Nicola Slawson is a freelance journalist and founder of the Single Supplement newsletter and digital community

It’s official: it's illegal to have sex with someone who lives in a different household to you. And the news that the government accidentally banned casual sex and sex between partners who don’t live together caused many a raised eyebrow and snigger this week.

Political commentators and the people of Twitter expressed their outrage at such a rule, but for single people it didn’t come as much of a surprise. We had already gathered from the fact we aren’t meant to go within two metres of anyone else that even kissing, let alone sex, was off the cards. And while I know there could be some troubling long-term consequences to this legal accident, I can’t help but feel that the frustration of many is misplaced.

For those who haven’t seen them in detail, the new guidelines, which form part of the Health Protection (Coronavirus, Restrictions) Regulations 2020 bill, state that: “No person may participate in a gathering which takes place in a public or private place indoors, and consists of two or more persons.” The fact that has even been dubbed a "sex ban", when it doesn’t even mention sex once, again shows that the most important thing in our collective mind is the status of our romantic life.

Whether we can see, or even find, a romantic or sexual partner is always top of the agenda - even today, when the legislation in question bans a lot more types of gatherings and partnerings than that. It means we can’t go to the pub, to a party, or to a friend’s house to sit on the sofa with a bottle of wine laughing our heads off; we can't have our families round for Sunday roast; we can’t even go inside if it starts to rain during one of the permitted back garden gatherings of six. Read more via Independent