Having Feelings, Part 1
Last month I was in Los Angeles, on a self-imposed writing retreat, aka Tindering. I matched with Josh, a gangly 36-year-old with protruding ears and a body like a line drawing. It’s L.A., so Josh is an actor. We met for drinks in Los Feliz, and he talked very enthusiastically about a “lesbian feminist haunted house” he’d been to (twice), which I took as a good sign. I told him that I was in L.A. making a documentary about Tinder, but that I promised our date wasn’t research. He told me that he was acting in a Web series about Tinder directed by one of the actors from Girls, but that he promised our date wasn’t research. It all made total sense.
We went back to his apartment and watched a clip of his Web series in which he’s fucking a girl from Tinder in his bed—the same bed we were lying in. It was all very meta. In the show, after sex, he instantly starts to find his date intolerable and wants her to go home. In the show, it’s funny.
We had sex, and it was really great. I was feeling really happy about the whole evening, and in my post orgasm bliss, I started to nod off. I felt a tap on my shoulder. “Umm,” he said, “Were you planning on sleeping here? Because I find it hard to sleep with other people in my bed.”
“Are you kicking me out?” I asked. It was almost 3 a.m.
“No, you should do what you want,” he said, trying to be polite, though it was transparently clear that he wanted me to leave. “It just will be hard for me to sleep if you decide to stay.”
I couldn’t help but feel sort of hurt, but then I immediately felt like a girly loser for having feelings, so I just quickly masked my sadness with defensiveness. “You know,” I said, my voice rising to a defensive register. “I think I’ll stay, because I don’t have any issues sleeping.” I then rolled over and anxiously pretended to pass out.
A few nights later, over steak at Cafe Stella, I whined about this to my friends. “Am I being too sensitive?” I asked. “Maybe he really does have sleep issues. He asked me out again. If I go, should I bring up the sleepover thing, or is that weird?”
“Don’t bring it up,” said Casey Jane, an artist who wears black lipstick and speaks in a dry monotone. “It’s better to seem unaffected. Besides, you met him on Tinder.”
“It’s not a Tinder thing, it’s a human being thing,” said Alexi, sipping her third vodka soda. Alexi writes the blog ImBoyCrazy, hosts a dating advice radio show, and is kind of like me—meaning, she has great advice for everyone—except herself. “I don’t like sleepovers with someone I don’t really know either, but now I always let guys sleep over at my house. If I was willing to have sex with someone, then I should be able—or at least try—to handle the intimacy of sleeping next to them. I used to kick guys out, because for years I assumed that men don’t have feelings, but apparently that’s not actually true.”
“Maybe the rule should be this,” I suggested. “The guest can decide to go home, but if the guest wants to stay, then the person whose house it is shouldn’t kick them out. Right?”
We decided to ask our hot waiter for his opinion. “It’s not cool to straight up ask a person to leave right after sex,” the hot waiter said, confidently. “But if you want them to go, you basically just keep saying, ‘God, I have so much to do tomorrow’ over and over, and usually they get the hint and decide to leave themselves.”
“See, I’m old school,” Alexi sighed wistfully. “I prefer the guy to pretend he wants me to sleep over, so then I can be the defensive one that’s like, ‘No, I’ll just leave.’ And then the guy should offer to pay for the Uber.”
Having Feelings, Part 2
Gabe is a successful screenwriter in his mid-40s. We’ve slept together maybe 12 times over the past two years. It’s very casual—we’ve never once had a sleepover, actually—and it’s never felt like it was going to evolve into something serious. But we’ve also become somewhat friendly outside of hooking up. (We sometimes give each other writing notes, for instance.) A couple months ago, Gabe and I were drinking martinis at Soho House, feeling very cool and entitled and spontaneous, when we suddenly decided that we should have a threesome.
I texted Kaitlin, a generally DTF writer who’s one of my closest friends. “You’re her type,” I said. “What’s her type?” he said with a smile, raising a cocky eyebrow. “Oh, you know, quasi-famous perennial bachelors who are always searching for the one despite their unrealistic expectations.” He frowned and gulped his cocktail.
Back at his West Village apartment, he put on some embarrassing earthy instrumental music and opened a bottle of wine. Kaitlin showed up drunk, and we all started making out on the couch. Slowly, we moved into his bedroom. As it happened, they were more into the whole situation than me, and I sort of fell into the role of spectator.
“Isn’t it hot watching us?” he asked. I said yes with mediocre enthusiasm, then got up and went to the kitchen for more wine. There I got distracted, nosing through his kitchen cabinets—quinoa and chia seeds, to match the music. By the time I came back, they were done. I didn’t make any efforts to get things going again, and neither did they. I wasn’t very bothered by it, honestly—on a scale of 1 to 10, my annoyance was maybe like a 4—so I just brushed it off. Fifteen or so minutes later, Kaitlin and I left, walked to Raoul’s, and talked for an hour about a friend who’s getting divorced.
Over the next couple months, I never heard from Gabe, but didn’t think anything of it. Kaitlin and I talk on a daily basis, however, so I was a bit thrown when, last week, I got this text from her: “I’m on my way to a date with Gabe. Just wanted to check that was okay?” Apparently, after our hang, he found her on Facebook, and one thing had led to another. I had a sharp pain in my stomach. My first thought was: Is it possible to actually throw up your ego? I immediately texted Gabe: “You’re fucking Kaitlin?” He replied quickly with a blushing-face emoji, and then, “Haha, yeah wanna come?” To which I replied: “Kill yourself.”
Now, I’m the first to admit that I have a short fuse and a bad temper. I’ve been known to have “episodes.” But I’ve been trying to chill on the anger front, so I called up my most rational friend, a late-40s restaurateur who never has any relationship problems because he never has any relationships.
“It’s just bad threesome etiquette!” I snapped. “It’s shady. If you care about someone at all, you don’t fuck their best friend. And now I can’t sleep with him anymore, out of principle. Just because a relationship is casual means that no one’s supposed to have any feelings? Sluts have feelings too, okay!”
He let out an exasperated sigh: “How can you be mad that your best friend fucked your fuck buddy when you literally facilitated your best friend fucking your fuck buddy?” He wasn’t saying what I wanted to hear. “You’re applying traditional rules to untraditional behavior. I don’t think you have the right to be angry about a threesome ending poorly. We’re humans. People naturally pair up.”
“That’s not true about threesomes,” I said, spitefully. “And you sound old.”
“I am old.” He hung up.
I was confused: Was I “allowed” to be hurt by this? Did I actually care, or did I just feel rejected and need to get my ego in check? I tried to rationalize: It’s unattractive to be possessive; you’re not in love with this guy; you ultimately want Kaitlin to be happy. So I texted her, and told her that it was fine—I didn’t care.
A few nights later, I had dinner with Kaitlin, thinking I was fine. A couple martinis taught me that I wasn’t. As soon as Gabe’s name was mentioned, all the feelings I was pretending not to have erupted into a full-on “episode.” I’ll spare myself the embarrassment of reliving the entire thing, but let’s just say that I shouted, “Fuck you! I never signed up to be your pimp!” over the table at a packed Narcissa.
I woke up the next morning feeling like the world was an unfair place and that I was its victim. I decided to really indulge in my self-pity and started scrolling through the Instagrams of various supermodels. Then the doorbell rang. It was a delivery of a dozen white roses from Kaitlin, with a note that said, simply, “I’m sorry.”
This made me feel worse, because I was probably the one who should have been apologizing. I got back into bed and looked for an angry text from a different friend, whom I’ll call “Allison.” A few months earlier, I’d had a one-night stand with Allison’s ex-girlfriend. I didn’t think it was a big deal—they’d only dated for a few months. (“Eww, why does she care?” I thought.) Now I saw the irony. Now I realized that, in trying to make ourselves into über-casual, sociopathic robots, it’s easy to forget that our actions might actually affect another person. I took the roses from Kaitlin, wrote my own apology card, and had them sent to Allison.
Karley Sciortino writes the blog Slutever.
Hair and Makeup: Ingeborg
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