I’ve learnt through many of my radio shows and my Facebook page that sex with the ex can be more common than it was when the same couple was in a romantic relationship. It’s called ‘cycling’: relationships that end and renew, with lots of sex between the phases.26 Despite sex with the ex becoming less stigmatised and a more acceptable, new form of relating, I see emotional pain in these couples as rules of management are lacking. And, as worrying, I see high-risk sexual behaviour: how do you ask your ex-lover to put on a condom when you didn’t use condoms when you were together?
The primary task of a romantic relationship is to accomplish relationship development – that is, to initiate the relationship, move it to intimacy or bonding, and then keep it there.27 Friendship is a ‘non-sexual relationship of two people, based upon shared experience and characterized by mutual personal regard, understanding, and loyalty’.28 I choose this definition as it boldly states the non-sexual nature of friendship.
Yet almost every couple with whom I work aspires to be ‘best friends’: a non-sexual status. This is a remnant of the traditional romantic model in which couples are encouraged – even manipulated – to be one with each other. I know these couples because they seek my professional intervention for low sexual desire. And, to my surprise, my respondents on www.AshleyMadison.com expect marriage to offer friendship. Plus they go online to seek a ‘friend’. Ergo Facebook – but with sex! It is fascinating to see FWB emerging across all ages as a relationship model of choice.
I can see why it is so appealing. No heavy conversations analysing ‘the relationship’, no domesticity to deal with, your friend is a mutually agreed-upon phone call or – more likely – WhatsApp message away, no romantic dates, flowers on the bed, expected showers together, or any display of outward commitment, leaving both partners available for other attachments.
However, there is the unspoken little piece of heart that longs for the possibility of FWB turning into a ‘real’, committed relationship. This dichotomy underscores casual relationships. Dammit, I say to myself, can we never escape the need for monogamy, commitment and fidelity?
FWB has characteristics of both the Romantic and the Friendship traditional models, being, simply, friends who have sex.
My first exposure to FWB was a conversation with my very confused and disappointed 19-year-old cousin. A freshman at an American Ivy League university, he couldn’t wait to begin dating on campus. Back after his first semester, he discussed the dating conundrums he was facing. No one wanted to date. People wanted to hook up. Friends wanted to have sex. His mother had raised him as egalitarian and had vigilantly prepared him with dating etiquette.
It seems that people choose FWB for the perceived benefits of avoiding commitment, sexual exclusivity and monogamy and the convenience of sex, trust and safety while staying single. Sure, feelings may develop: someone may get hurt and we could lose our friendship.29 But this pales in comparison to the gains. It’s all very confusing.
A father stood outside my therapy room door with his 16-year-old son. He had brought him to consult with me about how to handle the hook-up culture. The teen was fresh-faced, athletic and keen to share his dating conundrums. In the previous week, he had been to his first underage club party. He vowed not to return to this uncomfortable place with its illegal alcohol and smoking and mass of young girls and boys on a dance floor, unable to speak over the loud music.
Peer pressure drove him back a few days later. He had learnt the rules: no need to flirt, converse or seduce. The best-looking guy gets to hook up. He wanted to hook up, to wear the badge of honour coveted by all his peers. He noticed a pretty girl on the dance floor. He moved over and began to dance in front of her. She responded with a smile, the non-verbal cue of acceptance. Soon, he leant in and kissed her deeply. The song ended. He moved off the dance floor. He woke the next morning feeling awful and ambivalent. He’d passed the test, been initiated into the hook-up culture. He was relieved and proud, but could not come to terms with not having spoken one word to this girl. He didn’t know her name. It flew in the face of his idea of the progression of a ‘real’’ relationship. He was, however, looking forward to his return to the club that same night for another hook-up – perhaps he would even get to feel a girl up, in addition to kissing her.
Penetration was neither his aspiration nor his goal; orgasm, in any other form, was. Penetration was being saved for a ‘decent’ girl he hoped to meet in a ‘decent’ environment, outside the club situation.
As a pioneer of sexuality education in South Africa, I hold an uncomfortable measure of responsibility for the changing heterosexual scripts that began to uncurl in the late 1990s. Fear of HIV/Aids was rampant; sexual ignorance, abstinence-based policies in the USA and South Africa’s mortifying ABC (Abstain, Be Faithful, Condomise) policy, together with political denialism under Thabo Mbeki, ensured that we placed a big ‘No Entry’ sign over vaginal penetration. Once we knew that HIV/Aids was not a gay man’s disease, we clamped down on vaginas, not knowing that unprotected anal sex actually has the highest risk of transmission. Young people were bound to find other ways to avoid transmission and still have sexual play. I joined the voices that advocated oral sex as a great safer-sex alternative. Young women who saw this as a way of keeping their virginity – and their reputations – intact, grasped at it. Inadvertently, I added to the vaginal shame that women carry and hyper-idealised vaginal penetration.
Quietly, a new sexual script emerged: one in which vaginal intercourse moved down the ladder of sexual activities and in which oral and anal sex became normative number-one choices for young adults.30 Many other forces conspired to bring about this change – first and foremost the accessibility of the Internet, which brought pornography and non-pornographic media into young people’s private spaces, but also a change of marriage norms and significantly more moderate rules in colleges and universities, institutions at which girls and boys were equally present.
I tell you this because the reordering of sexual activities, focusing on the so-called casualness of oral and anal sex, created a paradigm shift that resulted in the emergence of a new subculture: a heterosexual youth hook-up culture.
Today, the age of marriage has increased. Women marry at about age 27 and men at about age 28 and a half.31 And they consent to sexual activity from a younger age. Age at first sex is fairly consistent worldwide. For example, the mean age at first sex among young men and women in South Africa ranges from 16 to 18 years, depending on the age and type of sample.32
Think about this for a moment: this is a lot of years for young people potentially to be having and enjoying sexual activity. It is a historically unique and wondrously long window of opportunity for young pre-reproductive adults. And, into this window has climbed this new form of sexual relating. Kids just wanted to have sex; colleges and universities offered opportunity, privacy and permission to this overly sexualised youth group. The hook-up culture emerged.33
Picture the scene. You’re 20-something, at a college or dorm party. Alcohol and recreational drugs flow. Boy sees girl. Girl sees boy. Spontaneously, consensually they find a room and engage in heavy kissing and/or petting, oral sex, anal sex, mutual masturbation or/and intercourse. Once they’ve cleaned up, they part, knowing there is no promise for more. It is an uncommitted sexual encounter between two people. This flies in the face of what we expect from women, the gender that is supposed to want emotional connection, romance, love, commitment and monogamy. Garcia and Reiber studied the motivation of 507 undergraduate male and female college students for hook-ups.34 Of these, 89% said their motivation for hook-ups was physical or sexual gratification. Yes, women love sex! Over