Member-only story
The Best Reason a Guy Ever Gave for Why I Should Sleep With Him
One of the most empowering messages of my life was actually an attempt to seduce me.
At the height of my quarterlife crisis, I was living in Shanghai, at a mouse-and-roach infested hostel, next to one of the most fetid wet markets I’ve ever smelled in my life. We’re talking offal and fish guts perennially rotting in the street outside my door. I was broke. Technically homeless. Roughly 8000 miles from everyone who loved me. Circumstances were not ideal. And this was when and where I met a great guy we’ll call “Alex.”
Alex was my neighbor, and from the night we met, people assumed we were an item, so palpable was our chemistry. I sensed within hours that we’d been lovers in a past life, a certainty that only deepened with time. Unsurprisingly, we became friends.
Also unsurprisingly: we ended up in bed together.
And it was fantastic.
Normally, one would want amazing sex to continue. Particularly if the partner in question (like Alex) was caring, interesting, and hot. Right?
Well, I didn’t.
Given my ongoing quarterlife crisis, I didn’t have the emotional bandwidth for anything more than a platonic friendship with Alex. He, on the other hand, pretty much immediately started raving after our night together about how much “potential” we had. How great we got along both in and outside the bedroom. We should follow that spark, he said. See where it led, maybe see if we’d become something more. Maybe let’s try dating. And definitely let’s keep hooking up. Thus we found ourselves at a pizza place one afternoon, a few blocks from the hostel, discussing our hypothetical future sex life.
I gave Alex my litany of reasons for rejection, like the quarterlife crisis, or how my grinding poverty functioned as an anti-aphrodisiac, along with some other emotional confusions that had nothing to do with him. But I also told him this:
“Look. You keep talking about our ‘potential.’ It already sounds like you’re going to feel something more. But I don’t see us going in a romantic direction. So why should I risk carrying on and letting you develop feelings? It’ll just get complicated…
