I fall in love quickly. How much do you have to know about someone before you know you love them? It’s a yes or no question, and when you know there’s no need to sally about and over-qualify things. Yes. Me. I do. But does the same apply to sex? How much do you have to know about somebody before you let them into your pants?
I don’t like having one-night stands but I’m a hypocritical opponent of the practice. I once slept with a woman before I’d even spoken to her. It was a New Year’s Eve party in Madagascar. I was drunk and with some friends in a small room we had convinced a local to convert into a makeshift disco for the night. The woman came in with her friends close to midnight. I thought she was a French tourist.
After an hour we wound up dancing close to each other and soon we were grinding. We started kissing without saying a word. After a few minutes of making out I picked her up and she wrapped her legs around my hips. I carried her down to the beach nearby and we had sex until the ocean water turned chilly in the pre-dawn air.
At one point I heard her moan my name and I stopped short. Not only did I not understand how she knew what my name was, but I was shocked to her speak with an American accent. It turns out she was another volunteer and we had friends in common who’d told her about me. I had no idea who she was.
When the air turned cold and the giddy booze high gave way to lethargy we decided to walk back to our hotel rooms. We hugged good night and went our separate ways.
Another night I went out with a friend who invited a girl he used to date out with us. We went to a bar and after a couple of hours, the girl pulled me outside to the back patio. She told me I was cute and said something nice about my hair (swoon). We started kissing and an hour later we were in a cab on the way back to my apartment.
We had athletic sex for a couple of hours and then I started to feel the onset awkwardness of being in bed with a relative stranger. Absent a deeper attraction, her body seemed like a foreign object in my arms, not something intimate that I wanted to get closer to.
After the second hour I tried to roll over on my side and pass out, but she was wide-awake and horny. She kept finding new ways to get me hard and I thought it would have been awkward to suggest we fall asleep with a bouncy erection. So we kept having sex until she was tired enough to fall asleep.
I was sullen and selfish the next morning. I had started wishing I was alone half-way through our night together. The sex was technically great, but I didn’t want to have great sex with someone I wasn’t that excited about. In the morning all the sex between us was gone and we were just left with the same two relative strangers who had jumped at the chance to sleep with each other the night before.
I offered to buy her breakfast but she had to be at work soon. I walked her down the street to her car. We hugged and exchanged numbers. We’d had sex and didn’t even have each other’s phone numbers.
Sex covers a much broader spectrum of people than love. There are people I immediately know I wouldn’t want to have sex with. But most people are question marks. All those strange new faces and bodies moving past each other on the sidewalk, in the subway, in the tight corridors of bars and restaurants, in between cubicles in offices. Sometimes the only way to find out whether or not you really want to have sex with someone is to jump in and try.
It’s easy to seduce someone with your clothes on, to draw another person’s imagination and sense of optimism. When you’re naked there aren’t any tricks of seduction left. There are always a million reasons why things can’t work, and only one reason why things do work; one opaque, immovable, physical gesture, an affirmation. Yes.
You never really know until you’re already there.
Previous Posts:
Date Machine: The Seductive Art of Dancing
Sex Machine: Becoming A Virgin Again
Sex Machine: Come On My Face
Sex Machine: Because I Can
Love Machine: Am I Romantic Enough?
Sex Machine: Picking Up Women in Gay Bars
Sex Machine: Diary of a Sperm Donor
Date Machine: Long Distance Lovers
Sex Machine: A Revised History of Whores
Date Machine: Moving to New York in Pictures
Date Machine: Old Love Letters, or Things That Got Thrown Away in the Move
Sex Machine: Talking About Sex With Your Parents
Love Machine: Willing to Relocate
Sex Machine: Checking my Oil, or the HIV Test
Date Machine: How To Pick Up a Bartender
Date Machine: Are You My Girlfriend Now?