Most people who realise they need to find love in middle age will download Tinder and start swiping. But for Layla London the solution was far more radical, when she decided to start a “sex bucket list”.
Layla – who has remained anonymous through her Curious Girl Diaries social pages – was a high-flying business woman when she suddenly realised that her friends were all starting to settle down with their own romantic partners.
And, worried about being left on the shelf, she made the difficult decision to pull back from her work and instead focus on herself.
So, after three and a half years of celibacy, Layla made the unusual decision of researching for a sex bucket list, with the aim of ticking off her sexual fantasies one-by-one and recording her progress over the space of a year.
This spawned into an enormous project involving blogs and sex-oriented podcasts, and, speaking exclusively to Daily Star, Layla described the moment that had made her re-evaluate her work-oriented lifestyle.
(Image: twitter.com/thecurious_girl)
“I’m just a Pitbull-in-panties type,” she admitted. “I’ve been an entrepreneur pretty much my whole life.
“I really loved my job, loved what I was doing, and so that kind of became my lover. That was my sex addiction, just the work, and hitting the goals.”
But, as the business woman grew older and saw friends getting into relationships, she suddenly realised that her life was running away before her eyes.
“I didn’t get tired of focusing on my job, it was just this lightbulb moment,” she remembered.
(Image: Getty Images)
“I was in the bathroom, I remember it clear as day, and I just had this moment with myself in the mirror where I was like, ‘what the f*** are you doing? You are wasting the pretty, this isn’t going to last forever’.”
So being someone to say yes to every opportunity, Layla put her business mind to work, and drew up a “sex bucket list” consisting of fantasies she wanted to fulfill within the space of a year.
“I was going to give myself a year, and put the time, attention and effort into my sex life as I did into my business life, and to see where that took me,” she recalled.
That was in December 2016, and now almost six years later, Layla’s project has evolved into a blog, website and podcast, on which she occasionally speaks to the men who have just helped her act out her fantasy.
(Image: Getty Images/EyeEm)
Despite the project’s surprising longevity, Layla has managed to maintain her anonymity so far, hiding behind the guise of her Curious Girl Diaries brand, and she admitted that this element was part of the fun.
“It was very exciting. I felt like I had this big secret, and that was part of the fun and that’s still a big part of the fun… I have something that’s just for me, and I don’t have to share it with everybody that knows me,” she explained.
Although Layla was keen to stress that it hadn’t been difficult to find men who were happy to help her on her quest, the 40-something year-old went even further when she invited some of them onto a podcast for a post-coital chat.
“It was selfish, I know how I saw it and I experienced it, and now I wanted them to tell me how they experienced it. I was curious to know, ‘what’s it like to be with me?’ Don’t you wonder that? Doesn’t everybody wonder, ‘am I good or not?’
“Even if they didn’t want to podcast with me, they knew that I would give them a nickname and that I would be talking about them, and they were okay with that.”
And, having developed a huge community of listeners, Layla said that she hoped her followers – especially those in monogamous relationships – could learn something from her experiences.
“I hope that what I’m doing is an example to other regular couples about how to communicate effectively, and to say, ‘this part was great, and then we hit that one part where it got a little awkward’, and then you can say, ‘next time we’ll have that little one area worked out’,” she suggested.
You can follow Layla’s story on her Curious Girl Diaries website here.
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