Why I Suck At Casual Sex

Before you snigger away, I'd like to make it clear that I don't mean the actual act, of course. I have it on good authority that I'm not any worse at casual sex than I am at relationship sex. How do I know? Because of the three serious relationships I've had, two of them started as casual enounters. 

I don't know if there's a general concensus as to what constitutes casual sex. My understanding of the term is: sex between strangers, or between acquaintances, sans any emotional involvement. When I approach a stranger in a bar or a club, I do so- as most decent people do- with this tenet lodged firmly in my mind.

I imagine scenarios where I climb out her bedroom window the next morning while she's still asleep, or trick her into stepping out of the car for some air and drive off into the sunrise. But these things never pan out in real life. I almost always end up staying for breakfast, or exchanging numbers or adding them on Facebook as soon as I get home.

 On one horrifying morning-after, I invited a girl who's name I couldn't remember to a weekend music festival with my mates. Not only did I spend the weekend extricating myself from situations where I may have had to say her name, I also conveniently forgot to mention the fact that she was with me to my mates who were promised a lads-only weekend.

This meant staging an elaborate ruse whereby I 'bumped' into her at the entrance in full view of my mates, and she ended up sort of hanging around in the background like a Casper mime. I spent my time alternating between telling my mates that the girl was certainly odd for following us around, and telling her that my mates were just too ill-mannered for a formal introduction.  

Both my 'serious' exes were casual encounters-turned-relationships through my propensity to text relentlessly. I can continue a conversation for hours and days, and sometimes, weeks, by text. Within three hours of having met me, women usually know everything about me from my favourite of the 4 Non Blondes  to why I resent my ex's goldfish. I'm a chatty man, and addicted to the sound of my own voice; for ever fascinated by the story of my own life. Sometimes, I wonder if I only have sex to trick women into feeling obliged to listen. 

As for the golden rule of casual sex- no emotional involvement- I'm even more ill-equipped for that one. I cried when I lost the pen I used to write my first short story. I have named household objects after women I've been with, and parts of girlfriends' bodies after sports teams. I'm incapable of emotional unattachment- to people, animals or things. If anything, I attach everything, and then superglue them together with emotion.    

I was once in the enviable position of being FWB with a rather attractive girl. We were neighbours in uni in Glasgow, and we had common friends back home, and she had a boyfriend. I was in a new country, and I was not looking to be tied down. It was perfect. She had a mouth like a salior, and a body that had never known failure. To top it all off, we detested each other on principle. There was nothing there but pure physical need.

It should have been a learning curve, a springboard to sexual greatness. We broke every rule in the book, plumbed new depths of depravity with every coupling for the first three months. I'll never forget the thrill of listening to her have phone sex with her boyfriend while we tried out a new position. Or the sickening aftertaste of lips that have just tasted my piss. But then winter came.

Winter somehow domesticated things; necessitated cuddling and partnered preparation of Christmas dinners. I put on a few pounds, she stopped waxing, and before we knew it, we were having relationship sex. We did assignments together, and went for walks. Luckily, our mutual hatred was just strong enough to never push us into a romance. My inability to walk away after a good innings meant we skipped romance and headed straight for long-and-bitter-marriage territory. She bit off a small piece of my ear on the last night we spent together.

I would like to apologize today to the women I’ve been with, whose welcome I subsequently overstayed. I wish I could blame the absence of a male role model in my childhood, but that would not be true. I remember when I first realized I had this condition. I was watching Cruel Intentions with my best friend, both of us excited and a little guilty about just how hot Sarah Michelle Gellar was. Remember how Sebastian had that scrapbook of all the women he had slept with? You’d think that’s what would stick in an impressionable teenager’s mind. Not in the case of yours truly. Do you know why? Frickin’ John Cusack, that’s why.

"Ïn your eyes" soundtracked many a childhood daydream.

Long before Cruel Intentions, long before pop music and Nick Hornby had infiltrated my soul, there was John Cusack. There he stood under women’s windows, clad in Nike high tops and that ridiculously cool coat, arms aloft holding a boombox over his head blaring Peter fucking Gabrielle. That was the beginning and the end. It was such a formative image, one that set in stone the notion and undying romance of the Grand Gesture. Every woman, every liaison in my life has been molded in expectation of that moment – the search for the woman who would finally give me the opportunity to make my Grand Gesture. It’s not that I’m unable to detach my emotions from sex, or even that I’m a romantic. I’m simply in search of a moment, and I can’t take the chance that I may lose out on it by not calling or emailing someone I’ve already slept with.   

To the bartender who woke up to find freshly-picked daffodils by the bed, the Russian student I moved in with briefly, the school teacher whose house I showed up at unannounced (you really should have told me you were married), to all the other women whose lives have been made poorer by my continued presence, by my audacity to stick around after and to remember birthdays and inquire about ailing moms, my inability to perceive you as objects of sexual gratification alone, I’m sorry. I’m terribly, sincerely sorry I suck out of bed.  

                            Icy Highs's Music Recco: "What's up" by 4 Non Blondes

The Uncle Trap

Today's been a day of discoveries of EPIC proportions. Firstly, I found out that my niblings think I'm a human-sized rodent in a human suit. Secondly, a little less than five minutes ago, I discovered that there's a collective, gender-neutral term for 'the children of one's siblings': yup, it's NIBLINGS! Told you, epic stuff. Here's how it all went down.

As some of you may know, my nephew and niece are spending the summer at my parents' house. I beached up on their doorstep a little before my niblings did, entitled brat that I am, to pursue my lifelong ambition of gainful unemployment and partaking-of-free-meals. And the little business of writing. So far, so good.

Now much as I love my niblings, I don't particularly care for children. This leaves me in a love-hate existential conundrum whenever I spend more than five minutes with them. The initial burst of affection for my flesh and blood (in a manner of speaking) quickly gives way to the more familiar loathing of our pint-sized brethren, and their disdain for Adult words.

To be fair, their presence does not in any way affect my lifestyle as I spend my days locked up in my room any way, my fingers a whirl of type-and-delete. I only ever step out and interact with the rest of the world at mealtimes, and that too only to load my plate and haul it back to the mothership.

Of course, every so often I hear them chattering outside my door and go out and play the benevolent uncle: a game of hide and seek, or maybe a drive to the pastry shop in town. But these occasions are utilitarian -they have a defined purpose- and therefore exert no conversational stress on any of the parties involved.

Little did I know that my niblings were quite taken by these spontaneous visits of mine to their world, and had asked Mom how best to coax me out more often. Neither did I know that they had taken her throwaway remark rather seriously, and decided to act on it.

So I open my door this afternoon, and find a big bowl of melted ice cream, a cherry and a chocolate wafer floating in the mess, and two pairs of eyes watching my every move from behind the couch. I walk past them, casual as a cucumber, push one end of the couch into the wall with a Bournesque flourish, and demand an explanation.

They crack like eggs. They sell the other down the river in their desperation for lenience but they're both guilty as sin, the jittery juveniles. They even try to take Mom down with them. As it turns out, she had told them- in jest no doubt- that their uncle would only ever be tempted out of his room by the promise of a good meal.

This little nugget of wisdom, coupled with their experience of setting mousetraps in the storeroom with my Dad last week, had somehow snowballed into the masterplan to leave a bowl of ice cream under my door to lure me out, like a common rodent. Presumably, they intended to pop a bucket over my head once I was suitably distracted.  

                                          Icy Highs's Video Recco

                                    'The Mouse Trap' scene from Tom and Jerry