Sex Panther: Friends with Benefits

Friends with benefits. All of those words individually sound so nice. Friendship, that’s awesome. And benefits, who doesn’t want those? Yet somehow, often, these situations don’t end up working out as perfectly as people initially plan. At a place like Middlebury, with the “work hard, play hard, then work harder” environment we have, many people don’t have time for dating. But that certainly doesn’t mean that people don’t want to play, if you catch my drift. Yet, as many people realize by their second semester at Midd, random Saturday night hookups only get you so far. While the first one or two might feel really exhilarating, and afterwards you can tell people how “college” your Saturday night was, after a while it begins to lose its appeal. And also, nine times out of ten, the hook up isn’t really ever that great. It’s messy and drunk and awkward and the next morning you wake up as early as possible to avoid any and all conversation.

So many people find that a solution is friends with benefits. None of the pressure of dating, but all of the fun of hooking up with someone you know. But, trysts that are “No relationships, no emotions, just sex” as Mila Kunis so eloquently states in “Friends with Benefits,” are very hard to come by. In the end, there is always some sort of miscommunication.

I remember my first time trying out friends with benefits. Late into freshman year, I hooked up with this guy I knew, same friend group and what not. I knew he was a player, but he was hot, so I figured as long as I kept my expectations exceedingly low, there would be no issues. And then we hooked up again. And then we started hooking up on weekdays. Sober. In the afternoon. And, while all my girl friends insisted that this was totally the beginning of a relationship, I knew deep down that it wasn’t. We were friends, and we would talk before and after sex. But the purpose of the hang out was strictly sex. The only problem was that we were not on the same page at all. I figured we were hooking up exclusively; he didn’t. And it all blew up one night when we were at Atwater and I walked in on him hooking up with some random girl. After a night of drunken fighting, fight sex, and subsequent sober conversation we both realized how much we assumed about the other person’s impressions on the hookup. It’s amazing— you’d think that the fact that being friends and having sex without the pressures of dating would mean that you could be really open with what you want. But for some reason, in friends with benefits, people seem even more afraid to be honest. No one wants to be the one who’s more into the relationship, and yet no one wants to be a “douche” or a “bitch”, especially if you risk screwing up the friendship.

So what are Middkids to do? Dating can be great, but also time consuming and stressful, and for people looking for something less serious but still sexually gratifying, friends with benefits is there….a much better option than random DFMO’s (Dance Floor Make Outs) turned random one night stands. And they are. As long as they are done properly. After the first round failure with “sex friends”, I made a second attempt, and this one ended much less dramatically. We had been good friends for a while, and after hooking up a few times, just talked about how we wanted it to be very casual, and only when it was convenient for both of us. We also were much more open about what we wanted from sex, how we wanted to experiment and new things we wanted to try, which made it a lot more fun! And I think, the most important aspect to making “no strings attached” situations work is this: Not every day. Once a weekend, or every other weekend, definitely. But when you start getting into everyday hookups, you enter a dangerous gray territory. Only venture there if you really don’t care about getting hurt, or if you are a big risk taker. As I see it, friends with benefits should be a no-stress, no-nonsense hookup with someone you can trust. Don’t make it out to be more or less than it is.