You probably have never lived in a Jerry house. Unless you were living in off-campus housing in south central L.A. from the ‘80s until mid-aughts, your chances are 0. You don’t know how truly bad shower sex can be. And you would know if you lived in a Jerry house. See, Jerry—my landlord—loved very few things: poorly designed Bob Dylan t-shirts, a mysterious map on his porch with color-coded pins, and cocaine. Jerry supplied toilet paper to all his tenants, which was so puzzling that even broke college students almost didn’t use it. (Did he have a deal on toilet paper? I still can’t figure this out.) He also often wrote us notes directly on the wall in Sharpie. At the beginning of the civil war in Syria, Jerry announced to myself and another one of his tenants that “he was going to go fix things in Syria.” He did not. Nor did he fix my shower.

For a large balcony-adjacent bedroom in a Jerry house with its own bathroom, my rent was less than the price of a PlayStation 4, so I don’t know why I expected the shower to work. The temperature varied between deep fryer oil and Finnish lake in the dead of winter, with no discernible method. The water pressure was extraordinary: Showering in there, I was like an American Girl Doll at the bottom of Niagara Falls. The shower was also very, very small, like a coffin tipped on its side.

Unfortunately for me, the person I hooked up with most frequently at the time liked shower sex. A lot. Mostly, his desire to have sex while showering was frustrating because I don't like to get my hair wet every day. The good lord invented dry shampoo for a reason. Still, this guy was hot, bordering on intolerably hot (much like the water in my shower). So we marched into the bathroom and turned on the shower.

Here, waiting for the water to heat up, is where shower sex starts to get bad. Nothing kills the mood quite like loitering in a brightly lit bathroom, cupping your important bits coquettishly, waiting for hot water. It’s the bye-oh-we’re-both-going-the-same-direction of sex. It’s awkward.

Finally you jump in, only to find that the water is not yet hot, it just seemed bearable on your hand. As we all forget from time to time, water that your hands tolerate is not water that your naked torso will tolerate. So you two shuffle out of the shower, slightly wet and very cold. You crank. That. Bad. Boy. Up. You turn the handle to temperatures you wouldn’t dream of using, hoping that this will jump start the hot water, and then maybe you can turn it down? Is that how water heaters work? Let’s try it.

OK. Back in. Now one of you is under that jet stream of pressure while the other wastes away in Oymyakon, doing the one thing that we all avoid during a normal solo shower: pressing against the frigid tile wall. Then you switch. Like a pair of tidal locked boxers, you keep circling and circling. One spot on your shoulder in the hot water, now back to goosebumps. Again and again.

And then what?

Herein lies the real problem with shower sex: Are you supposed to shower? Or do sex? Your brain certainly wants to reach for at least body wash. If you don’t, you’ve exposed your plan to just have sex with the other person in the shower! Embarrassing! You do a quick wash. Nothing too ostentatious—no washing of private areas, despite that possibly improving forthcoming sex. Too weird.