jake
cleland

Let me get Carrie Bradshaw on you for a second.

The casual hookup thing fascinates me. It’s a world that I’ve only recently breached. I use the term “breached” in the hope that it’ll evoke imagery of falling through a shimmery surface into a co-existing dimension. Casual hookups have always been around me, I’ve heard the whispers and the stories. Only in the past few months have I been privy, first-hand, to how it actually goes down.

So let’s get on the same page. You’re at a party. You see a hot girl and you chat to her for an hour or so. Then you make out, maybe it goes further or not. Then you wake up the next day with a headache and much less whiskey than the day before and continue on with your life. It sounds insane, but this is the fleeting romance we’ve reduced ourselves to - quite willingly, I should add. Much like losing my virginity, hooking up with someone at a party was something to aspire to. Then I did it and then did it some more, and I feel like I should be disgusted with myself, but all I can think of is that it was fun. That’s it. I could take it or leave it, quite frankly. I’ve come to the conclusion that we place wholly too much emphasis on sex and sexuality.

When I was about nine, it seemed like everybody was getting divorced or separated. My Mum, still married at the time, even remarked that it was “like an epidemic”. It was the first time I’d ever thought about the possibility of a marriage ending. This is the point of my life that, in my mind, I’ve pinpointed as the moment when I realised romance was dead. It seems to have given way to an era of impermanence and convenience, and I feel conflicted about that. I’m all for convenience (I once argued that abortion clinics should be used with the same frequency and guiltlessness as a 7-11), and though I wouldn’t consider myself a pragmatist, I try to be practical, though as a child who grew up fuelled by imagination, I’m also partial to romanticizing or idealising notions and concepts.

So, when I made the decision to have the “girlfriend talk” yesterday with this girl I’ve been seeing and got an “I don’t know”, I had to pause. First, I found her hesitation increased my desire for her significantly, though that was relatively easy to dismiss as human nature fucking with me. Second, I realised that I wasn’t hurt by her rejection, and rationalized that to the fact that I knew I didn’t like her that much, which I didn’t; We had very little in common and were on very different levels, intellectually. Then, I began wondering why I’d asked her The Question in the first place. That was the most confronting part of the session. I’d been acting, throughout my casual relationship with this girl, as if I didn’t want anything more than something non-serious. The truth is that’s true, at least for this girl, but I’d asked her out because what I really wanted was a connection with someone, and I was grasping at the most readily available possibility. The fact is, we’d make an awful couple, I know that. And so I realised that I’m not cut from the same cloth as other lotharios, that even though I’d been pretending (quite successfully) for a while that casual encounters were for me, they really weren’t.

Then I spent the rest of the day with another girl, someone I’ve been friends with for a while and that I’m really close to. You know those people that, even though they’re not your oldest friend, you tell them everything, even the things people don’t normally talk about? That’s how we were. Like *this* (imagine I am crossing my fingers). She was reading through messages on my phone, sitting in my chair, while I lay back on my bed watching her. “Personality Crisis” by New York Dolls played from the speakers on my MacBook. Sunshine flowed in from the giant window, basking us in its warm glow. I realised that’s exactly what I wanted the rest of my life to be like.

Now this girl, in particular, is taken by a pretty rad guy, and I wish them much happiness. Unfortunately I’m going to have to meet another billion people before I find someone like her again.

So maybe romance isn’t dead, but more like a Javan Rhino, at extreme risk of extinction. Maybe if we round up all the romantics and start breeding them in captivity, we can help save the species. That’s the romantic side to me speaking. The practical (some might say more mature, or logical) side believes that we should, in fact, continue this path towards eschewing the notion of courting and marriage, and return to a primeval time of fucking for pleasure and reproduction rather than miring it in Feelings. That seems kind of bleak to me, though.

This is where I mandatorily reference think Russell Brand is correct in his philosophy: Through sex, we make a connection divine and powerful. Unfortunately, we’re all so caught up on the aspect of being unemotional about sex that we forget that it doesn’t have to be emotionless. Say what you will about the biology of it, remove its dime-store novel metaphors, fine, but if you don’t feel something during sex, then you are one cold bastard.

So, for all the people considering recruiting a fuck buddy, here are my final thoughts: Choose someone you don’t have much to talk about with. Someone attractive without much emotional depth. Make sure it’s someone you don’t know very well, and most importantly, don’t want to know. This is why the casual hook-up thing evolved: So you can take advantage of someone physically despite knowing you’d be emotionally incompatible.

This concludes my column on unwarranted relationship advice for the week. x x