This week, thousands of young 17 and 18-year-olds will flock to grassy, leaf-strewn campuses in search of higher education, friends, and fortifying wisdom. They will also, undoubtedly, be looking to have some sex — a longstanding tradition of curious minds and libidinous scholars. Most incoming freshmen are not afforded the privacy of single rooms or intimate suites, so they must turn to the squeaky tall twin mattress in their 11 x 11 concrete rectangle, not but five paces away from another twin bed either occupied or not occupied by a roommate. Enter the pleasures, torments, and thrills of dorm sex. How do you sneak to the RA’s room to obtain a condom unnoticed? How do you navigate communal shower sex? How do you attempt position 48 from the Complete Illustrated Kama Sutra you got on sale from Barnes & Noble in a bunk bed?
These Hooksexup readers shared their hard-earned wisdom from getting it on in the residential halls of their colleges and universities. Put a sock on the doorknob, remove your shower sandals, and learn a thing or two.
You’ve Got to Keep It Down
My greatest dorm sex story actually took place in the elevator on moving-out day of my freshman year. I was with my boyfriend, who I’d spent most of the year having tons of loud sex with in my dorm room at all hours of the day or night. We were sharing the elevator with two girls, who expressed how glad they were to be finally moving out, mostly because, “This girl living next to us had super loud sex like, constantly. We could hear it through the wall.” My boyfriend and I expressed our sympathy and asked where she lived in the dorm. Turned out she lived on my floor, and in the suite next to me – as in, she was in 12B and I was in 13A, and all that sex she was hearing through the wall was mine. I was too surprised to actually say anything and it’s definitely possible I immediately lied that I lived in a different dorm and was only helping out my boyfriend, who lived on another floor. Sorry, neighbor. Maybe leave a note next time.
— Female, 23, NY
The More, the Merrier
My first college boyfriend lived in a triple that inexplicably had bunk beds, so there were actually six beds in the room. We hung out one night and got drunk and then came back to his room in search of ~private time~ only to find ten kids having a party. With incredible patience we waited for them all to pass out in various places in the room, and then had the world’s quietest sex on the top bunk of his bed with maybe eight other people asleep in the room. It was actually pretty hot.
— Female, 24, NY
That’s Why You Always Leave a Note
My college roommate and I had fairly active sex lives in our two years living together, so we had eventually worked out a solid system that would help us not walk in on each other. Early one day, he sent me a text warning that I should probably be out of the room around eight for an hour, so I made plans to go to the bar with my friend Molly. Around midnight, we drunkenly made our way back to my room. I sent my roommate two warning texts saying that I was almost back. When we got to the door, I made sure to loudly fumble with the keys while talking boisterously, giving him one last signal that I was on my way in.
We opened the door to see my roommate, along with another guy, on their knees, giving a third guy a blowjob. We all looked at each other, and then very slowly, Molly and I turned around and booked it down the hallway. From that one-second-that-feels-like-forever moment, the other thing I distinctly remember was that Wicked was playing on our TV in the background.
I later found out that the guy getting the blowjob had never gotten one before. My roommate and the other guy got in an argument over who gave the best head, so they figured he’d be a good judge in this proposed competition. In the end, it turned out my roommate won.
— Male, NC
No, Your Roommate Probably Isn’t Sleeping
I moved a week before my notorious freshman roommate, into a little room in the most historic dorm on campus. Our room wasn’t rectangular thanks to a chimney jutting into the space, so our beds were crammed together into one corner. My roommate arrived cradled in her high school boyfriend’s arms. They didn’t unlock lips or untangle limbs until her parents finished moving in her clothes, lamps, bedding, shower caddy and the school supplies my roommate ultimately never used.
I, meanwhile, had just got my braces off, had never been kissed, was resolute to leave my shy, taciturn childhood self behind. I painted a terracotta pot for my roommate as a welcome gift. She and I got along despite her refusal to make friends in our dorm, classes, or pretty much anywhere. The boyfriend visited on Columbus Day weekend and I made myself scarce from the room as much as I could.
On the last night of his visit, I woke up to my roommate talking to her boyfriend…about his dick. This was highly distressing to me, for I had zero exposure to dirty talk, to penises, and certainly hadn’t agreed to play witness to a blowjob about 3 feet from my face. In the dark haunted recesses of my mind, I can still hear her baby-talking to his dick. I made an obvious ‘I’m-waking-up’ sound and then fled the room, still wrapped in my sky-blue new comforter. The lesson here, of course, is to sleep facing away from your roommate’s bed.
— Female, 26, MA
That’s Not Very Neighborly
Back when I was a freshman in college, I had a female neighbor who was in a long distance relationship with a guy from back home. My roommate had the hots for the girl next door and my neighbor across the hall thought her boyfriend was actually gay and could turn him.
Anyway, we’re at a party and throughout the night my roommate and my gay neighbor are trying to divide and conquer. It’s not looking too good and at one point the happy couple seems to catch on and leave.
Later that night, we can hear them going at it in their room — she kinda sounded like a dolphin while having sex and it was unmistakeable. Bitter and with a grudge, my roommate and neighbor decide if they cant have any, well, then no one can. They look at me, tell me to get my coat and get ready to go outside into the bitter cold. A few seconds later, the fire alarm goes off.
For the next 6 months, any time her BF would come over to see her and get a little action, the fire alarm went off. This started a long term investigation that resulted in two different students getting suspended.
— Male, 27, NY
Beware of the Sexile
My freshman roommate and I got along perfectly well – sharing late-night pints of ice cream, bouncing ideas off one another for term papers. It was a rather symbiotic (and yeah, totally platonic) relationship. We spent most of the first semester in a nearly celibate state of bliss. Both virgins, we’d swapped out dorm fucking for poetry readings, Arrested Development marathons, and dining hall soft serve. All was harmonious in our small nebbishy pocket at liberal arts school, until she met a boy at the Student Union and they inevitably began to engage in some hardcore oral sex sessions. Since he was a few years older and had a single room in another dorm, most of this took place at his crib, and I was a-okay with it. It didn’t interfere at all with my studies, so I high-fived her from afar.
That is, until one evening when they decided to use our double as their 69 crash pad. It was a Thursday and I was at the library studying when I suddenly felt chills and felt like I was coming down with a fever. Hurriedly, I began the trek back to my dorm to immediately go to bed and curb the oncoming fever. After my roommate didn’t answer my “Ugh, I’m sick,” texts, I thought it might be a good idea to make a show of coming home and jingle my keys around loudly before entering the room. As I fumbled with the lock, I heard a forceful whimper of, “No!” come from the other side of our door. Instead of saying, “Just a minute,” and letting me enter once they’d put on a pair of boxer shorts and a tank top, I’d been barred from my dorm room. It was what all studious and tired freshmen feared — the sexile.
My fever growing, I wandered the halls of our dorm looking for someone to chat with during my time of sexile. I finally found a nice patch of carpet and began to read in the middle of the hallway on the first floor. People gave me a communal look of pity. A guy I was interested in at the time came and sat with me. “Sexiled, huh?” he asked. Eventually we started dating, so I could never blame my roommate for that feverish night of sexile. Though, let me point out: if you have been bestowed the wonder of a single dorm room, by all means, always use it for sexy time.
— Female, 26, CA
It’s Called “Alone Time” For a Reason
My freshman year of college, I roomed with an uptight guy who constantly called his best friend from high school, a girl who was attending a different college. The biggest defining characteristic I remember about him was how he was oddly cut-off from pop culture: he’d never heard of half the music I played, which at the time, included a lot of “Weird Al” Yankovic, of all people.
One night, I caught the end of a phone call with his gal pal. She was dating someone, and though he said he was happy for her, I could see it was killing him. In a moment of brotherly compassion, I lent him a stack of Weird Al cassettes and left.
When I returned much later, the lights were off in our room. I snuck in, figuring he was asleep, but the hallway light fell on his bed, revealing furious motion at groin level and a photo of his lady friend thumb-tacked to the wall. The movement stopped and I slipped into my bed. It was embarrassing, but understandable; there were no judgments here. But then suddenly the movement started again. Loudly. He was panting. I cleared my throat audibly, but he just kept going. Moments later he said her name, groaned, then rolled over. A week later he quit college and took my Weird Al cassettes with him. That heartbroken, masturbating bastard.
— Male, MA
Cut the Commentary
It was sophomore year, and because Emerson had limited housing to begin with, we were a group of sophomore men living on a freshman floor. For some of us, that meant hitting on the freshman girls and for others, that meant hiding in the suite with video games. This particular night, I was playing video games around midnight with my friend when our roommate stumbled into the common room accompanied with a freshman girl we knew. We both commented on how drunk he must have been since this girl had been stalking him for months now with no sign of mutual attraction.
Barely ten minutes later, she returns to the common room alone and in a state of sadness and anger. Being the jerks that my roommate and I were, we commented, “That was pretty quick” to her as she stormed out. Five minutes later our roommate returned to the common room to fetch another friend to “help him out.” As it turns out, the freshman girl had not bothered to tell my drunken friend that this was her first time…ever. So, as the sex began, she also began bleeding everywhere. When my very inebriated roommate saw all the blood on his sheets, he began to puke off the bed and eventually, into a nearby trashcan. The girl began to cry as he puked all over the room and told her to leave in between being sick. That is when she stormed out, only to have my friend and I make fun of her as she left. We all moved out of the dorms the next year.
— Male, 26, MA
Inspect Those Free Condoms
Because college costs an exorbitant amount of money out-of-pocket (still paying off those student loans!), as a freshman I decided to take advantage of any freebies that came my way. Free pizza give-away? Free t-shirts at orientation? I was there. And so, when my significant other pointed out to me that my RA had a packet of free condoms hanging in a folder on his door that said “Take one!”, I immediately knew where I’d be obtaining my discount contraception for the remainder of the semester. Because I didn’t want to take five at a time and out myself as a condom grifter, we’d mainly sneak one or two when the mood struck us.
One afternoon, as things were getting hot and heavy, I removed my boyfriend’s hands from my pants and said, “Hey, can you go get one?” He nodded and put a towel around his waist to feign going to take a shower. He raced down the hall to my RA’s door, quickly grabbed a rubber, and hurried back to me. Just as he was about to tear it open, I stopped him. “Dude, did you even look at that condom?” He held it up and quickly realized that he had not grabbed a condom, but a Ramen spice packet. A “Chicken Flavor” one that comes with the cheap noodles students love to survive off of. It seemed we had a prankster on our floor. A week later, I converted to buying my own condoms. Or stealing my roommate’s.
— Female, 30, GA
As Halloween approaches, many of you will no doubt d0n a flashy costume, take on a new persona, and, perhaps, go home with a charming Groot, Nicki Minaj, or can of tomato soup. So, we’d like to mine some of your past All Hallow’s Eve excursions to find out who has the wildest costumed dalliances. What’s your best story about Halloween hook ups? Send your true story, in 200-300 words, over to .
