Op-Ed
Friends Gone Wild
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Bedroom Eyes
November 15, 2007 - 1:00amIf you’re anything like me, all of your sexual partners can be separated into fairly distinct categories: boyfriends/girlfriends, emotion-free steady hookups, one-night stands and ... disasters. Not the kind of disasters that involve secret babies or vaginal creams, but the kind of disasters that are — I can’t believe I’m even going here — of the emotional variety.
And do you know what kind of sexual partners fall squarely and indisputably into that delicious little “disaster” group every time? Friends with benefits.
Look, people. It’s like Uggs. I don’t know why, despite everything we know instinctually, we all keep pulling out our Uggs season after season trying to pretend that they’re still in style. We’re stomping around fully aware that the girl sitting two rows down from us in lecture clearly looks like a dumbass in her pink ones, but we somehow believe the chestnut-hued Fuggs on our feet are the exception to all rules — we can pull them off. But no. We can’t. It seems like we’re looking at friends with benefits in the same way: we know it doesn’t work for anyone else, but we seem to think we can somehow beat the system. Our situation is different.
Before I unleash my anecdotes and advice on you, I’ll attempt to characterize the Friend with Benefits arrangement (even though it seems to be the most historically indefinable, hazy relationship between two people ever). I would define a “friend” as a person with whom you share a relationship that you give a crap about. A “friend with benefits,” then, is a friend whom you also happen to be having sex with. It seems like a kickass deal, doesn’t it? Sex with someone who cares about you is lovely, especially without the crap pitfalls and expectations of a committed relationship — it seems like it would be convenient and low-maintenance.
You know what else seems like it would be convenient and low-maintenance? Not showering for the rest of my life. Does that mean I should do it? No.
Adding sex to a perfectly good, functional friendship is just asking for some kind of emotional disaster — someone’s gonna get attached. And if someone doesn’t get attached, you’re both going to worry that one of you is going to get attached and then there’s stress. And avoiding stress was the whole reason you got into this hot little FWB relationship in the first place, right?
Even a journal article in the Archives of Sexual Behavior will back me up on this. According to a study of 125 Michigan State University students conducted by Melissa A. Bisson and Timothy R. Levine, 60 percent reported engaging in some kind of friends with benefits arrangement. According to a New York Times article published about the same study (Oct 2., 2007), “People got into these relationships because they didn’t want commitment. It was perceived as a safe relationship, at least at first. But also that there was this growing fear that the one person would become more attracted than the other.”
There are only a few possible endings to the friends with benefits fairy tale, so if you’re boofing your friend, listen up. In the scenario that you have romantic feelings that you suspect are unreciprocated, the study found only 1 in 10 of these FWB arrangements ended in all-out romance. Translation: abort your mission. In the situation where neither one of you has feelings for the other (for realsies) consider this: the first person to cut things off and enter an actual relationship with someone else is kind of going to piss the other one off. And once you go down the friends with benefits road, it’s hard to turn around — one in four FWB participants in the study stopped the sex and the friendship.
I’ve had a couple of these so-called friends with benefits. They’ve turned out about as well as you might imagine, considering I’m writing a column about how fiercely FWB relationships suck. One was with my best guy friend in the whole world: I’d just gone through a really, really shitty breakup and he was right there beside me whenever I needed him, but he was also, uh, right there inside me sometimes too.
And we never, ever talked about it; it was bizarre. I’d have trusted the kid with the lives of the children I hope I will never have and I’d tell the boy my deepest, darkest grossest secrets, but the fact that we sometimes had sex was, apparently, not to be addressed. Thus, I didn’t know how he felt about whatever was going on between us, and he didn’t know whether I felt that our intercourse was linked to romance. But once I slept with someone else, my friend got hurt and we pretty much stopped talking for a long time. Although I still respect him and care about him, we are now the type of friends who text each other about how we should grab lunch sometime but sort of never do. The sex went — and the friendship went with it.
Later, I was in a friends with benefits relationship with a buddy of mine who I was damn near in love with (he, unfortunately, saw me as more of a friend than a girlfriendy-thing, but we slept together frequently anyway because I was 95 percent certain that the sex would make him fall in love with me, too). He was leaving my apartment after a fairly awesome sack session and instead of leaning in to kiss me goodbye, he high-fived me. A little part of me died.
So, what the hell? Are our sexual options limited only to people we’re in committed romantic relationships with and to one-night stands? Oh, no no. I cannot emphasize this enough: a friend with benefits and a, uh, “fun” buddy are entirely different affairs.
A “fun” buddy (I’m trying to chill with the profanity) is someone who you’ve slept with more than once where emotion is a non-factor in the equation — say, for instance, you’re super attracted to some dude, but his personality is a total bummer or you have no interest in any type of relationship with anyone. A “fun” buddy arrangement works out quite nicely in a situation where the attraction is only skin-deep (hey, some people just kind of suck outside of bed) as long as you are the type of person who is capable of separating sex from emotion. Some feel that this ability to remove sentiment from sex is a sign of maturity; some see it as a sign of immaturity. I see it as a sign that I should embrace the opportunity to sleep with the attractive dude who is my year at my small school within Cornell (hint: the first syllable of my college is the same as what some people call me at the bars) without worrying about any emotions affecting me — aside from the emotions I’d call “horror” and “bewilderment” that I experienced when he came and sat right next to me the morning before class after we first slept together. Don’t do that.
Things to take away from this: throwing sex into a friendship (one in which you care about the person and value their presence in your life and cell phone) is a bad call. Peace out of whatever FWB you’re in immediately before the emotional fallout becomes unmanageable. If you’re still dying for the type of non-relationship-y friend that you care about, that satisfies your sexual needs, won’t ever let you down and won’t act all awkward, I strongly suggest a vibrator.
Jenna B. is a senior. She can be contacted at opinion@cornellsun.com. Bedroom Eyes appears alternate Thursdays.
" Some feel that this
" Some feel that this ability to remove sentiment from sex is a sign of maturity; some see it as a sign of immaturity."
Seeing that we're taught to connect to two early on, it takes a great deal of maturity to realize that the two are not one and the same.
Plus it's more practical to separate the two. We only have so much emotional energy and we can't spend it all on worrying about our hookups.
"Fun"-buddies.
There are, in my experience, two types of "fun-buddies." The first is the aforementioned "good lay, bad personality," and, as long as that buddy doesn't take social awkwardness to a new level and actually try to attach strings to the purely sexual act, thus setting him or herself up for rejection, those are probably the consistent hookups with the lowest casualty rate.
However, the second, riskier type of buddy, is the individual for whom you feel nothing but contempt or nausea in every arena except the physical. In other words, you screw someone you hate. There is no chance that you would grow romantically attached to this type, so in that sense you are safe, but the existence of this buddy, or, worse, a pattern of these buddies, should be a red flag. Maybe the sex is just hotter when it's backed by extra aggression, or maybe you feel triumphant that you could whittle the detestable creature down into your own personal pleasure stick, but the cold, hard truth is that the chance that this partner holds you with any kind of respect is pretty slim. I'm all for the separation of the physical and the emotional, but this kind of sex is not devoid of emotion; rather, it is brimming with anger and negativity. Furthermore, we all can agree that make-up sex is often angry and obviously fantastic, but it is ultimately about making up, not tearing someone down; sex should be joyful, not hateful.
Just some words of wisdom from someone who had to break a "fun"-enemy habit.
P.S. JB thank you for being insightful, real, and serving CU undergrads some tough love.