The last time I hooked up, I had an amazing time. She was an acquaintance in graduate school. We ran into each other at the school’s annual dance. The subsidized alcohol had us feeling libidinous, and it helped that we both looked great. I probably said something smooth like, “I’m snagging an Uber home. Do you want to see my…neighborhood?”
The sex was fantastic, but the good time did not last. Afterwards, she expressed interest in being more than “friends.” She said something that was actually smooth, “Now that we’ve been naked together, maybe we could snag lunch?”
But I had no desire for lunch. I did not even want to repeat the night. All I wanted was a hookup. So, I responded, “No, I’m good…haha!”
The night devolved from there. She ended up walking home alone even though I offered her a ride. It was painful.
Sitting in my bed alone after she left, I felt ashamed. What had I done? How had I made her feel? I considered myself an ally of women’s empowerment, but did I just show who I really was?
It is ironic to learn that, in a sex-crazed society, Americans are doing a poor job of having sex. Nearly one in three American adult men has not “done the deed” in the last year, a figure that has nearly tripled since 2008.
The current sex-drought has many market-based causes. Evidence suggests widespread porn consumption decreases libido, social media leaves us disconnected from real relationships, and television entices partners to spend precious free time watching Netflix rather than “chilling” while Netflix just happens to be on. Sex is more present than ever on screens, but less present than ever in bedrooms.
Casting itself as part of the solution, hook-up culture tries to solve for scarcity by freeing the West of its antiquated past. By jettisoning outdated notions of patience, commitment, and “lunch,” hookups promise to provide plentiful pleasure with a diverse array of partners.
There is some truth to this. I confess that, when I was in the hookup scene, I had a few good romps in the proverbial hay. Sex became like exercise—regular, functional, and something I did for myself.
The fact that I felt ashamed after many of the “romps” flummoxed me. I believed in hooking up. So I considered the burgeoning desires I felt before sex to be natural, but the emotional hangovers after somehow were not. Sex was about itself. Any scent of a wider purpose that I may have been missing was dismissed as an artifact of some primitive Christian past. Through discussions about sex-positivity and raw repetition, I tried to train myself out of it.
Culture critic Magdalene Taylor writes that many of the men who have not had sex in the last year say that their sexlessness is “the one component” upon which the overall problem of their loneliness hinges. For them, sexlessness reveals something that my own comparative prosperity had blinded me toward. Namely, that sex can be about so much more than itself.
Some part of me always suspected these men had a point. Even when I was my most hookup-focused, sex still offered more than pleasure. Sex made me feel attractive, wanted, and it allowed for a vulnerability to admit that I wanted someone else. Sex was about passion, surrendering control, breaking lamps or else doing weird shit in animalistic abandon.
Whether I admitted it or not, sex was also about love. Or, at least in the moments when I was captivated in the arms of a stranger, sex still gestured toward an imitation of love that the lonely nights after left in stark contrast.
Comparing my life to the men Taylor interviewed, I recognize that, though our sexual experiences were inverted, we shared in a similar sense of loneliness and inadequacy. Their sexlessness left them hoping that sex was the solution. But my having obtained that “solution” left me with the naked understanding that they were wrong. Sex was not the answer. At least my choice to divorce sex from the love it shadowed left me feeling like them—lonely, ashamed, and wondering if the problem was a lack of even more sex.
One Friday night, a couple of years ago, a friend invited me to play board games with him and some buddies instead of doing my usual weekend routine. I decided to go.
The group was odd. It was mostly nerdy men who belonged to that benighted class that Taylor could have interviewed. Cast into each other’s fellowship by the misfortune of not fitting in elsewhere, we had a good time together.
Between game-related cries of “Yahtzee” or “two words,” the more courageous among us began to open up. What began in the first weeks as tepid admissions masked in male bravado—“is anybody else pretty damn lonely”—grew into brave examples of vulnerability: “I am lonely,” “I hope you like spending time with me,” and even “I love you.”
Though awkward at first, the result was worth the price. Before game nights, my closest connections were with my “exercise” partners. After becoming a regular, I built deep friendships with caring men who removed the sense of loneliness that had plagued me and helped me to develop a way of life that never left me feeling ashamed.
The greatest miracle was that, with all the emotional connection I gained, my sex drive decreased. What I once thought was an insatiable geyser of wild passion—to a more significant degree than I could have imagined—turned out to be a displaced and juvenile desire for something more. I didn’t know that before. I was too impatient. But with love in my life, though not sexual, I learned that sex was not what I was craving back when I was having it.
Today, I am a proud member of the thirty percent of men who have not had sex in the last year. For whatever it is worth, I am also happier. I have slowed down and cultivated patience.
Patience, it turns out, is an attractive trait. The qualities I most associate with beauty—close friendships, a healthy body, a clean apartment—require some measure of discipline. Hooking up, in contrast, only requires enough patience to score for one night.
Looking back at the arc of my journey, I wonder how much hookup culture has contributed to America’s sexual drought. Just like porn, social media, and television, it is a hurried imitation of something true without being true itself. It made me uglier. And I suspect that its valorization normalizes an impatience that, at some level, makes us all uglier.
Now, my life is different. I have slowed down. I have learned that I don’t need sex, but I do need love. Rather than trying to get laid, I call—not text—my friends. I tell my male buddies that I care about them. I clean my apartment. I work out. I go to game night. Sex may return to my life one day. But love has arrived already.
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This Post is republished on Medium.
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Photo credit: iStock
