When 41-year-old Catherine* signed up to a new dating site, she never expected threesomes, sado-masochism and a life-changing addiction to sex

Putting down the phone, the man I’d met just five minutes before looked at me. “He’s on his way.” I shivered with excitement as he walked slowly over to the bed and tied a long silk scarf around my eyes. He then started to elaborately bind my hands to the bed.

Soon after, I heard a knock on the door. Another man, one who I’d never seen or met before, joined us in this anonymous, out-of-town hotel room. I tingled with anticipation as he silently approached the bed, and I felt another pair of hands on me. Over the following hour, I had sex with both of them. They tied me up and filmed me, all the time blindfolded. And when it was over, the man I’d never seen got up and left, as much a stranger to me as he was before. To many people this may sound seedy, or even like a horrible violation. But to me it was pure adrenaline. The same kind of rush that people seek from drugs or extreme sports. Even now, just thinking about it, I can sense that excitement rising again. I know I can’t go back there, but I’ll never completely shake the power sex has over me.

Two years ago, the rush was so potent that it consumed me completely – the endorphin buzz of forbidden sex became the thing I cared about the most. Work, friends, family, love – they all came second to chasing that elusive sex high. Because as a woman, sex is one of the easiest highs to find. Thanks to the internet, your next fix may only be a click away.

With highs, of course, come lows – only, for a very long time, I never felt the lows. Even after I left the hotel that day – following the riskiest sex I’d ever had – I didn’t sneak off full of regret. I felt ecstatic. And when I felt the buzz start to fade, I went back to the internet to look for the next one.

Double Life

That wasn’t only the dangerous thing I did. I stupidly took sex to work. In a meeting, one day, trying to listen to my boss, my mind was elsewhere; specifically on the image of a naked man that had just flashed up on my phone. Luckily, the phone was in my bag at my feet – only I could see it. I knew I was taking risks but my chest was pounding with the thrill of it – not fear. It goes without saying that nobody at work knew about my double life. Perhaps they saw me typing messages when I should have been concentrating on my job as an account manager in a marketing firm, but nobody ever questioned it. Thankfully, my work never suffered. I was good enough at multitasking to allow my mind to roam elsewhere. Those kind of thoughts constantly whirled around my brain. They’re why I rushed home after work and spent all night on the internet messaging men I’d never met. Sometimes I’d stay up into the early hours to check for messages. It didn’t matter if it was 4am, or if I had a big meeting at work the next day, I’d always reply. Because it wasn’t just about the sex. It was about the anticipation, the preparation, the chase. To make sure I never slipped off the sex treadmill, I’d often be messaging six or seven men at the same time.

Yet I still struggle to explain how I got to that point – how, at the age of 37, I ended up using sex sites. The irony is that I was never that into sex. As a tall blonde, I’d never struggled getting male attention, but I’d go for months, even years without it and I’d never had a relationship that lasted more than three months. “We don’t understand why,” friends would lament, trying to coax me into blind dates. I’d shrug it off, never quite able to explain why the prospect of a relationship terrified me so much.

So, when I started to meet strangers for sex, my friends were aware that my sex life had taken an upturn. They knew I was a little kinky, and took risks (I always let them know when I was meeting ‘a date’) but I never confessed to being an addict.

"I became addicted to sex"