Hook-ups, no strings attached, friends with benefits, booty calls
After many heartbreaks, I have decided to have a ‘friends with benefits’ type of relationship.
This way I can focus on my career and daughter and still get my sexual needs met.
I met a single guy online who is up for the same. We have chatted about my rules – condoms, no videos, no photos and no threesomes. There is beauty in the honesty that exists in this type of relationship.
He wants to use sex toys. And, as I have never tried them before, I thought it would be an adventure. I said I’m not happy to use his sex toys for hygiene reasons, which he thought fair. So I guess we’re going shopping (yes, I know about your shop
What other ‘rules’ or safety tips can you recommend? What about unprotected oral sex?
We are meeting this weekend in a public place for the first time and I am not planning on taking him home then.
www.dreve.co.za
I understand what courage it took this woman to put herself into the vulnerable world of the no-rules friends-with-benefits modern relationship. I guess that, like most women, she’d been raised on a healthy diet of traditional values dictating that women should not show sexual interest outside of a relationship, that all sex has to be intimate and that intimacy can only happen between two people who know and love each other and who are contained in this thing called ‘relationship’. She had probably absorbed that men only want women for sex and that, if she gave in to her desire, she would lose the man along with her ‘reputation’. Which is why female baby boomers married early: to keep their virginity intact, to have sex (finally) and to maintain their names in town.
What she had not yet anticipated was that she was about to jump off a precipice and free-float her way through a new form of relating. She hoped that throwing out the traditional expectations of a relationship would free her from heartache. Little did she know just how confusing modern relationships are.
I am, indeed, thankful that relationship choices, and the options for relating sexually offline, have expanded exponentially. Up to now, your options have been a significant relationship, engaged, married, divorced, widowed, cohabiting or single. In fact, I battle to keep up, and prefer my clients to describe their preferred way of relating rather than to have me box them clinically.
And herein lies the rub: there are no boxes, no scripts, no rules for these varied and interesting new forms of relationship. They are undefined by society, leaving people excited but vulnerable to being hurt or disappointed.
Let’s try to get some clarity about casual sex, the new form of relating that defines modern relationships, be they online or offline, or between men and women, married or single people.
Casual sex, the umbrella term I choose to use, is ‘a physical and emotional relationship between two people who may have casual sex or a near-sexual relationship without necessarily demanding or expecting the extra commitments of a more formal romantic relationship’.20 Basically, the common denominator in all of these new relationships is sexual behaviour in uncommitted relationships.
What does this mean? A 30-something-year-old man consulted with me about his casual sex confusion. Shy, reticent and lacking opportunities and confidence to meet women, his neighbour upstairs casually offered him sex whenever he felt like it. She was bored, horny and in love with someone who was not reciprocating her affection. He tried it once, and naively and painfully fell in love. She put up a boundary: sex only. He was devastated.
He was stuck in the traditional expectations of wine, dine, beg for a kiss, pursue, send flowers, masturbate furiously before the next date to avoid early ejaculation. And once the woman gave the go-ahead, condom on, penis inside vagina and voilà! You were in a relationship.
This man was lost. The very pillars on which he depended for structure and guidance in a relationship had crumbled: monogamy, sexual fidelity and commitment were not there. Or, they were there, but in a different way. His FWB wanted commitment to sex only without emotional or sexual fidelity while she freely sought to pursue a monogamous relationship with a man she truly desired both emotionally and sexually. Do you see how interesting and confusing modern relationships become – before you even get online, get seduced and get led into an infidel’s paradise?
One would imagine that with all this consensual casual sex emerging as normative, reputations would not matter. Do you still care what people think about your sexual and relational behaviour? Do you label yourself as ‘promiscuous’ when you’re having sex with more than one person, or when you’re having sex both online and offline with different people? And mostly, do you care about your reputation when you’re married and playing online? Believe it or not, reputation still counts.
I was aghast listening to a group of female students from the University of Cape Town, South Africa – with an average age of 22 – sharing their offline relationship rules. They have what they call the 90-day rule, according to which penetration can only happen 90 days after the first ‘date’. I use this word – ‘date’ – with caution. As you’ll see, a ‘date’ can be anything from a hook-up to a booty call to friends with benefits to a fling. It may even be an old-fashioned date, which may involve being collected in a real-life car or consensually and deliberately meeting at a restaurant for dinner that has been arranged via CMC.
The reason for this rule, they tell me, is to protect their reputations and ensure that the man will stick around after sex. Now, isn’t that interesting! These liberated female students have old-fashioned reputation-saving systems in place to gain traditional, real-life relationships: systems that involve keeping men away from their vaginas for as long as possible to make them hungry for the woman as a whole person.
I went back to my students at the University of Cape Town, intrigued by their 90-day rule. I wanted to learn more about their offline rules of engagement. I wanted to know about casual sex. I was learning that these educated, enlightened women, who are digital natives,21 want real-life, old-fashioned commitment. They want a relationship yet, paradoxically, fear putting a fence around a casual situation and calling it a relationship. This would carry all the usual relationship rules: monogamy, sexual fidelity and commitment. But no one wants to admit to wanting this. So, it’s kept casual and called all sorts of names: hook-up, friend with benefits, NSA, booty call, hanging out. One student called it a sensationship!
Many studies on youth populations tell us how rampant casual relationships are, specifically on campuses. For example, 25% of first-time sexual intercourse happens with a friend, stranger or an occasional date partner. About half of sexually active adolescents have had intercourse with a nonromantic partner.22 The principles of commitment, monogamy and fidelity are being redefined. Or are they? As you’ll see, these students – like people from all age groups – eventually seek long-term relationships, even when they begin as hook-ups or friends-with-benefits (FWB) agreements.23
Grello24 asked American college students about NSA, to find that 60% of them engaged in it – mostly with friends rather than with strangers, as part of their transition into sexuality, in combination with alcohol and recreational drugs. These students stated that frequency of affectionate and genital behaviours was associated with expectations of the relationship. Many of these female students were depressed.
I’d be worn out having to code it: this many kisses means a relationship; this many penetrative acts means a hook-up; this many touches on the shoulder means a friends-with-benefits situation. Another study on young adults questioned their motivations for casual sex. Both genders stated sexual desire, sexual experimentation, physical pleasure, alcohol use and the attractiveness of their partners as motivations. Men had unique reasons: they did it to enhance their status and to conform to normative peer-group behaviour. It will come as no surprise that women had casual sex to increase the probability of long-term commitment from a sex partner.25 Point made by my UCT students! I wondered whether I would find this same need for