When love goes on vacation

Womanly virtues Friday
There is a piece up on Jezebel that has gotten a lot of attention. It's a familiar, if not clichéd, story: girl has sex on first date, boy never calls again. She, her name is Anonymous, describes the sex as "a fictional f**k" but it would be more accurate to describe it as love going on vacation.

Maybe this has happened to you. You go on vacation somewhere, or go to camp or something and meet someone and something romantic happens. There doesn't have to be actual sex or even a kiss but there is this intense sexual interest and you can tell it goes both ways. This happens a lot in teen years. It's almost a necessary rite of passage.

It also happens in adult life. You see someone and something goes ping!

If you're lucky, you never see the person again because that way you can treasure the memory. If you're not so lucky, you see them again and find out (usually rather brutally) that you don't have any place in their life.

Worst case scenario is that you keep looking for this sort of love on vacation the rest of your life and never gain the maturity and experience to make love work back in your real life. Looking back on my own life, I can see how I might easily have done this.

Anyway, if we look at the story we can see how Anonymous has gone wrong, for she goes wrong at just about every step.

Here's her first mistake:

I went on a date a month ago with a boy I met on an online dating site.

Every day a woman is surrounded by men who are interested in her for sex and love. She sees them on the street, on the bus, in the hall of her building and at work. Every single one of those men comes with social connections (some with very little social connection, some with a lot). But go online and you can meet guys who have no social baggage. It's like meeting someone while on vacation. You don't know anything about them so your imagination takes over and, because you want to be pleased, you only see good.

And notice how incredibly low her expectations are, she has settled for a guy because he doesn't seem like a disaster.

"Met" meaning he'd sent me a few witty messages and his pictures were decent enough to warrant an IRL pass. "Date" meaning we made plans to grab a quick drink in Brooklyn after work. 

And then he turns out to be pretty good looking and her "expectations leap". (And was he so good looking? That too may be her imagination.)

They have drinks (plural) and then go to several bars. Again, why? Was there something wrong with the first bar? Meanwhile, at least one drink per bar. (Keep in mind that most women start to get drunk with drink number three.)

And then the guy asks her to come home with him. He offers to pay her cab home. That's an interesting detail we'll come back to. But first her reasoning:

... I—like many women I know—harbor a quiet but persistent internal voice that cries, "If you like him, don't go!" The voice that says men don't respect women who sleep with them too quickly. The voice that says despite the fact that you're turned on, you're a grown-ass adult and goddamn it you want to, as the female you should be the one to decline, to demur, to hold off for another night.

She wants a relationship? Really? And she thinks meeting complete strangers she hooks up with through online dating will get her this? Is she really that stupid? I doubt it.

But let's get back to that cab fare, if Anonymous really is the "grown-ass adult" she claims to be then why the hell can't she pay her own #%&*ing cab fare?

And notice that her implied alternative  choice is that she should have been more manipulative. Hold back on him and then you'll get a relationship. Maybe. Alternatively, he might wait until you give him sex on the second or third date and then never call back again.

So, as my brother-in-law likes to say, We can all guess what happened to her.

But the way my date kissed me up against the brick wall outside the subway stop was enough to convince me my internal voice was an antiquated Debbie downer, squawking nonsense irrelevant for the modern woman.

I went to his house. We headed straight to the bedroom. Sex — intense, unexpected, rough and satisfying. Afterwards, as promised, he called me a cab.

 Well, at least the sex was good. Rather, it was as good as sex between two strangers can be. And it's all downhill from there.

By 3 a.m. I was home. And utterly freaked out.

Hung-over and exhausted at work the next day, I spent hours worrying about what had happened. I had doomed our prospects, I thought. I'll never see him again. I blamed myself. I felt like I should have waited but I couldn't intellectually articulate why.

We were both consenting adults. We weren't that drunk. Why shouldn't I have gone home with him?

Do you think this was the first time this has happened to her? Of course it wasn't. She already knows how it is going to play out. She's done this several times over and what really bothers her is not that the guy never calls back but that she keeps getting pulled back to this sort of encounter. (By the way, notice how deep the self-deception runs here: She says "We weren't that drunk" one paragraph after admitting she was hung over. You go though a whole lot of getting drunk before you get to hang over territory.)

And there is something else. Read these two excerpts and see if you can spot an interesting subtext:

I went to his house. We headed straight to the bedroom. Sex — intense, unexpected, rough and satisfying.

And later she says, 

I hashed this over with multiple friends during the next few days. ... Another brought up respect — if he wanted a real relationship with me, he would have proceeded with more respect for my body.

Pinky, are you thinking what I'm thinking? Yes, even Pinky can figure this one out. It's not that the guy had her and left it's that he peeled back a layer and got access to something very intimate and secret about her. He roughed her up a bit and that really turned her on. And letting herself go that way, while it got her very aroused and a great orgasm, also left her exposed and vulnerable. Then he left and never called back because it just didn't mean that much to him.

She told her mother about it. Well, she told her what she describes as the "bare bones" version.  And her mother gave her what was probably well-intentioned advice:

When you first meet someone, she said, you don't actually see them. You see a flimsy construction of their personality, created by your interpretation of the signals available. The way they make eye contact. How they interact with the bartender/waiter/homeless man asking you for change. The facts they choose to divulge about themselves. Because you have no other point of reference, every little detail resonates with added significance. Your mind, faced with a scarcity of information, is forced to create a projection of them.

Well, yeah, if you meet them online!!!

Here's an alternative thought, maybe the problem here is not an excess of imagination but rather a lack of imagination. Anonymous is surrounded by men she actually knows, who know her friends and family, who have all sorts of social connections. Guys she could take a long time getting to know before having an actual date with and then not having sex with them on the first date. Could the real problem be that she can't imagine having the kind of sex she craves—intense, unexpected, rough and satisfying—with them? That she has always gone for the easy fantasy sex all her life and has no idea how to have a fully adult relationship with someone who is fully adult?

Millions of other women have managed this. What is it about the current generation of women that they are such helpless children?