Lillie Rohan: Netflix's new show Sex/Life made me want to text my ex

Sex/Life may spark a flurry of frustrating emotions about your love life, writes Lillie Rohan. Photo / Netflix

OPINION:

I watched 'Sex/Life' this weekend and after a hefty nine hours of viewing, all I wanted to do was text my very own version of Brad, aka the sparks fly guy who might have been the right one had we met at a different time.

When it comes to Netflix shows, there is nothing I love more than one that leaves you in a pit of sentimentality, and that's exactly what Sex/Life did.

The series will likely make you experience a compilation of risky thoughts and flashbacks about your ex-boyfriend. The one who had you experiencing every feeling known to mankind. Like any good romance drama, it comes with a lot of spice. Said spice is Billie writing her nostalgic feelings about her ex-boyfriend, Brad, in what was a secret diary, until her husband reads it.

Then, it snowballs. It gets bigger and bigger and ... anyway, back to main character and all those TikToks about episode three. The eye candy ex-boyfriend, Brad.

Sex/Life may spark a flurry of frustrating emotions about your love life, writes Lillie Rohan. Photo / Netflix

Brad is the guy we have all dated once or twice, or maybe five times. He knows all the right things to say, makes you feel like the only girl in the world, and when it's good, it's really good (if I had a dollar for every time, I've heard a girl in a toxic relationship say that I'd be a millionaire).

But Brad is also the guy who will make you cry more times than you can count. He's emotionally unavailable and most of your connection comes down to physical elements because that's the only way he can express his emotions.

My favourite example of this is when Brad couldn't healthily process his emotions, so he kissed another girl, Billie caught him, she said they're over, he cried, sweet-talked her and somehow, they ended up back together. It had me screaming into a pillow because I, have also been there and seeing it play out on screen made me regret it 100 times more than I already did.

Sex/Life had me feeling a winning combo of annoyance, nostalgia and frustration a lot of the time. I was either rolling my eyes at Brad's transparent mind-games and Billie's (kind of) dumb decisions or I was wishing my ex-boyfriend would reappear in my life so I too could have some blind-leading-the-blind spicy love drama.

Sarah Shahi as Billie Connelly and Mike Vogel as Cooper Conelly in a scene from Sex/Life. Photo / Netflix

And on top of all those feelings I had while watching the intense love triangle of Billie, Cooper and Brad, I was also stuck wondering if they had written the script based on my love life because the similarities were scarily uncanny when Billie said: "Brad wasn't just bad news; he was my own personal apocalypse. But it was thrilling, addicting, all that drama."

So, after a weekend of nostalgia that took me back to the best bits of my favourite toxic relationship, I couldn't help but type a text to my ex that went something like this: "Hey, I'm watching Sex/Life and it's got me thinking about you. I know you're in a relationship, bought a house and a dog and have a seemingly perfect life but maybe you want to be toxic again? IDK, just a thought."

Of course, my life isn't a passionate, romanticised Netflix series and realistically my ex-boyfriend isn't waiting in the shadows ready to declare his undying, all-consuming love for me. So, instead of doing something I would probably regret, I rang my best friend, confirmed sending a text was a bad idea and decided to write this column instead.

If you too have finished the series and are in the "should I text my ex?" phase, remember, Sex/Life encapsulates the utterly intoxicating, blinding and thrilling parts of love, but if you reflect on your own experience with a "Brad", you'll realise you don't really want your ex-boyfriend back.

And you deserve a "Cooper" kind of guy anyway.

• Sex/Life is streaming now on Netflix.