A Heroes Guide to Sex Mistakes

It’s Monday night, the first one in a long time when I don’t have an episode of Heroes to watch. I’m not too upset about this. Like a sex partner who stopped trying and isn’t that satisfying anymore, Heroes just didn’t deliver the excitement and pleasure it once did. While it’s hard to let even a bad lover go, you often find that you’re better off on your own than you were settling for less.

There was a time when Heroes really turned me on. I waited in anticipation for every episode during season 1, and each one left me breathless and excited, even before the sex dreams of Peter Petrelli started. In season 2, I hung in there, confused but still eager, like the lover amusing her partner while he “experiments” with new tricks. By season 3, I was just bored with the lack of enjoyment that Heroes brought me. And the end of this season (season 3.5?), well, it was too little too late to make up for how much it had let me down.

The mistakes the series made are ones that we can all learn from, even when it comes to our sex lives. Think about it – have you or someone you know wasted the glorious potential of sex by going down boring, meandering, or unnecessarily complicated paths? Heroes may have jumped the shark, but your sex life does not have to – avoid these Heroes pitfalls:

• Don’t peak too early. Heroes never really developed into anything special, despite all the promise and potential of season 1. Don’t be like the hot high school football player that never delivers more than jackhammer sex because he relies too much on his looks. You can always learn and grow sexually, especially if you are open-minded and receptive to feedback from partners.

• Don’t lose focus. Heroes was perfectly set up to explore the archetypal battle of good and evil, with Peter leading the good guys and Sylar becoming the ever more powerful bad guy. But then Hiro ended up in ancient Japan, some chick who could make electricity took center stage, and Mr. Petrelli came back from the dead, and  and it lost all focus. People let this happen to their sex lives, too, by losing focus on pleasure and intimacy, and getting distracted by artificial concerns about appearance, number of lovers, etc.

• Don’t waste your time with minor characters. I am the last person to make moral judgments about who sleeps with who, but if the person you’re taking home for the rest of the night or the rest of your life doesn’t have an amazing ability or memorable personality, they aren’t worth your time. Just look at all the mediocre characters Heroes introduced (too bland to remember), which only meant lost time with the amazing stars of the show we’d all fallen for.

• Don’t hide your badass side. Future Hiro, wearing a black coat, ponytail, and samurai sword, is badass. Unfortunately, the show never actualized this version of Hiro in real time, so we never got to see Hiro’s darker side. Don’t wait to bust out your inner badass. If you’ve got a dark, sexy side that no one gets to see, just throw on your best leather outfit and let your freaky side out.

• Don’t try to be normal. This is more a classic superhero plot point than it is a flaw with Heroes, but many of the main characters, including Claire and Nathan, longed to be rid of their abilities and be normal, which led to some problems for everyone. The lesson is that you have to be okay with who you are; trying to fit in and be normal at best makes you boring, and at worst leads to a police state complete with internment camps for deviants (just ask Danko).

• Don’t lose your powers. Both Hiro and Peter lost their powers because of a crappy resurrection of Peter’s dad, who came back, added nothing to the show, then promptly died off. We all dated those people who we thought were going to be important and that we’d learn from, only to have them disappear and mean very little to our lives. Don’t let those insignificant people take away part of who you are. You’ll need those powers when the right person comes along.

• Don’t assume you’ll have another season. Clearly, the writers of Heroes thought they were going to have more time to develop their story. I mean, they went through a whole season with Hiro and Peter having no abilities? WTF? Ugh. If you’ve got some good moves or good ideas in the bedroom, don’t save them for later. You may not have another chance to wow a lover.

I will miss Heroes if it is not renewed, not because it was amazing, but because I wanted it to have another chance to correct its mistakes. But unlike this show, you have a chance to avoid or fix those mistakes now – before you fade off onto the D-list of shitty sex partners.