Hooking Up Sober

You know that one person you’ve hooked up with so many times you can’t even count it on your fingers anymore? But you two are not, never have been and most certainly never will be anything serious. It’s the person you call at 1 a.m. when you’re in the mood and no one else is around. It’s the person who you sleep with in between relationships. You’re a boomerang and this person is the one you just keep coming back to.

But you’re not drawn to them. Because they’re somehow not the tragic love of your life that you can’t seem to let go of. In fact, chances are they’re the exact opposite. You don’t like this person — like, at all. Otherwise, you two probably would be together. The fact is, they probably don’t want to be with you either. No, this hook-up buddy of yours does not derive from a feeling of unrequited love or a lack of closure — it’s pure convenience, accessibility and maybe just a way to fend off boredom.

So, after you’ve gone through a tough break up, they’re the perfect no-emotions way to get over your old flame — by getting under this old lame. Or the party you’re at is starting to resemble Noah’s Arc and you’re the only one not paired off, so you give this person a call. Or, it would just take too much effort to flirt with and seduce someone else, and this one is a total layup.

Sure, all of those are valid reasons. But I think it’s more than that. The reason we’re so quick to revert back to an old hook up instead of to fool around with someone new is that, by doing so, we don’t have to increase our number. We don’t have to add another name to that list we keep in our iPhone notes.  We go back to the same utterly vanilla hook up again and again because we get to have sex without having to add on another sexual partner.

I believe that there is still something inside of us that hates the idea of that number getting higher and higher. We want to say it doesn’t matter. But we can’t help that feeling we get when asked, “what’s your number” and the answer is more than we’d like to admit.

It’s a funny dichotomy, because at the same time we don’t want to rack up umpteenth partners, but we want to be having as much sex as we can. We want to walk into a hook up and totally wow in bed with all kinds of tricks, but we don’t want to admit (even to ourselves sometimes) that we’ve gotten our practice from a slightly large sampling of people.

As sexually liberal as we might think we are, sex is still a big deal. We may like to think that sex can be casual, and while in many ways it can be, it still means something.  Think about it — isn’t it the first question you ask a friend when they tell you they hooked up with someone? “Did you guys have sex?”  If they didn’t it’s kind of like, “oh no biggie,” but if they did, it’s monumental. The first time you have sex with someone, not only do you add one to your number, but your relationship to that person changes. For the rest of your life, even if you never see them again, they will always be a your sexual partner.

So, by having sex with someone you’ve already had sex with, you’re avoiding all of the inherent side effects of the hook up. Nothing changes. It’s the easiest way to satisfy one of our most basic desires without any of the residual feelings or changes. You’ve been there done that, literally, so what’s the harm in doing it again? Sometimes, we don’t want sex to mean as much as it does, and if you’ve done something once it’s less of an event to do it again.

We may not even realize it as we’re walking back to that person’s room again (and noticing that their wall decorations haven’t changed since freshman year). At that moment, we may be wondering why we are doing this again. But in the morning, when we wake up feeling pretty good from our night of pleasure and don’t have to worry about having another person on campus we feel slightly awkward running into at a meal, it makes perfect sense why we went back, why we’ll probably go back again and maybe even again.