Listening to the drum circle outside my window until 3 AM last night (something that is a nightly occurrence at hippie schools until it gets too cold to light a joint with one hand and play the same rhythm over and over again with the other), I couldn’t help but think back on my last couple of years of college. While I’ve done a lot of cool academic things, met a lot of cool academic (and non-academic people), and learned important life lessons (protip: writing an important paper at 5 AM is just asking for typos), there is one thing I’ve done during my 4 years at school that I now kind of wish I hadn’t: hooked up with random dudes.

Once upon a time, I dated one guy for a long time. But instead of living happily ever after with me, he woke up one day and decided he wanted to “go through an asshole phase” (his words, not mine). After dumping me and proceeding to flirt and hook up with a lot of mutual friends, my once-love promptly forgot all about his sappy promises of “forever” and pretended we had never met.

You could say I was heartbroken.

Because I had always been “a good girl,” I hadn’t really dated around before the Ex, and was pretty flabbergasted at the entire dating process. Plus, I was grieving like some kind of Victorian widow in black and wasn’t thinking straight. Additionally, I was going out and drinking a little more — even though I was completely conscious of the fact that drinking a little more was going to make me cry a little more come hangover time. All of those factors combined meant that I decided my only life choice was to do what all my friends were doing: hooking up with random dudes because I could.

It took me a while to get a lay of the land (haha. Get it?), but after a few stumbles into emotional territory — haven’t you heard? Emotions don’t belong in hook-ups — I totally got the hang of it: meet a guy, make it obvious you’re easy going, be physical early, and then convince him to sleep with you after 1 or 2 dates. Guys are very easily convinced, and playing up my free-spiritedness made it easy for me to seem totally okay with everything. Even though, in the back of my wound-up mind, whenever the guy was snoring too loudly or fumbling around like an idiot, I would fear that I was not made for random hook-ups, I kept at it. Read More »