Emily Witt’s Future Sex, an investigation of modern love and sex, offers a measured perspective on the often frenzied demands of mid-30’s dating. After becoming single again at 30, Witt began exploring the trappings of digital-era relationships and searched for new ways of expressing sexuality, which lead her to experience – among other things – orgasm workshops, a BDSM film set, a polyamorist party and online porn, all the while rethinking her expectations of marriage, commitment and sex.

Witt is now in a relationship again, and wonders if being out of “the trenches” of single life makes her a fraud. I think not. To me, Future Sex is not about denying the possibility of love, but showing there are other ways in which it can be expressed. And as reader, you get the sense that Witt gave up a lot of herself for the book, often putting herself in uncomfortable situations – such as working with a stranger in an orgasm workshop: “As a man described to me the traces of my makeup, a blemish on my chin, and other flaws in my appearance that I had convinced myself were too small to be noticeable, I felt a unique experience of horror.”

Witt the unlikely sex writer is, to use a favourite term of the internet age, “all of us”, navigating the circus of modern romance, all the while feeling timid, curious, horrified and alive. Here’s what happened when we spoke about porn, marriage and the cruel optimism of the liberal dream.

Emma-Lee Moss: I remember hearing about you around 2013 through a friend, who said: “There’s this person and she’s writing about dating apps, but in a serious way.” This was exciting, because we were living this life, but it hadn’t been written down authentically yet. How do you write about a social trend that is evolving around you?

Emily Witt: People would always ask me when I was writing the book, “What’s your thesis?” and I found it helpful to not have an idea or a polemic going into the book. I just read a lot of books, and listen to my friends talk about their anxieties. I was looking for things to read to help me understand my own reality. And as I write in the book, most of what I was reading made me feel really trapped. It lamented the new technology for the most part, like : “Oh, this is creating a consumer market of people.” Or it would say: “Women now have to conform to male sexual desire.” It made me feel trapped because you don’t want to be so pessimistic about your present reality. So part of it was just me trying to be optimistic, and finding optimistic ideas about internet dating, about pornography, about these new ways of connecting, and the sexual freedom that we have now.

ELM: I’ve noticed a panic rising recently about porn. Are we living in a world where porn is the dark undercurrent to everything, or is that just a rumour borne from not looking?

EW: We live in a world where there’s more access to sexual imagery than ever before, and it can be accessed in a way that you don’t have to make any public statement to look at it. And I do think that makes it more omnipresent. But I also think it’s kind of a gendered experience still. Men are more socialised to seek it out and see it as a rite of passage, and some women view it that way but less so than men, and there’s an imbalance there. You can have a relationship where one person spends a lot of time watching porn, and sees it almost like a kind of maintenance thing. And then there’s this other person for whom porn is this scary mystery, or a kind of monolithic entity that imposes its will. That imbalance is easily remedied by everyone watching more porn.

ELM: I just read your Vice diary about VR porn, and the final paragraph made me sad. Do you think we are heading towards a place where we will be sitting in pods eating bags of chips and getting pleasured by anime?

EW: Hopefully not. I think the urge to connect with people physically is so powerful, it will not be enough to just look at your computer or interact with a VR experience. I think there will be more people like the woman in my book who identifies as “internet sexual”. I think that will become a more plausible mode of sexual expression, especially as VR might allow you to really interact with other people in a tactile way.

ELM: If it’s healthier to face these things head-on, how do you feel about attempts, such as the UK government’s, to censor online porn according to a idea of what traditional sex should be?

EW: I think it’s really bad. I feel pretty strongly about this. When you look at the history of what is classified as obscenity, it’s interracial sex, it’s men having sex with men. It’s sometimes literature about birth control and contraception. I feel that as long as something is between consenting adults and there isn’t violence, freedom of speech is very important … I remember reading the list of things that could be banned, and it was really arbitrary and had nothing to do with safety or the public good.

ELM: What I love about your book, that it presents alternative life choices that are authentic and dignified. Why do we keep coming back to the single narrative of the perfect family with a picket fence?

EW: When I look at marriage as an institution, from a personal standpoint, it’s a metric of success that there is a lot of consensus around. If you get married and have kids, you don’t have to explain your life to anybody. For me, as somebody who likes to get good grades and all that, it was the metric of success that I wanted to achieve, without knowing if I really wanted it. At this point in the US, 40% of children are born to unwed parents, but there’s no recognition of it as a structural change. It’s always seen as an accident or a set of personal circumstances.

ELM: Does anything represent the future anymore? Did we break the future?

EW: The academic Lauren Berlant wrote a book called Cruel Optimism. Her theory is that cruel optimism is when a fantasy you have about the good life is impeding your flourishing in reality. When I read it, it resonated with me. I wanted to get married and I was frustrated with dating. I wasn’t looking at this actual possibility, I wanted this fantasy life. And her argument is that it isn’t just the marriage, it’s the mortgage, and the good job, the kind of liberal capitalist dream. Holding on to that dream is sometimes preventing you from finding real happiness or adjustment in your life, or acknowledging your reality. I thought it was a pretty good idea.

ELM: So maybe, in heterosexual relationships, people are at different stages of coming to terms with sexual choice and not meshing to achieve their ideals? It seems like this a precarious moment for people who desire that traditional path, but might not meet as many potential partners who do.

EW: When I look at my friends in their late 30s who are still unmarried, who are really committed to that idea of marriage and children, they’re freezing their eggs and frantically internet dating, it stresses me out. Some are just trying to orchestrate a family, prolonging their fertility. I know a handful of people who threw out all those ideas, so if they wanted to have a baby, they had a baby with a friend. It does seem like, in the future, there will be more known paths out of the married family. Right now, it feels experimental to pursue those lines of thinking.

ELM: If people could step back, like you did, and look at the times we are living in, maybe they wouldn’t feel so frantic, or blame themselves when things didn’t line up.

EW: I no longer have this fear of ending up alone, of being middle-aged and becoming undesirable. I now know there are so many ways to experience connection that aren’t dating or relationships. There’s all kinds of stuff out there. I almost look forward to whatever will happen to me, because it will offer a different set of possibilities.

• Emily Witt will appear in conversation with Katherine Angel at the London Review Bookshop on 26 May. This event will also be streamed online.