Last weekend, I found myself sitting in front of a shaman in a mansion in Berkeley, talking about my commitment problems. You know, cliché white people stuff. “I have this fear,” I told the shaman, “that I’m going to wake up one day with a husband, two kids, a house in the suburbs, and wonder how I got there, as if it’s my destiny. So to avoid it, I continually destroy my relationships at the first sign they’re headed in that direction.” The shaman nodded sympathetically. She was holding a beaker of psychoactive toad venom that was apparently going to change my life. “Basically,” I asked, “can the magical toad help me come to terms with my fear of being a basic bitch?” She smiled warmly, then put a rainbow straw into my mouth and told me to inhale.

This paranoia—that I’ll somehow accidentally stumble into normalcy—is nothing new. But it’s getting worse, now that my peers have started to do the things people do around 30: get married, buy a house, have kids, pay for Amazon Prime, et cetera. For some people my age, these trends spark a FOMO herd mentality: Partner up and breed now or die alone. For others—i.e., me—they incite a rebellious, tween-grade tantrum: Fuck you, society, I do what I waaant! There’s nothing like a baby-shower invite to send me on a Tinder rampage.

I’ve had this kind of defiant reaction for years, in various forms. I ditched college to move into a squatter commune. I’ve avoided getting a “real job.” As of now, I don’t even have a fixed address.

And it’s the same story in relationships. I’ve yet to live with a partner. In the past, once a relationship began to feel routine, I cheated. Even in my queer relationship, a delightful escape from the hetero-normative default settings, as soon as she initiated talk of buying a house together, I panicked and pulled away.

Basically, as soon as something feels stable, I sabotage it. I’ve often thought this impulse stems from my super-white-bread, middle-class upbringing: I grew up in a small town with married parents who loved each other. It felt safe but not interesting, and I’ve spent my life fighting that fate. In some respects, I trust my instincts. But other times, I wonder if this fear of normalcy is leading me to destroy valuable, loving relationships simply to preserve some juvenile idea of rebellion.

The problem is, I really like being in a relationship. It feels good to have a partner in crime. I mean, I don’t want to YOLO solo forever. And I think a lot of people my age are wrestling with the same question: In order to experience love and a lasting partnership, do you have to close the chapter of your life that includes experimentation, spontaneity, and, well, freedom?

Enter the magical toad. The invitation to Berkeley came from some new friends, whom I’ll call Colette and Dan. She is a doctor of psychology and professional dominatrix, he the creator of a mega-successful tech startup that has something to do with weed. They’re both in their mid-30s, they’ve been together for three years, and they’re polyamorous. Has a more Bay Area couple ever existed?

When I arrived at their beautiful hilltop home on a Saturday morning, Dan answered the door wearing silk pajama pants. “Colette’s in the orgy room, meditating,” he said with a smile. They had hired the shaman to come up from Mexico that afternoon, to dose a handful of their friends with a psychoactive toad venom containing the powerful hallucinogen 5-MeO-DMT, known to induce divine revelation or, in Colette’s words, “ego death.” (Think ayahuasca but without the puking.)

With a few hours to kill before the ceremony, Colette invited me to one of her dominatrix sessions, to watch her electrocute a man’s balls. How could I say no? So after breakfast we all hopped into Dan’s self-driving Tesla and headed to Colette’s dungeon. Watching their exchange—Dan made Colette oatmeal as she packed her Prada bag full of latex lingerie—made me smile. In a lot of ways, they are my ideal couple. They’ve managed to create a relationship that’s at once loving and domestic, but also completely unorthodox. They have a beautiful home, support each other, and share breakfast each morning, but they also take on other lovers and host chic orgies—polyglamorous is a word that comes to mind.

Still, they’re the first to admit that defying convention is no walk in the park. “It’s really not easy to be in a poly relationship,” Colette said on the drive. “You’re allowing yourself to be thrown into situations that can arouse feelings of jealousy, insecurity, neediness—emotions you always thought you would avoid at all costs.” But ultimately, she prefers a relationship that’s challenging to one that’s binding. “That traditional relationship model just doesn’t work for me at all,” she said. “Plus, it feels good to carve out your own type of relationship. The idea of doing what everyone else does just feels insane to me.”

“People seek monogamy and ‘till death do us part’ because it gives them security,” Dan added. “They want to believe that the other person is never going to run off. But Colette and I both value our freedom to explore life in an unbounded fashion, and to love and to build relationships with many people. Within the open relationship, what makes Colette so special to me is that I learn more from her and I evolve quicker with her than I have with any other woman.”

“In all my previous relationships, my partners said I was ‘too much,’ ” Colette recalled. “With Dan, we obviously have issues that we have to work through, but I’m so happy to finally be with someone who radically accepts me for me: a weird, polyamorous sex worker.” The key, they both agreed, is not entering a relationship with someone who’s fundamentally trying to make you more normal than you want to be. This is certainly a mistake I’ve made time and time again.

Certain people get off on sacrificing things for the sake of their relationship, but personally, it just makes me angry, and then I grow to resent my partner for preventing me from having what I want (as if it’s somehow their fault). Like, having a family seems cool, but then what if I meet two Louis Garrel look-alikes who invite me into an MMF threesome? I’m just supposed to say no? Then again, there are moments when I question how practical it is to view life as one endless hedonistic pursuit. There’s a part of me that wants to form a domestic life with someone. I grew up on Woody Allen movies, imagining my future in a book-filled Manhattan apartment with my tweedy, intellectual partner, hosting dinner parties for all of our interesting friends, and breeding unusually gifted children. I have the same fear as many women: Will I regret my decision not to have children after it’s too late?

I asked Colette if she ever felt the pressure to have kids. “Recently,” she said, “Dan and I were on acid, and we were laughing and having this amazing time, and then suddenly I had this thought, like, ‘Wait, if we had kids, it would ruin everything. Everything we’ve been working for, our freedom, would be destroyed.’ ” She thought for a moment. “We’re on this earth to make things,” she went on. “Some people choose to make babies. Others choose to write books or make films or start a company. We’re not leaving our genes behind, but we’re leaving a different kind of imprint.”

What about the women who do manage to write books, make films, and start companies while still having children? In recent years, the Sheryl Sandberg brand of lean-in feminism has been promoting the old “you can have it all” narrative again. It’s like, Okay, sure, but what if you’re not rich enough to have a maid? And what if you don’t want your kid to be raised by a nanny? Then you’re doing a double shift. The bottom line is, at some point, something’s gotta give. And the more time I spend with Colette and Dan, the more I admire them for not surrendering to the social matrix of conventionality.

After an eye-opening lesson in erotic electrocution in Colette’s dungeon, we drove back to their house. A handful of their friends arrived. The shaman, dressed like a member of the Source Family, prepared her psychoactive toad venom. I sat in the orgy room—a large, skylit space with multiple couches jigsawed together to form a giant bed, which Colette assured me was recently steam cleaned—watching people emerge from the shaman’s sanctuary, bright with new perspectives on life, some literally crying tears of joy.

Finally, it was my turn for enlightenment. I gave my spiel, smoked the vapor, and awoke from my trip 20 minutes later feeling . . . nothing. Despite leaving my body and entering a supernatural psychedelic dreamscape, I had zero emotional response to the drug.

“Does that mean I’m shallow?” I asked the shaman. She laughed and said, “Maybe it means there’s nothing wrong with you.” I couldn’t tell if she was being sarcastic.

Karley Sciortino writes the blog Slutever.

Hair and Makeup: Ingeborg

The post Breathless: Can a Shaman Cure My Fear of Normalcy? appeared first on Vogue.

It’s been more than six months since my ex-girlfriend and I put the nail in the coffin of our creepily codependent three-year relationship. I’ve since gone through the obligatory breakup cycle. First there was the manic, Tinder-distraction phase. Then came the reality-check, self-pity phase where I gained 7 pounds. Then the juice-cleanse-Pilates-independent-woman phase where I lost it again. Then came this unforeseen period where I kept falling in love with people, but only for a day, like when I got a Pap smear and spent the next 24 hours convinced I had an intense connection with my gynecologist.

And then, a few months ago, I started seeing someone more seriously. He was a sane, nice person with a good job who made me cum a lot. But without meaning to, I kept trying to find his hidden flaw. I found myself having thoughts like, “This will never work out. His apartment is just too clean.” Or, “We’ll hate each other in two weeks. I might as well end it now.” When our relationship eventually did end, rather than feeling regret, I just brushed it off as inevitable. And it was in that moment that I knew I’d officially reached the final phase of the breakup cycle: the part where you realize you’re jaded.

Now, being jaded doesn’t simply mean that you’re “over it.” It’s more that you’ve become sick and tired after overindulging in something. And I’m pretty sure that my current state is the result of binge-eating on sex and relationships for the past 15 years. Some of the telltale signs include: Being around cheery, optimistic people makes me nauseous. Recently, during sex, when the guy asked me how I usually orgasm, I responded, “With great difficulty.” I often swipe through Tinder in front of my friends, sighing unnecessarily loudly and saying things like, “See, this is what I have to choose from!” I’ve stopped spraying perfume on my underwear. When I see engagement notifications on Facebook, I think, She must have settled. (Or, if I’m in a particularly bad mood: She just ruined her life.) An architect from Brazil who looks like Keanu Reeves circa 1986 could show up at my doorstep with his giant dick wrapped in a bow and I’d be like, “Bleh, he’s wearing square-toed Pradas—not worth the effort.” And so on.

It’s gotten to the point where I’ve pretty much convinced myself that my options are either to be single forever or eventually be like, “Eh, you’ll do.” And that sucks, because being cynical is not attractive. Self-righteousness and resentment aren’t exactly fuck-me qualities. But even if you know you’re jaded, that doesn’t mean you have the power to control it. It’s like the morning after taking a ton of Molly: You know the reason you’re suicidal is because you chose to borrow happiness from the future, but unfortunately, simply acknowledging that you’re on a comedown doesn’t make you feel any less Plath-y.

Recently, I was commiserating with a friend I’ll call Emma, a 35-year-old photographer who once told me that “true love happens when two people lower their standards just enough.” Emma hasn’t had a boyfriend in eight years. “The only time I ever thought ‘I could love this person forever’ was when I was too young to really understand what that meant,” she said. “Ignorance is bliss.”

It was a Friday night and Emma was refusing to come out, insisting that she’d rather stay home and watch Law & Order: SVU. She told me over the phone, “My best friend was in a relationship for nine years, only to recently find out that her boyfriend had been cheating on her for two. Meanwhile, she thought she was in a happy, long-term relationship. Then today, my boss was talking about her husband—they’re in their late 30s and have three kids—and she kept saying, ‘He’s just so annoying. He just annoys me.’ There was no affection in her voice.” Emma sighed dismally.“I don’t want to be single forever, but I also don’t want to be in a relationship where the ultimate goal is to not end up either hating or destroying the other person. Like, what are my options?”

When I asked Emma if she felt jaded, she seemed offended. “Jaded is something you become. This is just my personality. This is New York, okay. I’m not jaded. I’m just realistic.”

That, I thought, was an interesting distinction. In theory, with each new relationship, we grow more aware of what we want out of a partner and what we can’t tolerate. We become more streamlined, and that’s a good thing—we’re using our past experiences to protect ourselves, to make better choices. But is there a tipping point at which your expectations become so refined that no one is ever going to be good enough? Where is the line between jaded and smart?

Last week, I posed this question to another friend, whom I’ll call Malcolm, over dinner in the East Village. Malcolm is an old editor of mine with whom I had an S&M thing a few years back. “There’s a clear line,” he said arrogantly. “Becoming a victim of love and transcending the delusions of love are two very different things.” Malcolm’s approaching 50, and while he’s had no trouble bedding countless models over the years, he’s pessimistic about finding a woman to settle down and have kids with, an attitude that he, like Emma, says is just keeping it real. “Love stories are fantasy,” he said, “and once you wake up from a few love stories, you see through the plot. You understand the riddle, and eventually you stop falling for it.”

According to Malcolm, the reason most of us are jaded love addicts is because we’ve been raised on an idealized notion of love and romance. “Our view of love is a literary concept,” he said. “It’s all there in poetry and literature, everything you want to know about the drug of love, and how to quantify it. You know you’re ‘in love’ when your knees are weak, when you fuck five times a day until you’re exhausted and then pass out entangled in each other’s arms, when you’re so insane for a person that you would die for them. You get so high on the drama of romance that you feel like you’ve transcended humanity and are living in the realm of the gods. But then inevitably, you have to deal with the loss of that and come back down to earth.”

Basically, once you go through that cycle a few times, you realize that those feelings come with a major price. “But the kicker,” Malcolm went on, “is when you realize that those intense feelings you were sold as being ‘love’ are really infatuation. Infatuation is what makes us bother to put up with each other. But forming a lasting relationship is completely different from the sensational high you get from romance and infatuation.”

What about people who have been together for years or decades? I asked. What’s their secret?

“People in long-term marriages aren’t in love—they just made a deal that they’ve decided to honor,” he said. “But now we live in a culture where everybody’s got to be happy all the fucking time, so most people break that deal and get divorced.”

Last weekend, I spent the day in bed with a queer writer who I’d stalked on Instagram. He slid quickly into my DMs, and even more quickly into me. He told me that his parents met in an arranged marriage in Japan, and 40 years later are still happily in love. It reminded me, to a certain degree, of my own deeply Catholic parents, who started dating in high school and still have a strong marriage. The Instagram guy’s last serious relationship was poly and mine was open. Our idealized loves had failed. “Maybe having more options isn’t necessarily a good thing,” he said with a shrug. I’m pretty sure he was Tindering from my bed at one point. “Maybe to maintain a relationship, you have to stay a bit naive.”

On multiple occasions, I’ve asked my mom if she has any regrets about not dating other men or having more diverse experiences. She told me that while it’s natural to look back and wonder what if, the fact that she’s happy with how her life has turned out (her family, her supportive husband), she’s confident she made the right decision. While Emma and Malcolm say they’re realistic rather than jaded—they believe there’s no such thing as long-term love and that you have to be naive or delusional to get married—my parents would also say they’re realistic, not only for getting married, but for staying married. Not all people in long-term relationships are cynics. It’s a battle of competing realities.

The question seems to be: How can you be realistic about love while remaining open to it? To me, the key lies in something Malcolm said: You have to keep yourself from becoming a victim. After heartbreak or a breakup, the goal is to move on and grow, to not make the same mistakes in your next relationship, and to become more pragmatic. The problems arise when you don’t recover—when, instead of doing the work, you throw a tantrum and blame everyone but yourself for your failures. It’s a choice. You can use your past as a filtering process or as a defense mechanism, but with the latter, you will probably deny yourself love, affection, and sex. And that just seems dumb.

Karley Sciortino writes the blog Slutever.

Hair and Makeup: Ingeborg

The post Breathless: Am I Jaded? appeared first on Vogue.

Last month I was at a Planned Parenthood benefit lunch at the Pierre hotel, making small talk with a fashion designer seated next to me. “That woman over there,” the designer said, pointing across the room, “is my boyfriend’s ex-girlfriend.” I immediately knew what I had to do. “Ugh, she looks like a foot,” I said, reassuringly. The designer looked at me like I was Ann Coulter. “She’s actually a really incredible woman and an important activist in the fight for women’s reproductive rights,” she scoffed, and then turned away from me, choosing instead to face the literal wall.

Had I misread the cues? I didn’t actually think the girl looked like a foot; sometimes it’s just hard to gauge whether you’re supposed to be a friend or a feminist, ya know? And besides, aren’t we all obliged to irrationally hate our partner’s exes, for the sole reason that we both loved the same dick?

Circle of trust: I have a habit of becoming sort of obsessed with the people my partners dated before me. I can’t help but want to know: Who are you? What do we have in common? How are we different? Could we have been friends in a parallel universe? Who has more followers? And also, am I supposed to pretend I don’t recognize you when I see you at Whole Foods, despite the fact that we share all the same strains of HPV? Of course, it’s natural to be interested in your partner’s previous relationships because it’s an insight into their romantic personality. But where’s the line between natural curiosity and straight-up obsession?

Take my friend Linda, for example (not her real name). Linda is a 27-year-old event planner and part-time dominatrix. She’s been with her boyfriend for more than a year, yet his ex is still an ever-present ghost in her life. “The other day I was walking through Washington Square Park,” Linda told me over coffee last week, “and out of the corner of my eye I saw long blonde hair and red sunglasses, and I didn’t even have to turn around, I just knew it was her.” Linda nervously glanced behind her, seemingly checking if she was being followed. “Is it sad that I’ve never met this woman, but I’ve stalked her so hard that I recognized her from just a passing glimpse of her sunglasses in the distance?” I gave a noncommittal shrug. “Anyway, I was right, because a couple hours later I checked her Instagram and she’d posted a photo of herself in the Village, wearing the glasses.”

Sure, Linda sounds psychotic, but we’ve all been her. But what exactly are we looking for, in these hours and days spent digging through our partner’s relationship garbage? “The thing is,” said Linda, “at the beginning of a new relationship, you make checking the ex’s page such a habit that you continue doing it long after you no longer really care. Like, I live with my boyfriend, and his ex lives with her new boyfriend, but I still check her page every fucking day. I don’t know what she could post that would make me feel any better or worse. I guess I’m just endlessly interested in what she’s doing, and where she gets brunch.”

Of course, this behavior is sad and obsessive and disgusting. Which is why it must be done in absolute secrecy. Letting it slip in front of your partner that you know too much about their ex is a major party foul. But playing dumb isn’t always easy. It reminds me of this one time, when an ex-CIA operative told me that one of the hardest things about being an American spy in China was pretending not to understand the language—training himself not to respond to anything in Mandarin or to accidentally laugh at overheard jokes. Basically, being in a new relationship is like being a government agent: You’re both acquiring high-value intelligence that must be kept absolutely classified. Your life is at risk.

And then there’s the Mean Girl factor. The funny thing is, unless the ex is actively trying to steal your partner back from you, there’s really no reason to be jealous or to see them as the enemy. And yet, I’m embarrassed to admit, I often feel compelled to trash-talk my partner’s exes, even if I’ve never even seen them in three dimensions. Maybe I’m testing my partner, to see if they’ll join in on my trash-talking. Or maybe it’s an effort to distinguish myself from the ex—to assert myself as different, and somehow better.

For instance, in my last serious relationship, my girlfriend’s ex-girlfriend was really into New Age culture. This meant that every time someone brought up astrology—which unfortunately is like every six minutes—I would launch into a tirade about how New Age people are anti-science morons who should go choke on a crystal, and how chakras make me want to kill myself, blah blah—you get the idea. And yeah, I guess I do think New Age stuff is dumb, but not to the point where I could rationally justify losing my voice from shouting rageful criticisms of it. So why did I need to hate on it? I guess the easy answer is that it was some sort of defense mechanism against insecurity. But insecurity about what? That my partner had a life before me?

I posed this dilemma to my friends over drinks at Lucien this past weekend. “It’s fine to hate the exes,” said Stacey, a documentary producer. “It’s therapeutic. And besides, you know they’re simultaneously stalking you. The other night I got a ‘like’ from my guy’s ex on a photo at 3:00 a.m. But then when I went to see which photo it was, the notification was gone, because she’d clearly accidentally liked it when she was drunk.”

“I never get obsessed with my girlfriend’s exes,” said Ryan, a filmmaker. “But I intentionally don’t find out anything about them, to avoid being jealous. But if it’s a casual lover, I want to know everything.” According to Ryan, when he’s not emotionally involved, hearing about a girl’s past sexual experiences can be kind of hot. The problem here, of course, is if your casual thing turns into a serious thing, and then you’re left wishing you could Eternal Sunshine your mind.

“Well, I always idealize my boyfriend’s exes,” said Candy, a fashion writer. “If my boyfriend’s ex is amazing, it means he has good taste—it reflects better on him, which reflects better on me.” She was clearly very proud of herself. “I imagine them as being these really talented, incredible women . . . but then when I meet them in real life, I realize they’re ultimately just regular people with flaws. It’s usually a letdown, honestly.” I asked Candy if maybe glorifying these women was actually a subconscious way of justifying critiquing them in the flesh. She flipped her platinum hair. “No, I actually want to be impressed. It’s not my fault they’re always disappointingly basic.”

“The worst-case scenario, of course, is when you meet the ex and actually end up liking them,” said Stacey, “because then you have to admit that you’re a bad feminist. It’s sort of like how Republicans hate gay people until they actually meet a gay person, and then they change their mind. You assume your boyfriend’s ex is the enemy, but then when you meet her in person you’re like, ‘I guess you’re not so bad.’ ”

She’s right. But there’s another twist in the plot: the moment when you and your partner break up, and suddenly all the animosity you felt toward their ex turns to affinity. Having a mutual ex with someone can be a strange point of connection, even if you spent the months or years prior shunning them. It happened to me: I’d just moved to New York and was dating a writer. His ex was a special case—the rare type of woman who makes the extra effort to be nice to the new girlfriend. Of course, this creeped me out. I’d see her at art openings and book parties, and she’d always come up and say hi. She even invited me to a lecture on pansexuality once, knowing I wrote about sex. I declined, and then spent the next year referring to her as “Swimfan.” I assumed she must have some ulterior motive. But then after the writer and I broke up and she was  still being nice, I gave in. Now she’s one of my closest friends, and I find it ridiculous to think that I once saw her as the enemy, simply because we have the same bad taste in men.

Karley Sciortino writes the blog Slutever.

The post Breathless: Are You Obsessed With Your Partner’s Ex? appeared first on Vogue.

Last Friday night, I was bored and horny at my apartment, swiping aggressively on Tinder but having no luck. And then something dark happened—I swiped left on a guy who I thought maybe looked familiar, only to suddenly remember that I’d already slept with him. I needed a drink. And then I had a crazy idea—why not just walk out into the actual world and see if a real-life human being wants to have sex with me? It seemed so novel and retro. “How hard could it be?” I said into the mirror. So I put on my knee-high suede boots and my new contour stick and was feeling very powerful. Little did I know the horror I was about to put myself through.

I’ll preface my war story by saying that I am very pro-dating app, for multiple reasons. Most obviously, I like that you can stalk your prey from the comfort of your bed. I also like the increased options, and that apps get you out of your social scene, because even in New York City it’s surprising how quickly you can use up your resources. I also love that apps have given new life to the old-school date. For Tinder dates I dress up, I meet the guy for a drink at like 7:00 p.m., and then we have a real, uninterrupted conversation. And I like that. Whereas if you meet someone out at a bar or a party, you’re with a group of people, it’s loud, and you’re probably drunk. And sure, apps have downsides—it’s annoying when you can’t tell someone’s height, or if their voice sounds like a squeaky toy. But generally, it’s amazing how much you can know about a person from just a few photos, a one-sentence bio, and whether or not they opted to flex topless for a bathroom selfie.

But back to my IRL sex mission. My first stop was the bar at the Gramercy Park Hotel, because it’s near my apartment, and because rich people go there. Annoyingly, everyone there was either in a group of friends or already on a date. Still, I ordered myself a martini and started smiling at random hot people. The responses were not what I had hoped—I’m pretty sure that everyone thought I was creepily desperate or a prostitute. Then for a while I circled around groups of men, all of whom ignored me. I felt like a mosquito. The one guy I did manage to say hello to—he was waiting for the bathroom, on his phone—just responded, “Sorry, I’m writing an email.” It was such a bizarre experience; I couldn’t tell if I’d become so dependent on dating apps that I’d literally lost the ability to talk to a stranger in a bar, or if it really is just an extremely difficult and awkward thing to do.

But I wasn’t going to give up so easily, so I relocated to a random bar in Flatiron. It felt very testosterone-heavy, which I took as a good sign. I downed a martini. Eventually, I was drunk enough to just grab someone by the arm and pull him toward me (surprisingly effective). He was a 30ish guy in a suit and thick-rimmed glasses, who reminded me of a young Elliott Gould. He bought me a drink and told me he flew planes as a hobby. He put his hand up my skirt a bit, and invited me to go with him and his friends to a bar downtown. “Don’t go anywhere,” he said. “I’m just going to run next door to my place and change out of my suit.” We half-kissed.

Twenty minutes later he was back, now wearing a deep V-neck T-shirt, giant gold sneakers, and aviator lenses. I felt like I’d been IRL catfished. In the space of one drink, my tweedy, intellectual Jew had transformed into a DJ from Ibiza. People say that you never really know who you’re talking to online. I would argue that you have no clue who you’re talking to if they’re wearing a suit. The evening ended with me literally sprinting away from V-neck, almost being hit by a cab in the process. When I finally made it back to my apartment, out of breath, all I could think was: How is it possible that people used to meet in bars?

But people still do it. My friend Kaitlin—a flirtatious, 26-year-old writer—is one of them. Kaitlin dates a lot of guys and meets them all in real life. She says she doesn’t do dating apps, because she doesn’t make sense in 2-D: “I’m just better in context,” Kaitlin recently told me over the phone. “I’m kind of a lot—most people, when they meet me, want to fuck me or kill me. I’m a double Gemini. I’m not afraid to low-key blackout while drinking, so it just makes more sense that I meet people in the wild. Sure, I could pick a handful of photos where I look traditionally hot—from photo shoots, with a strong flash—but then what if the guy shows up thinking I’m this pretty, sweet writer, only to realize that I’m a babbling alcoholic who can’t even apply eyeliner? I’m too sensitive to court rejection. I’d rather meet someone in a bar, where they can process my worst qualities right off the bat.”

And the men Kaitlin goes for—well, they aren’t app-friendly for a different reason. “I’m not known for dating superhot people,” she said. “I’m literally known for dating ugly old men. I’m attracted to everyone I date, but if all the men I’m having sex with right now were presented to me on an app, I’m almost positive I wouldn’t swipe right on any of them. For instance, this Danish poet I’ve been fucking—he’s so interesting and smart, he’s 6-foot-4, but he has these sideburns . . . I mean, no one would swipe right for those. But then once girls start talking to him . . . well, they fall in lust.”

“But aren’t you curious to date someone who you’d never meet in your regular life,” I asked her, “like a podiatrist from the Upper West Side or something?”

“That actually sounds horrifying to me,” she said. “I’m just not interested in anonymous experiences or having sex with people outside the culture industry.”

Ultimately, what Kaitlin wants is for men to be vetted—whether through social connections, or simply by having her friends help her assess whether a guy at the bar is fuck-worthy. “I only sleep with squad and squad-adjacent people, because even if you don’t end up liking each other, the guy still has to be polite to you when he sees you,” she said. “And that’s important to me. No man should be able to ghost me and get away with it.”

All valid points. But I wanted an expert opinion on this apps-versus-bars dispute, so I called up my Internet friend Bernie Hogan, a research fellow at Oxford who’s an expert in social networks and online relationships. I told him about my bar-crawl fail. “What’s interesting is that the norms have flipped,” Hogan told me. “The general attitude used to be, ‘Online dating is for weirdos and losers,’ and now it’s, ‘Eww, who would try to hook up in a bar?—that’s for weirdos and losers.’ Today, you go to a bar to chat with your friends, not to hook up.” Which, in turn, clearly has made the latter a harder thing to do in recent years.

I told him about Kaitlin’s reason for avoiding apps—that she wants men to be vetted. “What your friend wants is mediation,” Hogan said. “She essentially wants insurance, which is something some people feel that online dating doesn’t provide. For instance, if some guy acts like a creeper on a date, she wants to be able to cash that in within her social scene, and to make him feel the consequences of that behavior. We’ve known in sociology for a long time that common social connections between people leads to a sense of trust. This is in part because there are more opportunities for social sanctioning.”

But for some people, this type of mediation can be bad, because it can result in your friends judging you, or policing your behavior. Think of it this way: If you only sleep with people connected to your social scene, then the regular gossip will result in everyone knowing who you’re banging. And if you’re someone who sleeps around even a little bit, that could lead to you getting a bad rep (especially if you’re a woman). Hogan told me, “By using dating apps, you can be very sexually active without most of your personal network knowing anything. By making your social group irrelevant to your dating life, you remove yourself from their judgment.” He put it concisely: “With trust comes constraint. With risk comes autonomy.”

That last part really resonated with me. For years, I’ve been telling Kaitlin to get on Tinder, to give herself more options. Meanwhile, she’s always insisted that apps are just distracting me from finding true love. But then I realized, I personally am willing to put up with the bad things about apps—the occasional asshole, super-awkward dates with someone I ultimately have nothing in common with, and even being ghosted after sex—because what I gain is more valuable to me: freedom, autonomy, and a multitude of choices. Whereas someone like Kaitlin is the opposite: She’d rather work harder and choose from a fixed pool in order to feel safe.

I came back to Kaitlin with my findings. Annoyingly, she didn’t seem impressed. “Getting a boyfriend or getting laid is not a matter of opting for Tinder or bars,” she said, rolling her eyes. “The reality is it’s just hard to meet people. We know powerhouse women who are going to die alone, and we know annoying bitches who are never going to be alone, even for a minute. It doesn’t matter if they’re on Tinder or not. There are just those girls who, starting in eighth grade, will always have a boyfriend, and then there are the girls who will never have one. That’s just life.”

Karley Sciortino writes the blog Slutever.

Hair: Takashi Yusa
Makeup: Mariko Hirano

Sciortino in a M Missoni petal cut-out-back top, $495, saksfifthavenue.com

The post Breathless: Are Dating Apps Better for Meeting People Than Bars? appeared first on Vogue.

I recently started dating this really sweet guy. We have a lot in common: We’re both writers; we’re the same age; we both hate being outside. But there’s one fundamental difference: He has an Android, and I have an iPhone. At first, I didn’t think it was that big of a deal. Sure, green texts are heinous, but I was willing to make that sacrifice. I figured, if we did end up together, we could raise our kids with both options, and when they were old enough they could make their own decisions about the phone they most identified with. But in the weeks that followed, it became more of an issue than I expected.

I was visiting my parents upstate for the weekend, and was surprised to admit that I missed the writer. I decided to go out on a limb, into uncharted emotional territory, and send him an “I miss you” text. Four hours later, when he hadn’t replied, I started to panic. My parents live in the middle of the woods, with bad service, but thanks to his Android From Hell there was no way to tell if he was playing hard to get, straight-up ghosting me, or if the text just hadn’t delivered. To quote @TheFatJewish, “Are green texts even getting to people?! It’s like throwing a message in a fucking bottle into the ocean.” I bit my nails until they bled, weighing over the risk of double texting. It was then that I knew: Green texts just cause too much unnecessary anxiety. It could never work.

It used to be that, when you started dating someone, you assessed the fundamentals of human compatibility: Do you want to have kids one day? Are you religious? Brooklyn or Manhattan? But today it’s: Are you the sort of person who talks to Siri in public? Because that’s a deal breaker for me. Sure, it’s romantic to think that opposites attract and love is blind or whatever, but I’m sorry, I just can’t accept that my soul mate would wear an Apple watch. It makes you wonder: In the modern world, where our phones have become an extension of ourselves, and our attitude toward technology is inextricable from our personality, is it possible to date someone who you’re not tech compatible with?

Last week, over tea in London, I posed this question to two of my friends, “Calvin,” a 28-year-old art director, and “Jane,” a 33-year-old TV exec (both fake names). “My friend has the same problem as you—she’s dating a guy with an Android,” Jane said, an ominous tone in her voice. “Honestly, it became a real issue in their relationship. But now they only message through WhatsApp, and everything’s fine.”

“The other night I slept with this lawyer from Happn,” Calvin chimed in, “and afterward he suggested we watch a movie, and then got out a PC. It was a literal Windows moment. I was like, ‘Does the Internet even exist on a computer like that? Does it have to be plugged into a wall? Do you want to make a spreadsheet while we’re at it?’ I was really turned off. Is there such a thing as a tech boner? Because if so, I had whatever the opposite of that is.”

But tech compatibility goes beyond simply what devices you use. For instance, Jane is a freak who barely uses social media (save for, like, three Instagrams of her dog a year). Her boyfriend, on the other hand, lives for the ’gram. “He spends his life looking for the next frame,” Jane told me. “Our life has become centered around social events that he thinks will be Instagrammable—or ‘gramorous,’ as he likes to say.”

According to Jane, her boyfriend’s obsession with social media has become a barrier between them. “We get into bed and I’m trying to be intimate with him, and he’ll just be scrolling, not paying attention to me,” she said. “Sometimes I literally feel like memes are destroying our sex life. It’s as if the intimacy of us being alone together is too much for him, so he needs social media to be in between us, almost acting as a buffer. I just can’t relate to his desire to be continually digitizing his life.”

I can somewhat relate. Last year, I was dating a guy—I’ll call him Ben—who had an approach to social media that I just couldn’t wrap my head around. Basically, Ben used Instagram as a way of earnestly updating his friends about what was going on in his life. Clearly, I found this bizarre. For instance, he’d Instagram himself in the kitchen, smiling with a bunch of vegetables, with the caption “About to cook a stew!” The sincerity terrified me. I, on the other hand, am more normal: I use social media as a way of tricking strangers into thinking my life is more interesting than it actually is, by means of ironic selfies at relevant social events, paired with vague captions that are meant to be interpreted as inside jokes but actually mean nothing.

So this one time, Ben convinced me to spend a day at the beach. I was hiding under a giant umbrella, online shopping on my phone, when out of nowhere he asked a stranger to take our photo “for Instagram.” I wanted to die. He then proceeded to make me pose in front of the ocean view, with our arms around each other’s lower backs, and expected me to smile as if nothing was wrong. When I recounted this trauma to Calvin afterward, he immediately understood my pain. “Oh, my god—no!” he shouted, covering his eyes and ears, as if watching a gory scene from a horror movie. “The posed-smiling-scenic photo is even worse than Instagramming your brunch.”

“I know,” I said. “I was so embarrassed; I felt like I was melting.”

“I would have literally melted,” he screamed. “I would have melted myself into a metallic puddle like The Secret World of Alex Mack, and gotten myself out of there.” I found it comforting to know that Calvin, too, found conflicting ’gram aesthetics grounds enough to dump someone over. “This is just the way the world works now,” he said. “You are what you ’gram. It’s not a coincidence that everyone who posts a ton of selfies is deranged.”

But I wanted a second opinion on the tech compatibility dilemma—a non-millennial, more romantic (read: French) opinion, so I met up with Olivier, a 53-year-old Parisian magazine editor. I explained my Android text trauma to him. “No, baby, no,” he said, shaking his head condescendingly. “Romance is above the color of your texts. What’s next—you dump someone because your laptop charger is American and theirs is from Italy? These are not the reasons why we connect with people.”

However, further into our conversation, Olivier began to change his tune slightly. I asked him: If a person’s choices around technology are directly related to their style,  and if style is directly related to sex, then is it actually that crazy to ghost someone because they use a Dell computer? He contemplated this. “Well, I can’t date a person who has bad shoes—that’s just impossible,” he said, matter-of-factly. “I haven’t reached the point where I won’t date someone who has a bad phone, but I don’t know . . . maybe it could happen?” He mulled this over a bit longer. “It is true that the Samsung phone is a bit repulsive to me.”

Eventually, Olivier admitted there is one form of tech incompatibility that he can’t tolerate. “The most obvious technological repellent is a bad TV,” he told me. “I couldn’t date someone who cared about always having the newest generation of television. Like those people whose TVs are curved—that’s embarrassing.” I asked him what sort of TV is not embarrassing. “Your TV should be old but not too old,” he explained. “Like two or three generations past, this way you’re not making a vintage statement, but also you’re not trying to keep up with the latest technology.”

Sure, maybe it seems slightly superficial to end a relationship over a TV or a cell phone. But before you judge, ask yourself this: If your choices around technology—from whether you’re one of those psychos who talks on a Bluetooth in public to whether or not you use the Hefe filter—are a reflection of your cultural values, then aren’t they also, to an extent, a reflection of your soul?

Karley Sciortino writes the blog Slutever.

Hair: Takashi Yusa
Makeup: Mariko Hirano

Sciortino in a Coach 1941 floral silk ruffle top, $495, for information: coach.com; Coach, NYC, 212.473.6925

The post Breathless: Is Dating Someone With an Android a Deal Breaker? appeared first on Vogue.

So the other night I was at a party, talking to a friend of a friend—one of those special types of New York artists who never actually make any art. I started telling The Artist about this sweet ER doctor I’d met on Tinder, when he choked on his mojito. “Ugh, Tinder—really?” he scoffed. “Are you not on Raya?” He was referring to the “elite” dating app that accepts only people in creative industries, unless you’re superhot, in which case: Who cares what you do? I shrugged and told The Artist that I just prefer Tinder—I’m a populist, not an elitist, ya know? I voted for Bernie Sanders in the primaries, that sort of thing. The Artist laughed condescendingly. “I guess Tinder makes sense, if you’re into . . . basic people.”

I’d been in this situation before. Multiple times, snooty friends of mine have turned up their noses at the mention of Tinder, assuming I would use a “normal” dating app only if I’d never heard of Raya, or if—shock, horror—I’d applied and been rejected. The consensus seems to be: Why go to a party that lets everyone in, when you could go to the party that accepts only a select few?

To gain access to Raya, which launched in March of 2015, you have to apply, and then an anonymous committee assesses your creative influence—aka your Instagram—and decides whether you’re cool enough to be in the club. (Hence why Raya is often called “Illuminati Tinder.”) The app has been growing in popularity, mostly due to press about its celebrity accounts—Joe Jonas, Kelly Osbourne, Skrillex, the hot one from Catfish, Matthew Perry (lol), Elijah Wood, and, of course, Moby have all been spotted.

But do we really believe that exclusivity makes something better? Sure, it’s sort of cool to swipe past lesser celebs while drunkenly prowling for sex on your phone, but you’re probably never going to sleep with those people. And the celebrities don’t represent the whole. In reality, Raya is full of C-List models, social-media managers who for some reason have a ton of arty photos of themselves emerging from the ocean, people named Wolf, people whose bios say things like “racing driver living between Monaco and Tokyo,” and, like, a million dudes who claim to be successful fashion photographers, but in reality have less Instagram followers than some dogs I know.

The problem, of course, is that whenever something is defined as being elite or exclusive, it tends to attract status-conscious douchebags. And while there’s a part of all of us that wants to be VIP or to get backstage or whatever, to participate in a system that prioritizes status in intimate interactions seems like a step too far. Essentially, Raya is the “you can’t sit with us” of dating apps.

Last weekend, while drinking vodka from a water bottle on Fire Island beach, I was complaining about the pervasive Raya worship to my friend Alan, a 33-year-old filmmaker. Alan has been in an on-and-off relationship with Raya for more than a year now (currently off). “Tinder lets everyone in, so you have to swipe through an amazing amount of garbage to find someone in your bracket,” Alan said, applying sunscreen to his nose. “It’s not that I’m anti-exclusivity or against narrowing things down, but Raya just seems to attract the wrong people. It’s the Soho House world of elitism: They want to draw young, cool artists, but they actually just attract rich people, and dudes in advertising who collect vintage cameras as decorations.” As for the girls on Raya? Alan rolled his eyes. “It’s an endless stream of photos of girls doing splits on the beach, or a photo from the one time they modeled for, like, Vogue Rawanastan or something.”

Alan’s main pet peeve about Raya is that, the few times he met girls through the app, what he’d thought was genuine flirtation turned out to be a networking ploy—they were just actresses who wanted work. “Raya’s not a dating app, it’s a social-climbing app,” Alan told me. “I think it’s good for surfer bros and models, but I don’t think many people are actually dating or hooking up on Raya. To me, it felt like more people were trying to connect professionally, but in a way that felt really gross and not transparent. It’s not like LinkedIn, where everyone understands that you’re there for work, and you can apply for a job. Instead, Raya creates the promise of something romantic, but it’s actually just people trying to be around other cooler people.” He shrugged. “If all a Raya date is going to get me is one more Instagram follower, well, I just don’t need that in my life.”

My experience has been somewhat similar. I’ve been on Raya for a year, but it’s the only dating app that I’ve never successfully met anyone through, compared with Tinder, Happn, and Bumble, which have all led to various degrees of dating, friendship, and casual sex. And Raya is the only app on which a match has asked me to tweet a link to their Kickstarter. Obviously, part of the reason we all want to be successful is so we can fuck better people. Work and sex are inextricably linked. But to institutionalize sex-as-networking is pretty disturbing. On Raya, how do you ever know if someone’s in your bed because they truly like you, or whether they’re just fucking you for your followers? The (minor-Internet-celebrity) struggle is real.

Besides its exclusivity, there are a couple of additional things that differentiate Raya from other dating apps. While most apps are location-based, Raya shows you users from all over the world. Rather than being restricted to dating within your neighborhood, like the commoners of Tinder, Raya’s users are global citizens—in a special bicoastal club. People on Raya don’t take the subway; they fly to meet each other. Or at least, that’s the impression the app wants to give off. Another distinction: Raya profiles are displayed in a video—a slideshow of your images plays along to a song of your choosing. Unfortunately, literally no one looks fuckable in a slideshow. Especially when it’s a slideshow of like five shirtless pics (one with a BFA watermark on it) to the soundtrack of Eminem’s “Lose Yourself,” something I endured during the research process of this article.

My friend Sarah Nicole, a 30-year-old writer to whom I often bitch on the phone, also thinks there’s a BS factor to Raya. “People on Raya aren’t hotter,” she said. “They’re just richer, or have better clothes, or they look better in their photos because they’re more likely to have been taken by a professional. Raya has a lot more to do with class than with other stratifications like attractiveness. It’s not an app that’s explicitly for people who are rich or white or in other ways privileged, but it’s for people who are only comfortable around their own kind, who already share their values, their aesthetic. I’ve met a lot of people in New York who are intensely tribalistic, and that’s what Raya caters to.”

And this is what really irks me about the app—it confuses wealth and status with creativity and coolness. Raya says it values creative achievements, but they’re not interested in all creative people—they’re interested in a particular type of particularly uncreative creative people. On Raya, I can’t find Jewish nerds who write for The Paris Review and stay in on Saturday nights to read Walter Benjamin instead of going to Paul’s Baby Grand. You can’t find hot young OccuPeeps. Recently, the app rejected a friend of mine—an Iranian-American Doctor of Philosophy. Why? Because Raya is like being back in high school, where the hierarchy of popularity is superficial and undeserved. Basically, people are praised for being conventionally attractive, having rich parents, hanging out at the “right” places, and wearing the “right” clothes.

“If you hang with a group of really popular kids anywhere, you often can’t understand why they are the popular ones, and they don’t know either,” Sarah said. “But their popularity is ensured by their complete acceptance of their popularity. Raya is an app that’s supposed to reproduce that sense of cliquishness—it’s like, for whatever reason, these people are approved as members of a club.”

Like in high school, the thing about cliques is, they breed conformity. On Tinder you have total autonomy: You’re presented with a bunch of random people and are free to choose who you think is hot or interesting. Raya is mob mentality: It’s an app about liking people that other people like. Sarah put it well: “On Raya you don’t have to be insecure about who you like, because someone has already looked at them and decided that they’re good enough. It removes the ‘embarrassing’ element of desire by adding a layer of mediation—your choice has been pre-approved by other invisible people in this network of cool.”

Karley Sciortino writes the blog Slutever.

Hair: Takashi Yusa; Makeup: Mariko Hirano

Sciortino in Missguided Bardot crepe bodysuit in white, $24, missguidedus.com

The post Breathless: Why Raya Is the Soho House of Dating Apps appeared first on Vogue.

In the run-up to the presidential election, it’s natural to reflect on our own politics and values. There are big questions to answer: What is my stance on abortion? What is my position on gun control? And, most importantly: Would I fuck a Republican?

My first instinct is to say that of course I wouldn’t. (Or at least not for free.) I have standards. As a liberal, sex-radical feminist, I am offended that I would even ask myself that question. But I’m not sure that’s an entirely honest assessment.

Don’t tell anyone I said this, but I have this recurring sex fantasy involving Speaker of the House Paul Ryan. Sure, he’s against abortion, gun control, and climate-change legislation, but he looks like a hotter, “bro-ier” version of Agent Cooper from Twin Peaks, and apparently my sexual imagination just can’t help itself. In my fantasy, Paul tears off his Sears blazer, throws me down on the bed, wraps his red tie around my wrists, and whispers Ayn Rand-ish nothings into my ear while making heated love to me, specifically, “Nothing comes between a great man and his desires—even consent.” It’s sort of twisted, but in fantasies we’re given carte blanche, right? Sometimes I feel weird about it.

But the real question is: Would I go there in reality? Obviously it would be impossible to seriously date a Republican. (I mean, what would we talk about? I just have no interest in guns, incest, or Frank Sinatra.) But maaaybe it would be acceptable to just bone a particularly hot one? It seems like it could be really exotic or sadistic in a good way. I wanted to know what my fellow fourth-wavers had to say on the subject, so I called a meeting with two of my closest friends: Kaitlin, a culture writer, and Kristen, a graduate researcher of film and sexuality, both 26, both with fiery red hair.

“I feel like sleeping with a Republican is like sleeping with a guy who’s shorter than you,” Kaitlin said. “You don’t notice in bed, you don’t really notice at dinner—like, how often do you actually notice? Maybe you notice if you need an abortion.”

“I could never fuck a Republican,” said Kristen, staunchly. “It would feel like a violation. I just don’t want that poison inside me. Ideology has material repercussions, and I don’t want to be contaminated by someone’s embodied ideologies.” I’d never heard someone refer to conservatism as a sexually transmitted disease before, so this was a new and exciting revelation.

“It depends what kind of Republican they are,” Kaitlin went on. “Like, are they the evil kind who are obsessed with bathrooms, or are they just rich? If you live in New York and you’re a creative person, you can’t bring a socially conservative person into your circle. It would be social suicide. And it’s just super tacky. But if they’re just fiscally conservative, then that’s fine, because they’ll pick up the check.”

“But if you’re fiscally conservative you’re inherently not socially progressive, because conservative ideologies cut funding for marginalized people,” Kristen countered. “So when Republicans claim to be ‘socially liberal,’ it’s just a platitude—they think it gives them a badge of strong morality, but it’s really peacocking, like ‘I’m a good person, but I make no effort,’ which to me is really gross.”

“I guess you’re right,” Kaitlin said. “If you’re an ally of the queer and trans communities, then you can’t fuck a Republican. Maybe I just don’t know what Republicans are actually like—I’m not sure if I’ve ever met a real one?”

All good points. But let’s pretend for a second that you’ve had a couple drinks, you’re horny, and a little desperate, and a hot young reactionary invites you back to his place. The question then becomes: Would the sex be good enough to warrant the ideological hangover you’ll be suffering tomorrow? Or, is the world as it seems, and all Republicans are simply rigid traditionalists who suck in bed?

Considering that Republicans tend to lack, you know, humor, charisma, subtlety, intelligence, and sympathy, it seems plausible that those deficiencies might cross over into the bedroom. But I mean, I’m not a scientist. I figured if anyone could answer this question, it would be the legendary porn star Nina Hartley. Along with being sexually prolific, Hartley is a sex educator, a former nurse, and the author of Nina Hartley’s Guide to Total Sex. So I called her up and asked: Can sexual prowess be drawn along party lines?

“I’ve had good sex with Republicans,” Hartley said with a sigh. “I met them at sex parties, when they were naked, and we never got around to discussing politics. But afterward, when we started talking, I realized ‘Ahh, I had good sex with a Republican!’ ” Still, being a hardcore liberal with socialist leanings, she avoids conservative dick when possible. “Basically, whether or not I sleep with a Republican is a question of: Did I meet them with their clothes on or their clothes off?”

At first, the idea of a Republican at a swingers party sounds a bit odd. But apparently it’s not: “At big swing events—like I’m talking conventions of two or three-thousand couples—a lot of the swingers go to church on Sundays, have 2.4 kids, and are pretty conservative politically,” Hartley told me. “Repression can make someone kinky, but it can also lead to someone being seriously unbalanced, because the more you squish something down, the weirder it comes out the sides.”

It’s often suggested that thwarted desire can lead to perversion—hence the slutty Catholic schoolgirl trope, and the substantial number of Hasidic Jewish men you find in BDSM dungeons. What’s the fun in being naughty if there’s no limits to violate, right? By that logic, maybe Republicans aren’t all the orthodox bores they seem to be. Could conservatives actually be more kinky than liberals?

I posed this question to Zhana Vrangalova, a PhD in psychology and an adjunct professor of human sexuality at NYU. “At this point, we know too little about the origin of fetishes and kink to be able to say how often this is a result of repression, versus, say, something biological, or some basic Pavlovian conditioning,” Vrangalova told me. “However, there are certainly some scholars and philosophers—Camille Paglia, for instance—who have suggested that kink and fetishes are a result of repression, and it’s quite likely that the sexual repression that is often part of the Republican ideology contributes to some forms of kink in some conservative people.”

In other words, though it’s so, so tempting, it’s impossible to make grand, sweeping statements about the sexual preferences and abilities of an entire sector of the population. “Being good in bed has nothing to do with your political affiliation,” Hartley said. “It has to do with what value you place on your sexuality: Are you respectful? Are you a giver or a taker? Do you care enough about sex, relationships, and communication to get good at it? Pleasure crosses boundaries—it crosses racial boundaries, age boundaries, and political boundaries. I wish it were simpler, but it isn’t.”

The question of whether to bang or not to bang a Republican is complex. But the more that I reflect on this deeply existential matter, the more confident I feel in saying that I wouldn’t go there, even if I knew the sex would be hot, or bizarre in a good way. That’s not because I’m close-minded or elitist. It’s because by having casual sex with a Republican, I would be enabling their hypocrisy.

When a person votes Republican, they’re effectively voting against my right to be an openly sexual person while protecting my physical and mental well-being. They’re voting against comprehensive sex education, against free access to contraception, against abortion, against gay rights, against sex work. They’re also more likely to hold sexual double standards, having less respect for me because I’m a “slut” while wanting to take advantage of my sexual openness. Sorry, but I swipe Left.
Karley Sciortino writes the blog Slutever.

The post Breathless: Would You Sleep With a Republican? appeared first on Vogue.

In a few days, I’m going to Cuba on vacation with a guy I’ve been sleeping with for eight years, but whom I’ve never once called my boyfriend. We live on different continents, but inevitably, a few times a year, we find each other somewhere in the world, have a few days of romance, and then go our separate ways. This arrangement would generally be called a friend with benefits, or a fuck buddy, or a romantic friendship, or perhaps even a relationship—with “no strings attached.” But let’s be real: There are always strings, aren’t there?

It was while planning this vacation that it hit me: The two longest relationships of my life have both been with men who I was never officially dating. Boyfriends and girlfriends have come and gone, but my friends with benefits have stood the test of time. I mean, eight years. That’s longer than I predict my first marriage will last. And while I can’t imagine being with my Cuba date “for real”—I mean, he’s a low-key homeless anarchist who once took me on date to his Sex and Love Addicts Anonymous meeting; there are red flags—I still value our relationship immensely. And he actually knows me better than a lot of my partners ever did. So what is it about the friends with benefits dynamic that is more sustainable, and often more transparent, than an actual relationship?

People are skeptical of fuck buddies. They’re like: How can you have sex with the same person, again and again, without falling in love? Or at least, without getting super-jealous and Fatal Attraction–esque? Some assume that one of the “buddies” is always being strung along, secretly hoping that the fucking leads to something more serious. Others dismiss fuck-buddy dynamics as just being compulsive sex that’s devoid of emotion. But why do things have to be so black and white? Surely it’s possible to find a middle ground between eternal love and zombie-fucking a stranger: a place where you can care about someone, have good sex, and yet not want to literally implode at the thought of them sleeping with someone else. Right?

Case in point: The most significant romantic friendship of my life was with an ex-editor of mine, whom I’ll call Malcolm. We started “a thing” five years ago and have yet to end it. When I met him, he was 45 and charmingly grumpy, and he would always tell me: “Sex is so perfect. Why destroy it with a relationship?” I’d go over to his apartment for a couple hours in the afternoons, we’d have sex (soberly, which meant I could actually cum), and then afterward we’d drink tea and complain about stuff. It was the best.

There were times when we saw each other frequently, and other times when things dropped off for a while, usually because one of us had a partner. And sure, when he would get a girlfriend I would be a little bummed out—I’m (unfortunately) not a sociopath—but it didn’t cause me to spiral into an emotional cyclone the way I would have if I’d been cheated on by a boyfriend. After all, disappointment comes from expectation.

Over time, Malcolm and I became really close. It felt like we had entered this secretive bubble of transparency—we were emotionally intimate, yet free of the burden of jealousy and ownership. We could spill our guts to each other because we didn’t have anything to lose. I told Malcolm about my previous relationships, my fantasies, my heartbreak. Once, he told me this long, complicated story about an affair he had with his cousin, adding, “That’s not something I tell most people.” Probably wise on his part, but I loved that story, as problematic as it may be, because I loved knowing something about him that no one else did. Sometimes it feels like we are more honest with our friends with benefits than we are with our partners.

This paradox always makes me think of that Mad Men episode when Betty seduced Don at their kid’s summer camp, well after they had both remarried. Afterward, when they’re lying in bed together, Betty says of Don’s new wife, “That poor girl. She doesn’t know that loving you is the worst way to get to you.” Harsh. But sometimes, romantic friendships can offer a type of intimacy that committed relationships can’t.

I was curious to know if Malcolm felt the same way I did about all of this, so last week (for strictly journalistic purposes), I paid him a visit. “Having a friend with benefits is great because it’s just—it’s just less annoying,” he said, smoking a cigar and dressed in an inexplicable beige silk onesie. “It’s more of a low-intensity intimacy. It’s not encumbered by obligations, which just lead to resentment.”

He then gave me that look—the one that means he’s about to admit to something despicable and blame it on humanity. “We are all selfish—we all live in this Ayn Rand–ish self-centered world, whether we like it or not,” he said. “When you’re in a friends with benefits situation, you don’t have go to the other person’s awful friend’s birthday party. But if you behave like that within a conventional relationship, it causes problems.

“With [FWB] there’s no illusion about the carnal aspect,” he went on, “so you can be really literal about it: You are two people who like and respect each other—and you like to fuck. There’s beauty and freedom in that honestly. And you can be playful. You can have your sex-power persona, or you can play the super-misogynist pig, or the bimbo, and it’s okay, because you’re not being judged. But if you change that dynamic into being a real relationship, then those games might not seem so sexy anymore.”

In other words, your fuck buddy gets all the good stuff about being in a relationship—the wild sex, the cuddles, the juicy dark secrets—minus all of the boring, would-rather-die activities that go hand in hand with commitment, like having to help assemble your boyfriend’s IKEA bed, or having to watch your girlfriend stab at the ingrown hairs on her bikini line while she watches the Kardashians. (That’s me—I’m the girlfriend who does that.)

Essentially, you’re taking a relationship and removing the creepy ownership of another human being, which leaves more room for hedonism and sexual exploration. Like, who do you want to bring to the sex party—your boyfriend or your fuck buddy? It’s a no-brainer. I’ve done so many things with fuck buddies that I never would have tried with partners, because I was too much of a jealous monster. (Like once I let Malcolm tie me to a dresser while I watched him have sex with my best friend. Unsurprisingly, it was literally awful, but now at least I can say I’ve done it?)

One of the most masterful fuck friends I know is my friend Casey, a 26-year-old Ph.D. candidate in English, who until recently had a FWB for 12 years. It started when she was 13, with a boy whose family spent every summer in the same beach town as she did. (Cute alert.)

Over martinis at Cafe Mogador, Casey told me, “When I’m dating someone, my immediate impulse is to be like, ‘Let’s lock shit down! My anxiety will decrease if I know you want to marry me in six years from now!’ Which is crazy and not hot or sustainable. But my longer romantic friendships have been a safe space. They’ve helped me figure out how to relate to someone romantically without the immediate trigger of, Where is this going?” In other words, having a fuck buddy is a great exercise in non-possessiveness.

“The thought of my boyfriend fucking someone else makes me want to wear his skin like a goddamned wetsuit,” she said, eyes bulging. “But with my fuck buddies it’s been like, ‘Oh, my God, tell me more.’ There’s almost a level of titillation to sex stories when it’s somebody who’s not your boyfriend. But why is that? I wish I knew, so I could bottle it and never be possessive ever again.”

For all the benefits of fuck friendery, it’s still possible for this dynamic to screw with your emotions. “At different points in our relationship,” Casey recalled, “it was hard to respect the line between friendship and flirting when he started dating someone, because I’d known him more intimately than his new partner. It’s like my morals were thrown out the window, and I felt this gross egotistical sense that I should come first, because I’ve been around longer, like, ‘Girlfriends come and go, but I’m forever.’” Sometimes it’s hard to accept that these dynamics usually have an expiration date, which tends to be when one person gets into a committed relationship. And, unfortunately, not only do you lose the benefits, but you sometimes lose the friend, too.

We are taught that all relationships that don’t end up in marriage are failures (because, ya know, hetero-normativity and patriarchal narratives or whatever). But subscribing to that belief ignores the fact that romantic friendships can be extremely fulfilling, enlightening, and straight-up fun. Of course, I’m not dismissing the benefits of committed, long-term, loving relationships. But both dynamics are valuable in their own right. And perhaps the reason romantic friendships are often so sustainable is they lack the soul-baring vulnerability and intense emotional investment.

Maybe the coolest thing about the fuck-buddy economy is that it allows women to actually enjoy sex in a casual way, without having to enter an old-fashioned ownership contract. It celebrates female sexual autonomy. It’s a chance to explore ourselves and other people. And in the interim, we can discover who we are and what we like, instead of committing to a pseudo-marriage we aren’t ready for.

The post Breathless: Why Friends With Benefits Are the Most Sustainable Relationships appeared first on Vogue.

Last week, I was walking through the East Village when I saw it: a two-headed monster coming toward me. It was a couple, arms outstretched meeting in hands tightly locked, taking up the entire sidewalk—a fence of human limbs—and making it impossible for anyone to pass through their relationship forcefield. I can’t stand when people do this. I’m generally not a fan of grotesque displays of public codependency, but hand-holding is by far the most offensive form of PDA. (Also, it’s not even comfortable to hold someone’s hand. It’s clammy and gross: Admit it.) I would sooner sleep with someone than hold their hand in public, and I think that makes me a very sane person.

As I got closer to the monster, I realized that one of its heads belonged to my close friend Kaitlin. I was shocked. I always thought of Kaitlin as being like me—i.e., someone whose crippling self-awareness prevents them from enjoying life’s basic pleasures. She waved hello at me with her free hand, shrugged apologetically, and just kept on walking. Thirty minutes later my phone rang.

“It’s not my fault, my boyfriend is a hand-holder!” Kaitlin said down the phone. “At the beginning I actually thought: What if I see one of my female friends on the street and I have to quickly pull my hand away, like, I’m not that person. But actually, we walk through Central Park holding hands a lot, and it’s just so nice. I feel like I’m Meg Ryan in You’ve Got Mail and can finally be like ‘New York in the Fall!’ Not in that embarrassing skipping-alone-in-loafers-talking-about-the-smell-of-bouquets-of-pencils type of way. But just because, for once, someone likes me as much as I like them. It’s like we’re co-branding!” Traitor.

Public displays of affection have always been a source of discomfort for me. When someone I’m dating puts their arm around my shoulders, I instantly get a shiver up my spine, and my instinct is to swat wildly at a pretend bee until they yank their arm away. I think it’s a symptom of being a socially anxious person in general—I’m constantly aware of how my actions are affecting and being perceived by other people, to a fault. (My desire to dull this awareness is generally to blame for my excessive drinking.) But primarily, I think my issue with PDA is that, often, it seems less done out of affection, and more to advertise that someone is your property—this person is mine, and everyone can see it, because I have them on what is essentially a human leash.

Sure, part of me wishes I could be that girl practically dry humping her boyfriend in line at Juice Press, oblivious to the judging eyes of the nearby yoga moms. I know that my PDA anxiety has led me to destroy many potentially romantic moments. Like this one time, I was having a drink with this guy who I’d had a crush on for more than a year, when he spontaneously leaned over to kiss me. But instead of being in the moment and enjoying it, I immediately tensed up and pulled away, and then said something really Mumblecore, like, “Bleh, sorry, I’m just so awkward about kissing in public!” Unfortunately, awkwardness is always cuter in the movies.

But even for people who are more relaxed about PDA than myself, there are certain things that are simply unacceptable. There’s elegant PDA, and then there’s PDA gone rogue. For instance, things that should never be done in public include: Having a conversation with your partner in a baby voice. Asking someone to marry you in a restaurant. Making out directly in front of subway turnstiles. (Be aware of your surroundings; your horniness shouldn’t impede anyone’s commute.) That emo type of sustained hugging that couples did in front of their lockers in high school. Anything that could be considered groping. And sitting on laps is just bizarre. You simply can’t have a proper conversation with someone when there’s a person straddling their crotch in a reverse cowgirl.

Other types of public fondling are more palatable. Like, if both people are super-attractive. (Sorry, but you know it’s true.) Or when it’s an older couple who are really smitten with each other. For instance, my parents, who have been married for 35 years, are still very affectionate—they’ll peck on the lips, and walk arm in arm—and seeing that feels reassuring, like proof of enduring love. And gay PDA always gets a pass, because it has a more political connotation. We need more LGBTQ public affection in order to normalize gay and trans relationships. But if it’s just me and some white dude, walking down the street hand in hand, just being totally non-oppressed and comfortable in our genders—well, can you think of anything more embarrassing in 2016?

That said, you shouldn’t overdo it. You don’t want to be one of those creepy couples who deliberately don’t stand next to each other at parties. The goal is to find a middle ground between flat-out ignoring your boyfriend, and parasitically attaching yourself to his back. It’s a delicate balance. And one I have yet to achieve.

Case in point: There’s this French writer I sleep with whenever he’s in town, and we have a tradition: We go for dinner, sit at a corner table, and he spends the entire evening trying to tongue me at the table, while I employ the bob-and-weave technique I learned in boxing class. He used to find it amusing, but recently we got into an argument about it.

“Americans are neurotic about the division between what’s private and what’s public,” he said, either condescendingly or just in a French accent. “You have these puritanical values, so you think that sex is necessarily bad, and a dirty secret. Sex has to be hidden, and as soon as you kiss in public, you break that rule. In Europe, kissing in public is still a transgression, but in America it’s a crime. At the end of the day, European people—or at least French people—are confident that their own emotions and desires are more important than bullshit social conventions or polite manners. When you kiss in a restaurant it’s because you can’t resist. The only reality is my desire and the rest is—is just a comedy.”

He’s so poetic, isn’t he? When he put it in those terms, it did sound sort of sexy. “American people are amazing performers,” he went on. “Janet Jackson shows her breast on TV, but she would never do that for her lover in a restaurant. On stage Rihanna touches herself, but she would never do that in a restaurant. So that means that in front of ten people they won’t do it, but in front of ten million people they will. It’s just proof that in America, everything is fake. Sexuality is a spectacle made for business, but not for real.”

To a lesser extent, I can relate to that. I’m happy to talk about my sexuality online, for an audience, but I just don’t think I can ever be the person making out at the bar. I guess in that sense I’m just very American. Or maybe I just have a complex about always appearing available. “You know,” the French guy told me, “your anxieties about PDA stem from your narcissistic obsession that other people are looking at you, or care what you’re doing. When really, everyone’s always just thinking about themselves. No one even notices you exist.”

Hair: Takashi Yusa
Makeup: Mariko Hirano

The post Breathless: Why I Can’t Stand PDA appeared first on Vogue.