I spent a year having casual sex — this is what I’ve learnt

There are few things that make me feel like a prude, but reading Kitty Ruskin’s memoir, Ten Men: A Year of Casual Sex, on my busy train commute is one of them. Perhaps it’s the bold title, or maybe the fear of someone reading the graphic descriptions of Ruskin’s sexual escapades over my shoulder, but I find myself trying to conceal the cover.

“I’m nervous about the reaction,” Ruskin admits when we meet. “I work in social media, so I can predict the hate that’s going to come my way.”

The book documents the now 30-year-old’s dating life during 2019, when she set out on a year of no-strings-attached casual sex. “I had one goal,” Ruskin writes in it, “to stop being so precious about who I had sex with. I decided to have sex with as many people as I wanted to.”

The result is a no-holds-barred account of the highs and lows of being a single woman on the modern dating scene. Ruskin recounts her dates with ten different men, devoting a chapter to each. She meets almost all of them on apps and has sex with each of them, often on the first or second date. The encounters range from hilarious (the man who runs her a candlelit bath after their first date) to horrifying (the second date that ends up with Ruskin unknowingly participating in bondage).

So how did she find herself here? What made her want to go from being a woman with relatively little experience to having as much sex as possible? In the book’s opening chapter, Ruskin, who is originally from Dorset, describes a sexual assault she experienced when she was ten years old by a boy of the same age. She says it led her to build a “rigid attitude, rooted in guilt, anxiety and, above all, shame”, and created a fear about sex and dating.

“All through secondary school and university, if guys showed interest I would completely freeze up,” she says. “I didn’t even want to kiss anybody, which made me feel a lot of shame because I was like, what’s wrong with me — why don’t I want to do that?”

It was only as an adult that she was able to come to terms with what had happened. She lost her virginity aged 22 in a one-off encounter with someone she had met at school, when she was 14, and reconnected with at university. She calls it “a revelation”. Finally she felt like she could participate. “I wanted to make up for lost time,” she says. “Everyone else my age was exploring their sexuality and I hadn’t at all. I thought being a bit of a hedonist would be quite exciting.”

Ruskin was binge-watching Sex and the City at the time and Samantha Jones, a character known for her unashamed love of sex, became her inspiration. “I really wanted to believe that you could be like Samantha and what she represented: this fun, liberated, sexually empowered version of a woman,” Ruskin says. “I thought, wow, I would love to be like that and just have fun, at least for a period of time.”

Ruskin estimates that she went on about 28 dates in 2019 and says she met many men who were funny and charming over texts but had “dry chat” when they met in real life. There was no time for slow burners. “I wasn’t going into it looking for a relationship,” she says. “I was looking for fun and that’s a totally different ball game. For me it was whether I could have a laugh with them and if there was a bit of chemistry there.”

Ruskin is keen to dispel the narrative that women cannot enjoy sex without building a meaningful connection. “That really wasn’t my experience of it,” she says. “I had really fantastic sex with people that I had absolutely no feelings for, before or after. I could say goodbye to them the next morning and I didn’t care if I never heard from them again.”

Among fun, flirtatious dates and drunken snogs, Ruskin does fall victim to some classic digital dating scenarios. After an intoxicating, more-than-just-sex date with a man called Leo, Ruskin is ghosted. “It’s so cruel — it’s like whiplash,” she says. “Psychologically it’s very hard to deal with because you go from excitement or intimacy to total silence and you have to fill in the blanks.”

While Tinder, Hinge and Bumble were at their peak in 2019, more recent data shows that people are coming off dating apps. Ruskin thinks these apps are “hilarious” for “the absolute crap people put on their profiles”, but says friends seem fatigued by them and have “gone back to trying to meet people in real life”.

Some of the encounters she describes in the book are shocking: see the men who move without warning from gentle, affectionate kisses to full-throttle throat-grabbing. Ruskin believes this is a result of men educating themselves about sex via porn. “They’ve convinced themselves that this is what women want.”

The book raises questions about consent and safety, and the darkest point comes in chapter three when, on a drunken night out with friends, Ruskin meets a younger man, whom she names Conor. It makes for extremely uncomfortable reading when Conor takes her back to her flat — not to ensure that she gets home safely but to rape her.

“I was in denial as to what had actually happened for a long time,” she tells me. “I tried so hard to package it as a funny anecdote, omitting details like how I wasn’t able to walk and I blacked out.”

She never heard from Conor again and it was six months before she could accept what had really happened. In the time between she continued to go out and date in an attempt to prove to herself that sex could be carefree.

“That experience really reiterated to me what I had feared: that I can’t have respectful, enjoyable sex,” she says. “It made me feel like it would always be disempowering, dangerous or damaging in some way.” Ruskin never reported the rape for fear that she wouldn’t have a case — five in six women don’t report rape to the police and only two in a hundred rapes recorded between October 2022 and September 2023 resulted in someone being charged, let alone convicted, that same year.

Ruskin is now in a healthy, committed relationship of three and a half years with a man she met on Hinge. She explains that her “need for temporary pleasure again gave way to a desire for something longer term”.

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How does her boyfriend feel about her releasing a book that so graphically details her sex life? “He’s really excited and supportive,” she says. “He thinks the book is very brave but hasn’t finished it. He’s finding it quite difficult to read.”

Ruskin says that the book is predominantly for women but that she would love for men to read it too. “If it opened their minds a bit to what it’s like to have casual sex as a woman, then that would be amazing.”

And does she ever miss being single? “Absolutely not.”

Leo’s first Hinge message featured a sunflower emoji. Looking down at the little flower in my hand, I decided that it was whimsical, sensitive. Clicking through to his profile, I zoomed in on the first picture, his handsome, weather-beaten face creasing around a Colgate smile. In his early thirties, Leo had an illustrious career in photography and a head of short, auburn curls. I laughed at the selfie with a goat and matched.

Within the hour we were chatting. It was the sort of conversation that reduces you to a smirking teenager, lying flat on your bed, legs swinging behind you. Gently flirtatious, his messages seemed intelligent, considered and colourful.

A few nights later we met in Soho. He was even better-looking in person. “We should have booked somewhere,” he grinned as I approached. Then he pulled me in for a hug, which felt surprisingly intimate. My face against his black shirt, I breathed in his aftershave: smoky and rugged but soft. Subtle.

Taking his hand, I followed Leo through the crowds. Eventually we settled in a restaurant, hassled waiters turboing past us. As Leo disappeared to the toilet, I took a moment to bask in my good luck. This man was unbelievably attractive, with his long legs and big hands and jewel-like eyes.

“So, how’s your day been?” he opened.

“Yeah, pretty busy … I’m glad it’s the weekend.”

God, our chat was awkward at first. And he kept looking at the candle by my elbow for some reason. Finally Leo reached around me, picked it up and set it down by the front door.

“Sorry, I’m just nervous. I didn’t want you to catch fire. Heh.”

Leo was nervous? My ego ballooning, I tried to put him at ease.

“Wouldn’t be my worst first date.”

“God — so the bar is low?”

You have no idea, I thought, sipping my cocktail.

“Well, anyway,” Leo smiled, “I was worried it would be our last.”

The sweetness of the sentiment had caught me off-guard. And the more I looked up at his frank, earnest face, the more I felt my shoulders sink. He was so handsome yet so gentlemanly. And so smitten, apparently.

We carried on talking for a few hours, eventually relocating to a pub, though we knew it didn’t matter any more — every sentence presented itself like a bridge to a kiss. I watched his mouth open and close, his body inching nearer with each reply. My neck felt hot, my hands a little clammy. At last Leo said: “I love your funny face. I want to kiss it.”

And he leant forward, our lips finally meeting. It was a deep, tender kiss. I held on to the countertop with one hand, my knees wobbling slightly.

Winding a blonde curl of mine around his finger, Leo suggested that we go back to my flat. Turning my head, I faltered, laughing awkwardly into the crook of his neck. Up until this point there had been something romantic and old-fashioned about Leo. Wanting to knock boots on the first date wasn’t in keeping with this image …

“Ha. Not tonight.”

“Come on,” he whispered into my ear conspiratorially. “Take me with you.”

I paused, discomfort encroaching on my happiness. I didn’t want to say no to Leo. Yes, I was only looking for something casual, but I wanted to see him more than once … I didn’t think much about how pushy he was being about sex. I couldn’t because he was just so nice. So gentlemanly. I’d be insane, wouldn’t I, to say no to Leo?

With my gentle nod he took my hand and pulled me down the street.

Extracted from Ten Men: A Year of Casual Sex by Kitty Ruskin (Icon Books £14.99), published on April 11. To order a copy go to timesbookshop.co.uk. Free UK standard P&P on orders over £25. Special discount available for Times+ members.