I Would Never Seriously Date the Guys I’m Hooking Up With. But What I Want Instead Scares Them Away.

How to Do It It could be so simple. Photo illustration by Slate. Photo by AntonioDiaz/Adobe Stock. Sign up for the Slatest to get the most insightful analysis, criticism, and advice out there, delivered to your inbox daily. How to Do It is Slate’s sex advice column. Have a question? Send it to Jessica and Rich here. It’s anonymous! Dear How to Do It, I am a straight woman in my early 30s, and I’ve had terrible luck with dating. It’s been a few years of lackluster first dates that lead to a handful of second dates and nothing more. I’ve accepted that I need a break from it all, because it’s really not so fun anymore. But I have needs! In between all the earnest dating, I’ve also been hooking up here and there and have managed to find a few guys who are willing to keep up a consistent friends-with-benefits relationship. The problem is that I’m finding men can’t seem to wrap their heads around the “friend” part. I long for a long-term hookup with someone who I can also just grab a casual meal with, chat like a pal with, or do a load of laundry at their place when I stay over the night (the struggles of no in-unit laundry). But so many of the men seem terrified that being friendly and showing someone care will automatically mean a romantic relationship or catching feelings. These are not dudes I would seriously date! But I still respect and like them as people. Is there a way to reassure them that, “Hey, if you treat me like your buddy, I promise I won’t fall in love with you,” or otherwise find someone who wants this kind of thing too? It could be so simple. —I Don’t Bite I Swear Please keep questions short (<150 words), and don‘t submit the same question to multiple columns. We are unable to edit or remove questions after publication. Use pseudonyms to maintain anonymity. Your submission may be used in other Slate advice columns and may be edited for publication. Jessica Stoya: Outside of the kind of really close friends where there’s a depth of emotional intimacy that equals or even eclipses that with most romantic partners, how often do we do loads of laundry at people’s places when we sleep over with buddies? Rich Juzwiak: I never do. The laundry thing struck me as strangely intimate, like a new kind of intimacy unlocked. I never thought about it before this. It seems like the letter writer wants a boyfriend. What she wants is so specific that it’s really, really difficult to get this kind of dynamic. She’s creating such a grand plan, but I don’t think that you can actually orchestrate this. I think that going into it this way, where you’re forming a sexual connection and then hoping a friendship happens, is a much tougher way to do it than when you’re already friends and have that bedrock, and have now decided to sleep together. So that’s one thing you might want to look at in terms of the procedure. This letter reminds me of just a hyper-specific dating profile in an app where you’re left thinking, yeah, it sounds great if that could happen, but there are so many different things that need to align for this to happen that it sounds, at minimum, like just the trial and error of looking for it is going to be frustrating. Jessica: Well, it reminds me of people who are clients at a dungeon or who are ordering custom videos from the fan site platform folks, specifically the small subcategory that come in with a five-page single-spaced 10-point type, blow-by-blow list of everything they want. And then if that’s not 100 percent delivered, they’re really disappointed. People sometimes want this precise type of interaction that they have imagined in extreme detail. But that’s not friendship, dating, friends with benefits, or romance. It’s none of those things because all of them involve a back-and-forth. Is it objectification? Rich: It’s so idealistic in a way that it’s kind of objectifying because it doesn’t actually contend with the reality of how this often works. In my experience, with friends with benefits, you’re nice to each other on the way in and out of the apartment when you’re going to have sex there. The friend part is secondary within these structures. The benefits are the whole reason for the friendship. It’s not the other way around, really. So, by friend, that can often mean a really light version of the word. In every experience that I’ve had with friends with benefits, yes, maybe we do hang out, but that almost always has to do with sex. That’s the priority; that’s what binds us, and then everything else is secondary. We can watch a movie, hang out, get something to eat, sure, but we’re having sex. Jessica: Or it’s a situation like you were describing earlier, when there is a friendship first, and then maybe hooking up gets added. This is my friend, and sometimes we have sex. Maybe that develops into a serious relationship. Maybe one of the people gets in a serious relationship with someone else, and then the sex stops, and you remain friends. But also across my entire lifetime, I can think of only a few friends where I would’ve shown up with a basket of laundry and slept over while my laundry was going through their machine, unless I was visiting where they live and staying with them for a couple weeks. Rich: Also, with the scenario that this writer paints, I think a lot of people would find it difficult, me included, discerning at a certain point, OK, how are we not seriously dating? If you want all this and you’re doing your laundry at my place and you want to be friends and you want to be having sex, what is the difference? Then it seems completely semantic. We’re not seriously dating or dating, period, because I said so. Jessica: I’m so curious what she means by seriously dating. And I’m wondering if what she means, as a straight woman in her early 30s, who we can probably safely assume comes from the Anglophone world, by “I would not seriously date these dudes,” is actually, “I would not marry them, have shared property, procreate with them,” which is really good to be extremely cautious about. But generally speaking, regardless of gender or orientation, most people in the world, like Rich and I, would view what the letter writing is describing as seriously dating.So of course these men are like, “Something doesn’t add up. I don’t think you actually want what you’re saying you want.” Rich: Yes. And there is already the stigma that I think has reduced, that When Harry Met Sally is premised on, regarding male and female friendships. I guess that movie was kind of about whether they could be friends without having sex. But I think it becomes even more precarious when you add sex into it and you say, “We’re just friends, and we’re keeping at this level.” It’s like doing a hollow body hold. The relationship’s abs need to be tightened the whole time because we have these constraints on it. It seems like a hard thing to pull off for anyone. Jessica: For most humans, when we are casually sharing meals, having chats with pals, doing domestic chores together, or are in each other’s spaces, sleeping over and having sex, if this is more than a couple of times a year, someone is probably going to develop feelings. Rich: Kind of hard not to. And you can tell yourself that you won’t. I do really well with self-administered boundaries, but the human heart cannot be contained. It’s not like an eating schedule. You know what I mean? It’s not just behavior that you’re saying, “This is what I’m going to do, and this is what I’m not going to do.” It’s far messier and more ephemeral and way more difficult to control when you get into the realm of emotions, which is what you’re stoking with this. But then we’re talking about friendship, which is an emotional experience. It’s like a recipe that needs to be cooked absolutely perfectly or something’s going to go awry. Good luck finding a sous-chef for this one. Jessica: It often is not entirely about the fear of the straight woman catching feelings and wanting to be a girlfriend. There’s quite often some amount of the men knowing that if we’re engaging in these behaviors at that frequency, I might catch feelings. And then if you really mean it, you wouldn’t seriously date me, whatever that means, I’m going to get my heart hurt. Rich: Yes. It’s also the same risk for somebody that you’re friends with that you start sleeping with. Then automatically that might feel like a more complicated situation. Even if we’re having fun and it makes total sense to do this, just adding the sex into an already kind of emotional situation can overburden them regardless of gender. So I don’t really know what this person wants other than a boyfriend in anything but name. Jessica: That can also kind of be fine, right? If you’re pitching it clearly as I would like to play house for one to four years without any significant commitment that is difficult to disentangle myself from. Are you up for that? Someone can look at that and comprehend and consent. But that’s also not simple. I really want to know where this statement, “It could be so simple,” is coming from, because it’s either a path for her to debunk this belief she currently holds, or she knows someone who does this and it is simple for them. If they’re a man, do it with them. If they’re a straight woman, ask them for tips because obviously she’s got something figured out that neither of us has extensive experience with. Rich: What is your model? Is this just an ideal? Is this a whim? Because if so, then we’re looking at a kind of fantasy scenario that exists within the realm of human possibility, but it seems rare and very hard to assemble. But if there is some kind of reality that this belief is tethered to, investigate that. And you know what? Maybe send them our way. I would love to talk to somebody who pulled this off. I would love to have this person in my Rolodex as an expert. Jessica: Also, if people feel moved to write to us about this with their experiences, just take a beat and think it through. Are you sure it was so simple? Maybe it was simple for you, but not for the other person. More Advice From Slate My husband recently found out I’ve been having an affair with my boss. Well, sort of. He walked into my office and saw me kiss my boss goodbye. My husband didn’t really discuss it at the time. But now a few weeks have gone by, and we’re not talking to each other. He wants me to shower when I get home—presumably because he thinks I’ve been having sex at work—but nothing could be further from the truth… Advice Sex