The cost of free love, worth of hook-ups

By: Rose Hansen

Posted: 9/30/08

In medieval times, ladies threw their handkerchiefs to knights as a symbol of love. In "Pretty Woman," Richard Gere used roses. You don't have to look hard to find insurmountable evidence of that mysterious, elusive emotion. However, our generation's ideas about love, sex, and relationships have evolved far from Romeo and Juliet. We live in a culture that encourages equality between women and men, including the right to celebrate sex freely. We don't date. We don't wait for guys to open doors. Welcome to the "hook-up" culture. Gone are the expectations of emotional love and support from the opposite sex just because you're having sex with them.

There are two routes to take if you participate in the hook-up culture. You can have one-night stands or a casual sex relationship. Is this good? There are certainly enough people out there who do it. Casual sex relationships are not one-night stands and last over a period of time. They're common between roommates, co-workers, long-time friends, and exes. Every story is different.

In my story, he's handsome, charming, and hard to resist. The attraction was mutual. At first, being casual seemed like the safe way to get what we wanted without being confined to a relationship. This required putting aside the fact that human beings aren't just bodies, but vessels holding everything that makes us us: our talents, our stories, our hearts. Nonetheless, I was well versed in safe sex and went the distance to keep my body safe, despite the inability to ensure that the sex, as a whole, was ever truly safe. There's no device to protect what isn't physical. Little was discussed about ground rules, and defining the limits was a taxing process that centered around sex, our glue, our fix-it-all.

In the beginning, the sex was mind-blowing. And without responsibilities! Strictly casual. Those were the terms. After all, good sex is rare and a hell of an experience. Who am I to turn it down?

As the months passed, I kept waiting for the buzz to wear off, but it didn't. I started to wonder, why is sex with this individual so good? Ask most women, and they'll tell you that the best sex is emotional sex. Over time, I learned that the emotion doesn't have to be love.

Inevitably, trouble brewed when we were pushed outside of our emotional limits. Sex is an intimate act, but in a casual relationship, intimacy is not allowed. Now, all sorts of questions arise. Is it okay to spoon? What's an appropriate time to go home? As friends who have sex, how is that different from a normal relationship? Do you want to meet my friends? Who was that on the phone?

Power games, jealousy, frustration, anger - these were the emotions that made the sex so intense. And underneath it all was fear. Was I ready for a relationship? Was he? No, we said. No. There's so much more to lose when you willingly put your emotions at stake and slap a title onto it. It's easier to ask for nothing, expect nothing, and know there's no logical reason to ever feel disappointed.

But emotions aren't logical when you're having sex with the same person night after night. I didn't get involved with him under the illusion that it would turn into something more, but pillow talk is still hard to dismiss. The person you're sleeping with becomes the person you want to sleep next to. Every action and word adds to the looming mountain of testimony that proves how tricky and multi-faceted casual sex becomes.

How does a casual relationship end if neither person meets someone else? That's where I am now. Even the bad emotions have withered because there's no purpose for their existence. There's no forward movement together. The sex becomes less and less satisfying because afterwards, there's nothing there to support it.

There's a fable of a casual relationship that bloomed into true, emotional love, but in my case, the only one who got emotional was me, and that emotion was nothing like love, but instead a combination of dissolution and sadness.

Every relationship you ever invest in - whether its marriage, casual sex, or just friendship - is hard. While a casual relationship sounds ideal, particularly for people our age, it is anything but casual because people are incredibly complicated and sex itself is not a casual event. It's capable of stirring deep emotions, and can come with enormous consequences.

Proponents of free love got it all wrong. We're not built to have consistent casual sex. Look hard enough and you'll find people who do it, but I haven't met anyone totally satisfied with it. When you're intimate with someone without requiring intimacy, they're never obliged to give you anything, including the reassurance that you are valued. While valuing each other didn't matter to me in the beginning, it matters enormously now. I've trusted my naked body with his hands only to realize that he doesn't want or appreciate what it holds: me.

I'm in a casual relationship, and there are no roses or white knights at my door.