One Night Only

Why some women prefer casual sex to dating

I read Bridget Jones's Diary at the age of sixteen, I thought I had found my salvation. By my senior year in high school, I felt like I had already had my share of crappy dating experiences, from the kid I dated freshman year who insisted on always wearing his varsity jacket when he had lettered in marching band, to the junior spring dance where I thought a secret admirer had bought me a ticket, only to publicly find out that it was an administrative glitch and I still owed $10 to get in. These experiences could have sucked, except, as I learned from all my pop-culture single role models, from the hapless Bridget to the outwardly glamorous and inwardly neurotic Sex and the City ladies, dates should suck. It seemed to me, that the more intelligent and self-possessed a chick-lit heroine, the less she can navigate traditional boy-meets-girl setups. But that's all part of her imperious charm, until she finds the guy who falls in love with her winsome neuroses.

I ended up going to an all-female college, which further complicated my ideas about dating. There, as confused and lonely freshmen, my suitemates and I bonded through our mutual obsession with the frat guys from a college twenty minutes away. We often drove there just to bump into one of them coming out of class. After doing this for several months, I scored a date with one of them. I saw this as proof that that my ridiculously over-the-top persistence was effective, and I wanted to prolong the situation. When we ended the evening at his apartment, I explained to him that I was a virgin. "But I really want you to fuck me," I said, as I wiggled out of my jeans, already imagining how jealous my suitemates would be. "Okay," he said, visibly weirded out. Read on >>