Is My Sex Fantasy Normal?

The great news is this question has a very short answer. Yes. Yes, yes, yes. “All sexual fantasies are normal. All of them,” Cyndi Darnell, a New York-based sex therapist, tells Bustle. So take a second to breathe a sigh of relief if you need to. Your specific sex fantasy. The one you’ve never told anybody about because you were embarrassed. It’s totally normal.

“Think of them like daydreams,” Darnell says as a trick to help you feel more comfortable with your fantasies. “Like dreaming about going on a vacation, or renting a yacht and sailing around the Mediterranean, or dreaming about free tickets to Wimbledon.” Just as those things don’t seem out of the ordinary, neither are your sexual yens. “Whatever you can imagine, someone else has imagined it before you,” Darnell adds, in case you find comfort in not feeling alone. “There is no such thing as a weird fantasy.”

Darnell also emphasizes that it’s important to remember that fantasies are just that… fantasies. “Just because you imagine a thing doesn’t necessarily mean you want to do it. If you think you want to do it, then it’s a different conversation, especially if it’s something a bit edgy,” she says. “But if it’s just you, and your mind and your hand when you’re masturbating, or something that you looked up or found in porn and were like, ‘Wow, look at those people doing the thing that I thought about doing that I thought I was the only person who thought about doing.’ That’s the perfect place to let your imagination run wild.”

“There is no such thing as a weird fantasy.”

Try not to read too much into them, either. “Sometimes people like to analyze fantasies in the same way we might analyze our sleep dreams. You know, if your teeth fall out, it means you’re going to lose money and all that kind of stuff,” Darnell jokes. “That’s all conjecture.”

“If people say, ‘Gosh I fantasize about going to Paris,’ nobody ever says, ‘That’s because you were abused as a child.’ No, you just want to go to Paris,” she adds. “But we’ve decided that sex fantasies are these extra risky things. And there’s frankly no difference between imagining having an orgy and having lunch in Paris. It’s just what your mind likes to think about. It doesn’t mean anything other than the meaning you place on it.”

Your fantasies are nothing more than something that your brain has decided makes you feel good. So lean into that feeling. You deserve to feel good. Go have lunch in Paris. Whatever that means for you.