Apr 12
It has been eleven days since my last post – a fairly worthless one at that – so I am long overdue for an obnoxiously over-serious rant. There have been a couple topics floating around lately, but in the shower a few minutes ago something new popped into my head. I say ‘new’ only because I never intended to write a post about this. In fact, other than myself there is only one person alive who has even heard this story. Oh well, I have had a few beers tonight and that seems an excuse enough to proceed.
For reasons beyond my understanding I think about this particular event quite a lot. I think about it way more often than is healthy, probably way more than anyone should. It’s weird, too, because my thoughts on the subject are always the same. If faced with the situation again I know exactly what I would do.
But tonight in the shower I began to wonder: what would you do?
Relevant Back Story
You are casual friends with a girl in college who you have known for about a year. She is obviously into you and wants to take things to the next level. You are physically attracted to her, but have no interest in a serious relationship.
The Scenario
You are brushing your teeth and getting ready for bed late on a random weekday night. Your phone rings and you are surprised to find that it is the girl. In a shaky half-whisper she asks if you can come over to her place. She needs to talk.
(That’s not the decision)
You obviously say yes (at this point in the story “you” are still “me”, and I am the kind of guy who will always say yes). You put on some clothes and walk over to her dorm. She meets you at the building’s front door and asks you to take a walk with her. The two of you walk around the block, wandering randomly through the night while she talks about the problems she is having with her family. She talks about her friend from home who is seriously ill and it is clear to you that she is having a rough time. Tonight in particular she is feeling very sad and lonely. Eventually you make your way back to her dorm and she invites you inside. You go up to her room where the two of you sit down on her couch and continue to talk for a while. Gradually you slide closer and closer together until you are right up against each other. While she is talking she puts her hand on your leg and, as my roommates like to say, “utilizes”. You play it cool for a little while, but finally there is a brief pause in the conversation and the girl leans in for the kiss.
Boom. What do you do?
As I said before, I have thought about this a lot.
I always arrive at the same conclusion, too, and that conclusion is this:
A) Based on my experience this is a trivial decision for the vast majority of guys.
B) This was a completely trivial decision for me.
C) The decisions made in (A) and (B) are total opposites.
It is horribly bizarre for me, and therefore blog-worthy, because whenever I think about that night I feel a very real sense of personal remorse. What makes it so bizarre is that while I feel remorse I do not feel any regret. No, regret is wishing that things happened differently. It isn’t regret to believe that you made the right decision, and further, if given the same circumstances to know that you would make it again.
So why then does this bother me so much?
Is it possible that I feel conflicted in that while I believe I did the right thing, I still wish that I had done the wrong thing? That is a little bit fucked up, no?
Is it possible that I feel strange because my own response was different from what I assume to be the “natural” response? That I feel like I made a mistake by not being a normal guy? Am I simply not giving guys-in-general enough credit here?
Any thoughts?
April 12th, 2008
It is maybe also worth mentioning that I have long meant to include this particular situation as a scene in the book that I haven’t started writing yet. I still might do that but even given some context I feel like the point of the situation and decision is lost without specific explanation. Though, once again I might simply be underestimating the nature of what I view to be an overwhelming majority of our population.
April 12th, 2008
Essentially it seems you were conflicted because she needed you, mentally and physically, to help her through her pain and you elected to follow your own conscience because you didn’t want this to grow into a “relationship” based on a random act of sexuality. Many of your friends might just say “I’d hit that” but since you didn’t describe the attractiveness of said person I am willing to bet at least half of them would say “uh, no” if you had posted up a photo…
With that in mind, you could not do either the right or wrong thing in this situation. If you weren’t interested in a relationship you would have helped get her mind off her problems and she would have helped you “get off” some of yours. However, in the light of day a week or a month or whatever later you would just end up hurting her again by dumping her and that would have been wrong …. maybe. Maybe being with her for her that night would have helped her cope with the family issues and her friend’s plight, made her a stronger person and she would have figured out on her own the two of you weren’t meant for any long term relationship. At that point you both got “something” and you maintained a friendship after sex.
Life is too short, though few people in their twenties realize it and no one in their teens (hence driving 80 mph while drunk or high seems okay). Go with the flow as long you do no greater harm, and MAYBE it turns out that you did have feelings developing for this person, MAYBE she influences you in a way you didn’t realize possible, or MAYBE you just get the best sex of your life for a month and learn from the situation. Being a person who says “yes” doesn’t mean you are weak, it means you are confident in your ability to deal and unafraid to explore what might lie on the other side of a closed door.
April 12th, 2008
Ugh, I appreciate the comment and the effort, dad, but I can’t help but think that you also missed the point here. Well, maybe you didn’t miss my point so much as, by making your own point, reinforce my already firm belief (as mentioned above in part A of my conclusions) that this is a trivial decision for the huge majority of men.
I was intentionally vague as to personal specifics but I feel like I included the truly relevant details. It is interesting to me to see how they are interpreted by others though.
Your own breakdown to a simple matter of “Hit It or Not” goes to the real heart of this situation for me. You seem to see it as simply a question of sex. But for me, if anything, the confusion over this situation comes from the fact that in my mind – both now and at the time this actually happened – sex has very, very little to do with my own decision.
I could have just uploaded a photo to HotOrNot.com if that was my question. There have been plenty of situations where I turned down a girl because she was fugly, but there would be no point in writing about any of them here. Maybe I have been too vague here, but as is often the case I can have a very hard time explaining something to others when it is so mind numbingly obvious to me.
Maybe it is worth restating the conundrum this way:
For you and everybody else with a Y chromosome this decision would almost always break down to, “do I want to have sex with this girl?”
For me, and this is the important part, there IS NO DECISION. Regardless of her hotness or any long string of “maybes” that you might try to throw up later as justification, the answer here is, was, and will always be a strong and unshakable NO for me.
The moral quandary for me here lies in wondering why that is. Not in wondering about the decision that everyone else seems to make, but wondering why, encoded somewhere deep within my screwed up brain, the decision can not even exist.
April 14th, 2008
If its any consolation, I think 95% of the men in the U.S. treat women like garbage and are pretty much lowlife pieces of scum when it comes to the opposite sex. I can actually very easily see why you had no decision to make, well maybe not very easily, but I could see myself doing the same thing in the situation to an extent. I think it all boils down to the code of morals and ethics we hold ourselves to. At least that’s what I think it is with me.
You do not think it is right to take advantage of someone, particularly of a girl with sex. The situation would have played out the same if she was drunk and you were sober. There is little difference when you get right down to it. She was vulnerable, lonely, hurt and looking for comfort. You were in a position that was questionable because you thought it out too far. 95% of the guys in the world would end their thinking right there, sleep with her, deal with the weird consequences, have an awkward breakup/avoidance period, and that’s that.
Since you already knew you didn’t want a relationship, you could have simply felt that sleeping with this girl now was only going to be a temporary release and that it may ultimately make her hurt even more- hence you shouldn’t do it. If you pretended to be there for her emotionally and just slept with her, but then ditched out on her from then on, both of you would feel worse about the situation and wish it hadn’t happened in the first place. If that didn’t make sense, I can explain it a lot better in person.
This reminds me of the exact reason I broke up with Kat, the girl I was seeing for about a year with a daughter. I knew I did not want a lasting relationship with her, I was not going to marry her or be a father for her daughter. We had great sex for awhile but as her daughter was growing up I realized I did not like what I was doing. I was not being fair to either of them just treating the relationship as a physical one. Even though she would have stayed with me forever (hey, I’m that good) I couldn’t justify “wasting” any more of her time or her daughter’s life on me. I had to break it off so that she would look for someone else and hopefully find someone to fill that space in her life, since I had come to realize I didn’t want it to be me.
So basically I gave up sex for doing the right thing which is exactly what you did in college. The problem though is that you need to take some risks sometimes, get hurt, sleep with the wrong chick, in order to live your life to the fullest and not have any regrets when you’re lying in your bed at 80…unable to fall asleep