Sex + Alcohol = Awkward.

No matter who you are, no matter what you wear or how many scented candles you light, the first time you and that hot piece of ass sleep together is gonna be awkward. Just a festival of oops and oh! and huh?

By Jess

I’m sure it’ll be awesome too. Hot. Dreamy. All that. But it’s also gonna be clumsy. Sure, you’ve done it before, but not with this person. You don’t know what they’re like. Maybe you don’t even know what they’re like under those clothes. They could have their own way of doing things. Their own homemade positions. Inclinations. Rhythms. One minute it’s familiar territory and the next you’re hanging upside down with chocolate sauce all over you and its cool and everything but also really confusing.

No one likes uncomfortable situations. Me especially. I can spy an unwieldy circumstance from miles away, and once spotted, it’s impossible to make me deal with it. Strange people with funny breathing problems? I turn and run. Crazy couple having a giant fight in the middle of the sidewalk? I take a detour. A good friend trying to squeeze into a tube top that makes her armpit fat goosh out everywhere? I look away—and then tell her to change with my eyes closed.

Because of this aberrance, I have found myself more than once trying to temper a possible ‘first sexcapade’ with a little liquid courage. Some vodka and cranberry to ease the nerves. Rum and coke to stop my stupid heart from freaking out. A Long Island Iced Tea to make me lose all of my heavily built-up anxieties. When you’re drunk, or even just halfway there, the event is hardly as big as it was when you thought about it sober. You feel free, wild, kinda pornstar-ish, ready to deal with whatever weird position or fetish comes your way. Nothing is weird when you’re buzzed.

(Case in point: One time, on my way home from a bar at 2 AM, I saw an old man doing what I think was maybe the Charleston down third Avenue. Instead of stopping to point and stare, my friends and I joined him. We freaked him out. The crazy guy. Who was dancing down the street. We freaked him out.)

Nothing is weird when you’re buzzed. But nothing is completely clear either. Details are never crystal in the morning, and sometimes emotions get wacky. Would you really have cried if you hadn’t had all that Budwiser sloshing around in your stomach? Why’d you feel kinda disconnected while looking into eyes that usually make you go jello in the knees? And afterwards, what were they really thinking? How come you can’t remember that well?

It honestly isn’t a party if there isn’t alcohol around someplace, and if it’s there, and known to make things easier, the ratio of how many of us stumble full speed into drunken hook-ups is, I think, pretty high. In most circles, it’s hardly taboo to discuss ‘last night’ over French toast and coffee, even if ‘last night’ was with someone you didn’t know too well.

Obviously, this trend is going nowhere, and who’s to say how horrible it really is, but my question is; why? Why hook up with someone when you’re wasted, especially if it’s someone you sorta kinda find a way to covertly stalk on a daily basis? I know the easy answers: sex is fun. College is stressful and sometimes we just want to let ourselves go. Who has the energy to be responsible all the time? I just can’t say no to hotness.

Sure. I hear you. I’m there. But letting alcohol dictate what we do in the bedroom can sometimes mess things up, and at the very worst, allow not-so-good situations to arise. A lot of us feel like it’s some kind of collegiate right of passage, that we’re not cool unless we’ve had a least one crazily trashed hook-up. That argument starts to wilt when I think about the fact that most of these ‘events’ aren’t even that memorable. Sometimes they’re just plain horrible. Annoying. Awkward.

Ah yes. We’ve come full circle.

In out attempt to make sex less uncomfortable, we’re shooting ourselves in our preverbal feet and actually making it more so. Being sober and having a few moments of hey, there, that’s going where?! might just outweigh an entire night of drunken thrashing and a disappointed, hungover morning.

Now, I’m not your mother, pretties, but I do want you to have fun in the bedroom. And sometimes, opening our eyes and being there completely, without the aid of Jack, The Captain, or Jim, can lead to something pretty amazing.

…Besides, can you do that behind-the-head-pretzel twist that always drives ‘em wild if you’re not fully concentrated?

Exactly.