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.