When the Benefits Aren’t So Beneficial – Part 2

Last year a fella I don’t speak to anymore accused me, rather zealously, of being a sex addict (amazingly, that is not why we stopped speaking).  So far my life doesn’t look like anything that would show up on an episode of Intervention, so I begged to differ.  I haven’t yet bankrupted myself or put myself in physical danger to have sex, so I think I’m doing alright.  But an accusation like that, if you’re me, makes you think.  That’s, in part, because I always take the opinions of others too seriously (don’t all bloggers?).  I had to admit though, that the other part of the reason his accusation rankled so much was because I was feeling a certain level of conflict around the sex I was having already.  When I had a good long think about it, I decided to take a break from sex, just to see if I could, because I did feel like the sex I was having had an edge of compulsion about it.  I made a deal with myself that I could have sex again whenever I wanted to, but it had to be due to actual horniness and not because of anger, boredom or loneliness.

The break I took wasn’t terribly difficult after the initial terror of having to be celibate; I haven’t gone more than about a month without sex since I became sexually active seven years ago, so the whole idea of going without was kinda scary.  After that initial period of time, I realized that I was never that horny (likely because I’m on the pill).   In fact, I concluded that the lion’s share of the sex I’ve had in the past four years or so has probably been entirely about anger, boredom or loneliness.  I don’t drink a lot because I can’t handle it, I didn’t touch weed until the ripe old age of 30 and I go without it for pretty long periods of time.  Sex and food are my drugs of choice.  The forty pounds I’ve put in the past four years is a pretty good indicator of my compulsion around food.  And the sex, well that’s what this post is all about.

When I splashed onto the casual sex scene seven years ago it was probably not ideal timing.  I had just left church, faith, flock and the first man I’d really felt anything for had just dumped me.  I was on the verge of clinical depression for about two or three months.  I basically had sex to fuck all the pain away.  Even though I was pretty crazy for a while, the casual sex I was having was just that—entirely casual.  I wasn’t emotionally invested in anyone and pretty quickly I settled into trying to find a boyfriend.  But that didn’t work out so well (two boyfriends pulled disappearing acts rather than actually breaking up), and all those MSN chat rooms and sites like Adult Friend Finder were still bookmarked on my computer waiting for me.  So I jumped back into the ring.  After three years of this, give or take, a pattern developed.  I’d try to date for a while and that wouldn’t work out and I’d just go back to having sex.  Sex became my consolation prize for the relationship I couldn’t seem to make happen.

This isn’t to say that I haven’t made some valiant efforts at dating.  People who can’t understand why I’m not in a relationship assume that I put more energy into fucking than I do dating.  Not so much.  When a fuck buddy is working well, it’s no work at all for me.  Dating is like being in a chain gang in comparison.  I’ve tried every site you’ve tried:  Plenty of Fish, Lava Life, Yahoo Personals back in the day, CraigsList (where I tend to have the most success—it draws out the literate in the pack) and a bevy of others you’ve never heard of.  I even swallowed the vomit in my mouth over their advertising and tried eHarmony.  I’ve paid super big bucks and used LifeMates (avoid if you are not Caucasian).  I bought the popular book (at the time) The Surrendered Single and spent weeks walking around smiling at random men and handing out my number.  It never got me a date—just a lot of awkward moments with guys who were utterly disinterested.  At one point I was on three different dating sites and on a date every weekend.  I had a plan to go on a date every week for an entire year.  You get the point.  I have made a great deal of effort to date.  And for whatever reason I have been thwarted.  I’m sure the problem lies with me blah, blah, blah, but for the moment I have no idea what makes the opposite sex entirely immune to me.

I’m kinda done with being single and as my friends get married and have babies and generally set up their nuclear families, it gets harder and harder to ignore how much I want to have a partner.  I think that has a lot to do with why my sexual relationships have become more intense (for me) over the past few years.  The consolation prize has to get better and better to stand in for what I actually want.  Unfortunately, it seems to become self-perpetuating.  Don’t get me wrong, I’m still trying to date, but I think my efforts have become less and less hopeful.  And it gets increasingly easier to just go back to having sex so that I don’t feel lonely.

This doesn’t even take into account the biological clock ticking loudly in my ear.  Lately, I’m finding babies a whole hell of a lot cuter than I’ve found them in past.  I get that babies grow up into annoying teenagers and then angsty bank-account-destroying university students, but it doesn’t make the desire to see what a mini-me would look like any less compelling.  I’ve got six, maybe eight years until I stop having the choice to have kids of my own without it meaning a lot of risks I don’t want to ponder.  That’s not really a lot of time when there’s no relationship on the horizon.  I don’t know for sure that I want children—I just know that I want the choice and I don’t want to have to make that choice ten minutes into a long term relationship.

A while ago I decided I’d have to stop having fuck buddies if I was ever going to deal with my issues around loneliness and stop being compulsive about sex.  So, in anticipation of cutting off my present fuck buddy, I got a cat—which was an utter disaster.  She was an adorable kitty but Viv and I had to part ways within two weeks because I’ve come to enjoy sleeping in my 34 years and she wasn’t really into allowing that.  I also realized that no cat was going to make me feel less lonely—no cat is that damn powerful.  Instead, she became yet another obligation and I managed to start resenting her within a week.  Back to the Humane Society she went and I had just rented a cat for two weeks to the tune of about $350.00.  Lesson learned.

This particular downside of casual sex is far more specific to me than the problems I brought up in my last post.  However, I can imagine that there are some women for whom sex is their drug of choice, whatever it is that they’re avoiding feeling.   If you’re one of those women, hopefully my admission of guilt makes you feel like you can fess up—at least to yourself.  It doesn’t mean you have to do anything about it, but awareness is always better than a lack thereof.  Admittedly, awareness of an issue over a long period of time can only turn out two ways though—you deal or you go back to being unaware.

At the moment I don’t even know what this new found awareness means for me.  So far all I’ve figured out is that I have to get rid of my present fuck buddy.  Unless of course, he pledges undying love.  But given my track record, the odds are kinda stacked against me.  And on that depressing note, ‘till next time.

When the Benefits Aren’t So Beneficial – Part 1

I’ve been trying to write this blog post for over a month. That’s the explanation I’m going with for my extended absence from the blogosphere—not perhaps the fact that I’m a couch potato who can’t multi-task.

I’ve been mulling the idea of doing a post about casual sex for a while, but all my attempts so far have sounded like bad LiveJournal entries or Mars/Venus rants, so I‘ve kept them to myself.  But I think I might have a handle on this topic at long last—might. So here I sit being a wi-fi hobo on a Second Cup patio because it’s too nice a night to be indoors. For those of you reading this from outside of Canada or inside British Columbia, Second Cup is like Starbucks but with less pretension and cup sizes that are comprehensible in English.

After a few attempts at writing this post, it occurred to me that part of the trouble was that I was trying to talk about a lot of different aspects of one topic. Hence, a two-parter on the perils of casual sex.

Those of you who know me personally might be surprised to see me take this position—pun fully intended. Well, I‘ve surprised myself. I’ve had a lot of conversations in the past few years in defense of casual sex in general and long term fuck buddies specifically and have always been a staunch defender of the practice. But my own experiences of late and some of what I hear from friends has caused me to take pause and now I’m not so sure I should have been mounting such a defense.

This is not to say that I think casual sex is all bad all the time. I don’t think that at all. I think one night stands can be amazing. A number of great relationships are one night stands that stuck.  Apart from the obvious risks of STIs, if you have a lot of one night stands that are fuelled by booze or drugs, I actually would venture to say that one-nighters are about the most harmless form of casual sex you can have because there just isn’t the potential for a lot of emotional hoopla. It’s the fuck buddy thing that I’m starting to question. And I question it specifically for women.

Clearly I’m speaking mostly from my own experience here, colored with a bit of the experiences of people I know, so please forgive my massive generalizations. I just think that maybe my experience might be more common than not.

First off, I’m going to go ahead and call a spade a spade here and not use the term “friend with benefits,” title of this post notwithstanding. I dislike the term because I think it has a way of obscuring what’s actually going on. I have never really been friends with the person that I was casually fucking. Maybe everyone else in the world is best of friends with their fuck buddies but that has never been my experience. It’s always been pretty clear to me that while my buddies and I would have a very mutually beneficial evening once a week, I wasn’t going to be invited out for drinks with their friends. The one time that I did have drinks with a fuck buddy’s friends, it only served to severely muddy the waters. With the exception of one of my fuck buddies, I have not maintained anything akin to a real friendship with any of them—at most a pleasant acquaintanceship. So, fuck buddies. That’s what gay men were calling it long before we straights caught on and tried to make it sound like more than an entirely sexual arrangement.

But there’s also probably a reason that this has worked so well for gay men. They’re men. A friend and I were talking about the whole difficulty that it seems we women have in compartmentalizing our sex lives and she mentioned a line from a Candace Bushnell novel. I spent about 20 minutes sitting in the public library scouring for the quote in the book, One Fifth Avenue, because I refused to read the entire novel:

“This is one of the disappointments one learned about life: yes men loved sex. But great sex didn’t mean they wanted to marry you. Great sex held no larger implications for them. It was only that: great sex.”

Now this is not to say that I’ve never had great sex with a guy more than once and was clear on the fact that I didn’t want to marry him. But if I keep having great sex with a guy for a really long while, eventually an attachment forms. I used to actually try hard to make certain that any man I was thinking about having sex with long term had some sort of fatal flaw that would ensure I’d never really fall for him. But somehow, more times than not, when I’ve thought the dude had some fatal flaw, I’d still fall for him. With one it took a year; with a couple other ones, it was on its way to happening before things ended for other reasons. And with the latest one, the one I’m fucking now, it happened in about 43 seconds. I wasn’t even sure I was attracted to this guy when I first met him and lately he’s the last thing I’m thinking about when I go to sleep at night.  I have spent the last two months of our four month arrangement agonizing over something or other when it comes to him and it’s driving me mental. And I’m about 95% sure he is not losing a wink of sleep over me. This guy turned down a two-day non-stop sex romp at a B&B with me during his vacation time. I’m not even sure he’s as invested in the sex as I am. Though, to his credit, he does make me dinner whenever we meet at his place.

Years ago I read a book by sex therapist, Ian Kerner (author of She Comes First) called Be Honest—You’re Not That Into Him Either. One chapter in the book that always stuck with me was entitled “You’re Not That Into Him Either, But You Thought You Could Have Sex Like a Man.” I’m not going to explain all of his reasoning but the point of the chapter is that the way that women are built emotionally and sexually makes sex for women just different than it is for men. And while we’re busy trying to have sex like men—without too much attachment—we just don’t seem to manage it very well. So that guy that you never meant to have any feelings for, that guy you knew was just a casual hook up, suddenly has you on an emotional roller coaster that should be a paid ride at Wonderland. Ultimately, men can have emotionally connected sex but it doesn’t seem to come as naturally to them as it does to women.

And all this emotional investment has further consequences. The first is only a problem if you are interested in a long term relationship. It’s really hard to be emotionally open to the Mr. Right who might be smiling at you on the subway when you’re caught up in the guy who really doesn’t think of you as a lot more than a mobile and responsive vagina attached to a reasonably agreeable personality. And there’s no fault in him thinking of you as that. Initially, he was just a mobile and responsive penis attached to a reasonably agreeable personality. The problem is that it all changes for we ladies somewhere along the way and generally it hasn’t changed for him. Some dude could walk up to me with a diamond ring and a white picket fence in his backpack and I’d be all “meh” because right now I’m invested in some dude who likely does not feel the same way. So not only are you invested in a dude who isn’t producing a sufficient ROI, you’re ignoring guys who could.

The second possible consequence: confidence annihilation. While I’m busy falling for every reasonably nice guy with whom I have great sex, the same thing is not happening for the men I’m sleeping with. And I’m simultaneously missing out on potential real relationship prospects while I get all invested in these fellas so I‘m not getting the feedback loop from guys who might actually dig me. I think, if you’re not possessed of some pretty amazing self-esteem, it’s hard not to let insidious little ideas about your own desirability start to creep in. If I of great skin, cute smile, sparkling personality and renowned sexual prowess (I kid) can fall for these less-than-just-what-I-wanted guys, what’s so wrong with me that they never feel the same way?  The constant feedback loop that I’m getting because of the number of these relationships I’ve had is “good enough to fuck but nothing more.” I think, for me, it has started to feel like a bit of a referendum on my desirability, even while I know it’s not rational to think of it that way. But since when are humans rational?

Now there is a possible solution to all of this and it’s a way of giving women the tools to fuck like a man: fuck many men at once. I like to call this keeping a harem. It’s a lot harder to get emotionally invested in one man if there’s a roster of men to choose from. It’s time consuming and hardish work to start and maintain a harem though. I’ve tried it and never got to the established stable of four to five studs that I wanted. It’s not that damn easy to find compatibility with that many people at one time. You’ll notice that even people in open relationships don’t often have multiple side partners, as much as one main partner and one on the side. But if any of you manage to ever procure and maintain a harem I want to hear about it and I want to hear about whether or not it’s had the intended result of keeping you from becoming overly attached to any one of the men in it.

Let me reiterate, I love sex, you should love sex (unless you’re asexual) and everyone should have some sex with no strings attached at some point in their lives. But maybe, unless you’re a dude, you might have to put a cap on how much of it you have.