When I was 15, I got my first boyfriend. We fell in love, had sex for about three months, and then broke up.

I was devastated. Like many young women, I had internalized the idea that a “good girl” only ever sleeps with one guy. In a society where sex before marriage is no longer taboo, sex in a relationship that doesn’t last forever is still frowned upon.

Perhaps the breakup wouldn’t have been as hard to bear if I had been able to better differentiate between sex and love. It took me many years — and many partners — to learn that sex doesn’t have to equal love in order to be good.

Unfortunately, I did learn that sex needs to be free of emotional baggage in order to be good. On the rebound from my first relationship, I f#cked my way through my grief. Nothing ever satisfied, and each breakup left me feeling even emptier.

I eventually screwed myself, figuratively at least. I got into an emotionally abusive relationship that ended with some tough lessons a year and a half later. Basically, after 18 months of possessiveness and jealous accusations, I slapped my boyfriend, and he promptly turned me in for domestic violence. A moment’s bad decision cost me $650 in fines and restitution, and nine months of therapy. Read More »

“There’s a really hot guy in my Shakespeare class,” my girlfriend informed her roommate and me during lunch the other day. My first immediate thought was “Why have I not seen this guy?”. My second immediate thought was “I wonder exactly how hot he is.”

It didn’t really occur to me at all that I should have been jealous or angry or even concerned, and my girlfriend seemed just about as intrigued as I did when I told her about the tall, silent, fairly attractive guy in the corner of my Shakespeare class.

Ogling is a tricky little subject. The problem is that just because you now have a girl doesn’t mean every other gal and/or guy instantly ceases to be attractive. Hot people still exist (thank God), and there isn’t some magical on/off switch that makes you think your girl is the hottest one on the planet (not that this is a bad thing to think).

It also kind of complicates matters that ogling when you’re in a girl/girl relationship is one of the things that’s VERY different from the way it is in a girl/boy relationship. It depends all on your significant other’s personality, of course; I’m not gonna say that ALL girls are okay with ogling and ALL guys are against it. For me, though, I’ve never had a boyfriend who entirely appreciated me leaning to the side and checking out that one guy’s amazingly shaped ass or that girl’s near perfect rack. My girl now is totally okay with it. So what’s the big deal? Read More »

As if avoiding any sexual contact with my own co-workers wasn’t concern enough, now I’ve come to realize it’s best not to get freaky with anyone‘s co-worker.

Explanation:

My friend, I’ll call her “Alyssa”, works in finance. So obviously, all of her co-workers are hot men. She’s kept things platonic there since she’s smart and now these cute money-makers are her pals. This means we all hang out on a semi-regular bar-going basis, thus allowing male/female attraction to develop.

Now my roommate, “Kelly”, has had her eye on one of these fellows for a while, and the two of them have been flirting for months. So it was only a matter of time before they wound up in bed together.

I mean, I wasn’t surprised. But Alyssa, well, she was kind of pissed. Read More »

Jealousy is a bitch.

You can’t deny that at times your blood starts to boil when you see another guy checking out your beautiful lady. Luckily, you aren’t alone. Jealousy is a natural human emotion. Merriam-Webster likes to define it as “being threatened by and/or hostile toward a rival.”

Acting out on jealousy tendencies is often considered a bad thing. But is it really so terrible to express those feelings? Read More »

Sooner or later, your boyfriend will turn into your ex.So the question becomes: Can you stay friends with the person who once held you when your goldfish died?

Although there is no one answer to a question that has plagued couples (and their new mates) for centuries, there are a few guidelines that can make a confusing time a little easier to deal with.

Most importantly, the circumstances that contributed to the break-up can offer a clue. For most couples who parted on (relatively) civil terms, maintaining a close friendship afterwards only means that one of you started playing for the other team (read: not very common).

On the other hand, staying friend-ly is only a natural progression of a once-intimate relationship. Read More »

“You have really pretty eyes. I’ve told you that before. You do.”

He leans over the bar and smiles at me, and being the friendly girl that I am, I smile back. Then I turn away and start talking to someone else in our group, while he signals the bartender for another drink. I make a mental note to find a way to move soon, because drinking always makes him super “friendly”.

Do you have one of these guys in your life? The one who always seems to have a girlfriend, but flirts with you on a constant basis? Maybe you two have hooked up in the past, maybe you’ve never actually done anything with him, but either way, he’s a friend who continually fuzzes up the dynamitic you two share. Someone who seems to enjoy looking into your eyes and telling you all the things a boyfriend should, walking the line between being friendly and holding on a little too long until Sensible You pulls away.

These guys aren’t always Players or smooth talkers, and sometimes even make real great friends in the daylight, but their genetic make-up seems to make it impossible for them to play it completely platonic. If you’ve hooked up with them before, things become even stranger, because even though you’ve moved on, he acts like he never got the memo—or if he did, only read half of it. Read More »

I’ve always been better friends with guys. I don’t know if it’s because I grew up with three brothers, or what, but I always seem to get along with them better.

Girls to me are just vicious. Sometimes it’s hard for me to deal with the constant talking behind each other’s backs, the judgment passed on everything from hairstyles to clothing—I need to retreat back to my boys and take a deep breath.

This doesn’t mean that I don’t have those same mean girl tendencies, or that I don’t have close girl friends. I will definitely make fun of someone’s outfit that I find…outrageous. But I think the biggest clue that a girl is a bitch is when she doesn’t have any girl friends—she’s obviously screwed over a lot of people, or has screwed a lot of people’s boyfriends. Read More »

It really is the ideal situation for a college-aged guy. Being able to hook up with a friend on a consistent basis, without having to deal with all the annoyances that come with a relationship? Sign me up! Being permitted to hit the bars to look for a new hook-up, but knowing you can always call up your friend if all else fails? That’s solid gold!

Yes, having a friend with benefits really is an amazing luxury in college. But is a true FWB situation really feasible? Not so much.

Far too often, these types of relationships begin very innocently. You know, with a couple of shots of the Friz Vodka, and maybe a beer or two (ok, maybe not so innocently). Before you know it, you and your friend are getting hot and heavy, rolling between the sheets, and individually thinking about whether or not you want to do it again. Of course you want to do it again. You’re getting ass from a guy that you’re friends with. A guy you obviously like and feel comfortable around. Read More »

Every relationship is full of traps and pitfalls, and the ones that most often persevere are the ones that feature open communication and an absence of secrets. Oh yeah… it also helps if the guy doesn’t have a best girl friend, who very well may be lying in the weeds, just waiting for your relationship to falter.

Although almost no one ever agrees with me when I say this, I maintain that it’s nearly impossible for guys and girls to be very close friends without sex getting in the way at some point. Obviously, there are exceptions to this, such as if significant others are involved and all three or four people are friends, or if the guy or girl is hideously unattractive.

But generally speaking, sex always gets in the way. In my life, I have three very good girl friends, and I’ve hooked up with all of them at one point or another. I believe the only way we’ve been able to maintain these friendships is that we found a way to long ago release the sexual tensions between us and move past that. But believe you me, despite the fact that my physical relationships with these girls had long since ceased, my old girlfriend was forever wary of my friends. Read More »