Whether you’re a sex toy connoisseur with five bins of toys under your bed, or you’re a total newbie, it can be scary to bring up the topic of incorporating toys into your sex life with a partner. And that applies to new partners as well as ones who have been around for a while—some people in long-term relationships have only ever used sex toys when masturbating, never with a partner.

There’s nothing quite like a pandemic and a local shelter-in-place order to throw a major wrench into your dating life. It was tricky enough to figure out what we wanted and how to find people who wanted that too before it became literally against the law to meet a stranger for a cup of coffee.

Working from home has its downsides (days on end without showering, forgetting how to eat in public, growing accustomed to never wearing pants so when you have to leave the house a real waistband feels like a torture device), but it also has many, many perks. One of those perks is that if you are a person who still has any interest in sex, you could feasibly squeeze in some afternoon delight between meetings, something that would be very hard to pull off (though not impossible!) when working in an office environment. Whether that’s a quick romp with your partner or a solo sesh in celebration of May being Masturbation Month, here’s how to pull off this midday stress reliever.

Four years ago, I decided never to have sex again. I was healing from trauma and felt overwhelmed even by friend hugs or a date grabbing my hand. I didn’t want to be touched, ever, because it felt…