Dating in your twenties can be scary. There are so many questions: “Where do I meet people?”, “Does he feel the same way?”, “More importantly, is this dude going to give me some kind of disease?” and “Is that guy I met on Match.com really a 65 year old pervert who is going to hack me up into a million pieces and stuff me in his trunk?”. Throw in the fact that in your twenties you’re also trying to handle school, work and all sorts of other real world stuff (while desperately trying to maintain your sanity) and the thought of going out to meet new people seems totally exhausting. At least this was my situation when I was in my earlier twenties. To counteract this I did a lot of “recycling”: I slept with my exes. There was a 2-year period during university where I basically re-dated & slept with the same 4 guys on a rotating basis. Al Gore would have been proud.
Everyone is different, but here are the reasons why I chose to keep repeating this pattern:
1. It’s Comfortable. I like sex however, break-ups leave you emotionally vulnerable. Sometimes it feels safer to be with someone who already knows you, rather than risk opening yourself up to someone new.
2. It’s Convenient. You can call them up at 2am and chances are they’ll come over, sometimes with a bottle of wine. Plus, they already know how everything works & what you like. If the sex is good, why waste a good thing?
3. It keeps the notches on your bed post to a minimum. One night stands have never been my thing. Faced with the choice of having potentially horrible sex with someone new or good sex with someone who’s already seen me naked, I opted to booty call the ex.
Something I’ve learned about myself: I sometimes have a really hard time letting go of people. Which brings me to reason #4, the most dangerous one of them all:
4. I still really loved him and I wasn’t ready to let go. With one particular ex, I knew it wasn’t healthy for me to keep sleeping with him after we broke up. However, I think I figured by sleeping with him I’d be able to hold onto a piece of him. Part of me hoped we’d get back together. I’m embarrassed to admit I ever felt this way, but it’s the truth. So, I settled for table scraps from him, instead of the full meal. Eventually, this kind of emotional starvation will make you go insane.
I thought that sleeping with my exes would simplify my life but instead it just made it even more complicated. In the case of my ex that I was still in love with, sleeping with him after we broke up turned into one of the most heartbreaking experiences of my 20′s. I’ve had time to reflect on that era of my life come up with a new list -
Why sleeping with your ex is a bad idea:
1. It delays the inevitable and prevents us from moving forward. To use the band-aid analogy, it always hurts less when you rip the band-aid off in one sweep. It’s painful but quick. Sleeping with your ex is the emotional equivalent of pulling the band-aid off one painful hair at a time. What could have been a relatively quick break-up was drawn out into a six month painful affair. My emotional and physical attachment to him prevented me from doing what I should have been doing during that time: getting over him, healing, moving on, working on myself, & meeting new, better guys.
2. “No Strings Attached” doesn’t work: In an ideal world, mature, consenting adults could have great sex together without any kind of emotional repercussions. In my experience the opposite is usually true. One person usually catches feelings and gets hurt. You can never guarantee that this won’t happen.
3. They’re using you! Looking back, my ex had the ideal situation: he got to sleep with me on a regular basis but without having to be committed to me. I wasn’t stupid. I knew I was letting him have his cake and eat it too. I lied to myself: “I’m using him just as much as he is using me”. However, every time he’d walk out my door in the morning and I’d be left to deal with my messy emotions, I knew this wasn’t true.
4. Lying to yourself is emotionally exhausting: in order to keep up this charade you have to lie to yourself A LOT. I told myself all the classic lies, “This doesn’t mean anything” “We’re just having fun” and the worst of all “I’m happy with the way things are”. Eventually though, you do have to deal with reality and reality hurts.
5. When the reality is they’ve met someone new- it hurts extra bad. When you date someone an emotional bond is created. By continuing to sleep with that person after you’ve broken up, that bond doesn’t get severed the way it should under normal circumstances. If I had taken time to get over this guy (instead of sleeping with him) I’m sure I would have hurt less when I found out he was seeing someone new. Instead, I found out he had met someone new while he was still sleeping with me – a smack in the face that hurt like hell.
6. Your ex may be sleeping with other people besides you. With the situation above, I found out I wasn’t the only girl he was seeing, there were many other girls. While he was sleeping with me, he was also sleeping with a new person he was dating, and three other people on the side. At least these were the ones I found out about. In this day and age, people shouldn’t mess around with this kind of stuff however, it happens. Remember to always practice safe sex. No matter how much you think you still love this person, engaging in risky behavior with them is never worth the cost to YOU.
This is all to say, I used to be the kind of girl who pulled the band-aid off, slowly, carefully, painfully. I’ve come to realize that its better to just rip it right off, even if you lose a bit of hair along the way. It grows back.
Has anyone else had a similar experience?
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