Somebody to Screw Around With

November 3, 2009 6:15 AM

How do I go about finding someone to sleep with on a regular basis, for fun?

Over the Halloween weekend, I got laid. Hooray! It made me remember how much I like sex, and want to do it more (though not with that particular person; he was sweet, but our levels of experience—he was close enough to being a virgin that he was nervous about everything—were too different for me to want to go back). But I'm not dating anyone right now, and I've never been the kind of person who can just waltz out and have people falling all over me.

I've never done this before; what do I do to go about getting myself a regular fuckbuddy? And, since the sex is the point, how do I go about finding someone who's good?

Assume that I'm taking necessary precautions regarding STDs and contraception—one of the reasons I want to sleep with one person on a regular basis is to lessen the risk of just occassionally hooking up with random people because I just want to have sex, which is my current pattern.

Anonymous email if I've forgotten any important details: [e-mail]
Other potentially relevant deets: I'm a woman and in New York.

posted by anonymous to Human Relations (14 answers total)

I'd suggest that you find a forum online with a group of people who may be numerous, diverse and geographically convenient enough to make hooking up possible. Announce to them your availability along with some way to get in contact with you and hope for the best.
posted by sambosambo at 6:34 AM on November 3, 2009 [3 favorites]

It seems to me that people often complain that OKCupid has so many men looking for casual sex that it's not very useful for men looking for casual sex. For a woman looking for casual sex with a man, though, that would seem to be ideal.
posted by palliser at 6:39 AM on November 3, 2009

Halloween has turned into a holiday for women to decide it is ok to have sex with a random stranger. Since you got laid, it may be that you don't give yourself license enough during the rest of the year. You'll have to be more aggressive to get what you want and basically ask for it from men. The common wisdom amongst men is that women don't want this and they act accordingly. If you wait around for guys to approach you, you'll get drunks and sex addicts, primarily.

Remember, bad sex is still sex.
posted by Ironmouth at 7:01 AM on November 3, 2009 [1 favorite]

Post a craigslist ad in the casual encounters section. You will get tons of responses for casual sex in mere minutes. Then it's up to you to weed your applicants from there.
posted by jameslavelle3 at 7:10 AM on November 3, 2009

Yep, agreed with all the above that you're not going to have any problem at all getting responses on CL; in fact you'll probably get hundreds. I do think once you've filtered through the unsolicited "dick pictures", poor spelling, and so on that you may be able to narrow down possibilities fairly quickly, so you may want to have respondents reply with a few lines about themselves so you have an easier time sorting through it.

And ditto what ironmouth said... it's not going to be that hard to seek it out from coworkers, friends, etc -- there's a lot of "nice guys" out there for instance who would have no problem with this. I've been there myself back in the day. And it's probably less risky than CL.
posted by crapmatic at 7:34 AM on November 3, 2009

Method #1: complain to a friend that you're having a hard time finding suitable casual hookups, ask if they know anyone they could hook you up with.

Method #2: Craigslist casual encounters posting. Or, if there's an alt-weekly paper in your area, check their personals section. Here in Seattle we have The Stranger, which has the Lovelab for more traditional dating and the Lustlab for hookups and kink. The ratio of men to women on the Lustlab is, like, 8 to 1, with most people looking for exactly what you're describing.

Method #3: OKCupid.
posted by palomar at 8:14 AM on November 3, 2009

though not with that particular person; he was sweet, but our levels of experience—he was close enough to being a virgin that he was nervous about everything—were too different for me to want to go back

I hesitate to make this comment, as it will bring up inevitable questions about me in people's minds, but here goes: why not take this guy under your wing and teach him the ropes? You could even be explicit about the arrangement, and my guess is that he'll still go for it and be hugely grateful.

If you want an analogy, think about real estate. If you're filthy rich, you can have the perfect home in the perfect location. If you're not, you have to buy a smaller place, or one in a less-than-desirable neighborhood, or you can buy a fixer upper and put some work into it (the man in question would fit into this last category, in this imperfect and somewhat insulting metaphor). It may be that he's less of a project than a total tear down, but if not, why not invest some time and energy into a guy that you can be fairly sure is STD-free and not a psychopath?
posted by UrineSoakedRube at 8:27 AM on November 3, 2009 [1 favorite]

OkCupid. For sure.

CL is good for anonymous, but OkCupid offers a lot more in terms of actually being able to know someone a little before meeting up with them.
posted by crickets at 8:55 AM on November 3, 2009

(Possible answer for U.S.R. — "sweet" and "near-virginal" often translates into "doesn't do NSA well." Still, you shouldn't assume blah blah blah and it may be worth a shot, especially if he was sweet-for-real and not just sweet-as-in-adorably-clueless-and-smitten.)

I totally endorse Craigslist and (even more so) OkC. But another approach would be to try some poly meetups. It's really going to depend on what there is in your area; some poly folk, and some poly groups, are sane and level-headed, while others are seething pits of crazy and pissed-off. But I have a hard time believing a city as big as NY doesn't have some sane groups, and in fact I'm willing to bet there are NY-area mefites who can point you to one if you ask around.

The advantage, if you find a good group — which, by the way, is likely to look more like a monthly coffee circle and less like a floating orgy — is access to guys who (a) won't treat you as a dirty little secret or think less of you for liking sex, (b) are more likely to be up-front about who else they're sleeping with and what precautions they're taking, (c) have some experience keeping everyone's expectations on the same page in this sort of situation, which makes the long-term stable fuckbuddy thing a lot more sustainable, and (d) okay, aren't guaranteed to be good in bed, but will at least likely be somewhat experienced which can be a step in the right direction.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not shilling for The Poly Lifestyle. I'm not saying you should identify as capital-P-Polyamorous or run off and move in with J Random Fuckbuddy and his wife and boyfriend or anything drastic like that. But if the goal is fun safe NSA sex, then yeah, this is a community with some expertise at making that happen in a good way.

('Course, where I've lived at least, the worthwhile subsets of the OkC and Craigslist userbase are basically online outposts of the poly community anyway, so these three solutions may boil down to a single mega-solution: thoughtful, nerdy, slightly promiscuous dudes seem to like to start clubs, and the solution is to give up on bars and parties and figure out where their clubhouse is.)
posted by nebulawindphone at 9:04 AM on November 3, 2009 [3 favorites]

Possible answer for U.S.R. — "sweet" and "near-virginal" often translates into "doesn't do NSA well." Still, you shouldn't assume blah blah blah and it may be worth a shot, especially if he was sweet-for-real and not just sweet-as-in-adorably-clueless-and-smitten.

Fair enough. Ultimately, there are too many subtle details for anyone except anonymous to figure out which of those are true, but I thought it might be worth considering.
posted by UrineSoakedRube at 9:21 AM on November 3, 2009

Well, for starters, send an email to everyone who has commented on this thread or who has marked the post or comments as a favourite.
posted by randomstriker at 10:06 AM on November 3, 2009 [1 favorite]

Being a female, you pretty much just have to post something even slightly witty on any number of forums. Any dating site will do. OKC, Craigslist, AFF, whatever. Your mailbox will fill up, since actual women just looking for a sex partner are vastly outnumbered by men looking for the same.

It oughta take you about 15 minutes from posting a craigslist ad before you have dozens of replies. And no, I'm not being snarky.
posted by drstein at 11:42 AM on November 3, 2009

Life is strange. Maybe something will happen to you like it did with me a few years ago. A friend brought over a friend and he ended up staying and never leaving. It was the best sex ever. It was like we were made for each other in the physical sense. Nothing else matched, so we were perfect as sexbuddies, but nothing else.
posted by VC Drake at 4:58 PM on November 3, 2009

follow-up from the OP

Over the past few months, I've gotten several emails from mefites asking whether I'd found anyone to be a regular hookup (and a few inquiring about the possibility of being that hookup). The answer to the question, until this weekend, had been no. One or two mefites who emailed asked me to follow up if anything ever worked out, to say what worked for me. I ended up going the OKCupid route. It was no different than any other internet dating, really; just more emails (of both the skeezy and not-skeezy types). I went out on a few dates that went nowhere, got kind of discouraged, and for the past month I've pretty much been ignoring the messages I get, never looking beyond the short previews that come to my email inbox. Finally, though, last week I got a message from someone who seemed to be looking for the same kind of thing, and who seemed to have actually read my profile and paid attention to what it said. We went out this weekend, and decided that we like each other well enough to be each other's regular hookup.

So that's it, really. I'm pleased it worked out. I was a little surprised at how similar this process was to normal internet dating; I suppose I expected it to be easier somehow, given that I wasn't looking for a boyfriend. I hope anyone else who's looking finds what they're after.

posted by jessamyn at 7:29 AM on January 25, 2010 [1 favorite]