I was never friends with the guy I fucked for nearly a year, and I’m pretty sure that’s how I convinced myself I was in love with him.
We started talking over Thanksgiving break and I could tell where it was going. There was no way I wanted to be his girlfriend. He had a reputation for seducing girls under the pretense that he actually cared for them, and I didn’t want to give him the satisfaction of thinking I believed that. I told him I didn’t want to be like the others and he insisted that he never had romantic inclinations anyway. Instead of taking that as a slap in the face like I probably should have, I was relieved.
I thought I was getting everything I wanted. We understood each other. We could use each other for something we both wanted without having to put a label on it. I felt like I’d gained control of the situation when, really, I had walked right into his trap.
The problem was that what I wanted turned out to be very different from what he wanted. As much as I wanted the sex, I really wanted to be friends, too. I thought it was important to be on a level where we were comfortable enough with each other that communicating during sex wouldn’t be so awkward. Crazy, right?
Don Juan, however, was not messing around when he said that he had no romantic inclinations. Turns out he didn’t have any friendly inclinations, either. Aside from the very late walk we took the first night we met, we never hung out. He kept up the flirty banter over winter break, but that came to a screeching halt once we got back to campus. I should have known something was wrong when he rejected pizza after sex. Who in their right mind turns down an offer from a girl willing to both fuck and feed them with no strings attached? The kind of guy who finishes first and never shuts up about the fucking poetry he reads, that’s who.
After we started having sex, it was like access to his dick was open and admission to everything else was closed. No more talk about what we were doing outside the bedroom, no more making plans to hang out (which he always managed to avoid anyway). He pretty much stopped trying to get to know me after he figured out what the inside of my vagina felt like—and he wasn’t a particularly creative investigator in that area, either.
Instead of seeing it as his loss, I saw it as my own failure. Why didn’t he want to get to know me? What was I doing wrong? At first I thought the sex must not have been good enough for him to want more from me. But I was always willing to do what he wanted, whenever he wanted, and I never even asked him to reciprocate. And he didn’t. Ever.
If our meetings were awkward before I had this fear, they became even more awkward when I had this insecurity that there must be something wrong with me. I became obsessed with the idea that the dynamic in the relationship had shifted somehow, that he cared less than he did before. My mind would race as I searched for something to say, something to spark his interest. My ability to banter was gone. I put too much stock in how he’d react, because suddenly that was all too important to me. I was losing a game we’d agreed not to play.
And so I found myself obsessed with this idea that I needed to win him over, to show him what he was missing. This quickly turned to obsessing over him, I’m sure to his sick, twisted delight. I don’t know if I ever had true feelings for him. One day I hated his guts and the next day I still hated him but for some reason wanted him to want me on a very personal level. I wondered if that was what it was like to love someone.
Regardless of whether it was love or infatuation, I was hooked. I knew how he was treating me was terrible; he’d ignore me for days and the sex was only ever about him, but I was convinced things would get better if I could just show him how much there was to like about me.
When he got a girlfriend, I lost it. There it was on Facebook, proof that he cared, but not for me. Because we were in the kind of relationship where we didn’t talk at all, he didn’t feel the need to tell me that he was going official with someone else. Not even three days before when he asked to come over and we fucked like everything was normal.
I wish I could tell you it stopped there. To be fair, it did—for about three weeks. When I saw him after I got the news, I told him that I’d had had feelings for him all along. He threw his hands to his face in the textbook way actors show shock and gasped aloud.
“Oh, Riggi. I had no idea. If I had, I would have treated you much differently.”
For those of you gagging as you read this, I’m sorry to say that I swallowed it. Not because I believe it, but because I wanted to. When he came back a few weeks later, saying that he wasn’t intimate with her and they’d break up by the end of the semester, I saw it as the chance I never had. Of course I took him back. Now he knew how I felt. Things would be different.
Of course, they weren’t. I was still in the fuck zone—the place where it’s all benefits but no closeness other than the proximity between your genitals and sometimes your face. We’d never established any sort of mutual respect and we certainly weren’t going to establish it while he was fucking me from behind with texts from his girlfriend lighting up his phone on the desk next to us.
This is not a condemnation of casual sex or relationships where it’s just sex. This is a warning to keep talking to one another and be honest. It’s not fun for anyone when one person cares more than the other. No one should make you feel like you’re hard to care about. If they do, fuck ‘em. In the figurative sense. And then go fuck someone else, literally.
Brianna Arrighi is a sophomore WLP major who recently explained the concept of a fuck buddy to her grandma. She enjoys thigh highs and Daniel Radcliffe, but not the idea of Daniel Radcliffe in thigh highs. (Actually, she's more okay with it than she thought).