutely was letting outdated and patriarchal views on women and sex boss me around. I wasn’t choosing to have casual sex for the reasons others who have it do (it feels good; it’s fun; literally any reason you want to as long as your partner’s game). I was choosing to have casual sex to be defiant. And the more I thought about it, the less it felt like fist-in-the-air feminism and the more it felt like…a waste of my time.

A few months later, I started seeing someone else. On our third date, we were making out on the couch when he suggested we take things to the bedroom. I told him that I’d like to get to know him a little bit better before we went there; not long after, he left. And as I locked the door behind him, I felt that satisfaction that had started to elude me while I was busy trying to break all the rules.

So of course my non-feminist feminist mother was always correct when she said I should make my own choices. But now, that choice is to skip casual sex. Sex clouds my vision when it comes to getting to know another person. It makes it easier for me to ignore the things I don’t like about them, which means I have a harder time figuring out if they’re someone I want to be with. So now I’m taking my time to get to know a man before I sleep with him, because I want to figure out if I actually like him—outside the sack. Any number of people could’ve told me to try this litmus test (and plenty have). But that’s not the point.

Whether you’re into no-strings hookups or saving yourself for The One, the only rule is no one should be making these rules for us. My mom, married at 25 with three kids by 30 knew that, and so do I. I’ve known it all along.

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