tl;dr I'm kind of happy but also kind of worried that maybe I shouldn't be as happy as I am

July 11, 2010 7:54 PM

I'm emotionally attracted to different people than the ones I'm physically attracted to. Is this abnormal?

I'm 19 years old and still a virgin. Which I know isn't strange in and of itself; but I also don't particularly feel the need to rush in and have sex with somebody just for crying rights. I'm very very capable of lusting after people; I get bothered by the fact that I haven't really been physically intimate in any way for a year and a half; but at the same time I'm not particularly interested in the effort it would take to hook up with/commit to somebody I don't feel an emotional bond to. I don't know if this is normal.

I don't want for close friends, either. I don't have any enormous social circles, but I have many small circles of friends and I'm about as emotionally honest with them as I am with myself. When I need to confide in somebody, or get something off my chest, I've got a lot of friends I can turn to. But with those friends I'm not in a hurry to hook up. Some of them are dating other people, some are physically distant, some I'm just not madly attracted to.

I don't know. Maybe it's just the age group, but I feel pretty constantly surrounded by people who are either actively pursuing some kind of physical relationship (when they're not involved in one), or else by people who never seem to think about that sort of thing at all. And I don't know many people who'll readily admit to having friends as close as the ones I have, either, at least not in the numbers I find myself having. (Within these circles of friends there're a lot who feel the same way as I do, and the same quiet anxiety about whether we should all be doing more fucking than we are.)

I don't feel like this is particularly unnatural. I'm happy with my friends. I'm happy being outside of the dating world (I decided 18 months ago that dating is really not my thing, and that I'm not interested in a committed relationship, at least for the foreseeable future). But I worry sometimes that in this contented place I'm being an idiot and missing a world of sexual activity that seemingly everybody outside this closed little circle is experiencing. And when a close friend of mine starts dating, I feel this little twinge, like perhaps I should be doing that, and perhaps I'm somehow being an asshole or an idiot or a loser in some way I'm not immediately aware of, and therefore outside some normal realm of human activity. Am I being dumb for preferring close friendships to fuck buddies, even if those close friendships mean sacrifices like jerking off and occasionally despairing at other people finding the kind of happiness I haven't had in a while?

Or is this something that's normal, but maybe just not ordinary when you're a college student? In which case, is there some point at which I'll find people start being more and more like me, more contemplative and less fucklusty? I feel kind of like I'm skirting around another question without knowing what to ask, so if anybody's ever been in this situation and knows what'll enlighten me, I would be extremely grateful.

(I'll add that this isn't something I obsess about 24/7. I'm happy with my work and my school and my friends, more so I think than a lot of the people around me. Really content with life. But this is the one thing that keeps popping up and making me feel upsettish, so I thought it would be worth anonymously blurting out in the hopes that it's curable or at least ordinary.)

posted by anonymous to Human Relations (11 answers total)

As you get a bit older, you will stop asking the question, "Am I normal?", realising the answer is probably yes, but that even if it's no there's tonnes of weirdos like you anyway and it doesn't really matter.

When you want to have sex with someone, you want to have sex with them; don't overthink it, dude. If you're worried about not having any sex at all, then start hanging around groups of other students like yourself that get drunk a lot, it'll happen eventually.

There's no right or wrong amount of sex to have at any age: stop worrying about what other people are doing or think you should be doing, and enjoy being 19 and in college.
posted by smoke at 8:01 PM on July 11, 2010

I'm happy being outside of the dating world (I decided 18 months ago that dating is really not my thing, and that I'm not interested in a committed relationship, at least for the foreseeable future)....

and then this:

And when a close friend of mine starts dating, I feel this little twinge, like perhaps I should be doing that...

Are you really indifferent to dating, or have you just sublimated your desire to date because that's easier than actually doing it? Do you see the contradiction in these two sentences?

Or is this something that's normal, but maybe just not ordinary when you're a college student?

Yes, it's normal. Lots of people get confused about love and dating. I'm trying to unpack what you're saying about your friends and how that relates to dating...it's a bit unclear what you're asking. You can have your close friendships and fuckbuddies; I'm confused as to why you think they're mutually exclusive.

Bottom line, go out on a date when you meet someone you find attractive. Yes, "actively pursue" that person. Take chances and prepare yourself for being exposed, and the possibility of rejection. These are easy for me to type out, but very hard to do in action. But, like a muscle, dating gets easier the more you do it. Probably.
posted by zardoz at 8:08 PM on July 11, 2010 [1 favorite]

I don't think that's weird at all. There's kind of an idea in our society that young people, esp. young men, should be all about the sex all the time, which isn't true for everyone. Sex is great and all but it's a fine thing to wait until you meet someone you're both sexually and emotionally attracted to. (I think for some people, going through a stage of fucking everything possible is like binge drinking; it's something to do to demonstrate you're vigorous and alive, to themselves and to others.)

As for whether the discrepancy between emotional and physical attraction is normal: of course it is, think about it the other way around: people are always finding themselves sexually attracted to people who aren't good for them emotionally.

OTOH, dating esp. in college doesn't have to be a committed relationship any more than you want it to be. If you find someone you're really emotionally attracted to and also physically attracted to and just want to be with now without worrying about The Future, well, nineteen is the right age to do that.
posted by hattifattener at 8:12 PM on July 11, 2010

Am I being dumb for preferring close friendships to fuck buddies

NO!!!

At no time in your life are your peers having as much sex as they're leading you to believe. The gap between this perception and the reality probably peaks around your age.

With any luck at all, you will indeed find some friends who are more interested in thinking than in screwing. The bad news is they'll always be in a minority, but the good news is they tend to form more loyal friendships and therefore tend to accumulate.

The better news is that you'll eventually find someone who both has a brain and is attracted to you, and v/v, given ANY luck at all.

NOTHING worse than pushing to find romance simply because you think you oughta wanna be doing that, especially at your age.
posted by randomkeystrike at 8:13 PM on July 11, 2010 [1 favorite]

I'm very very capable of lusting after people; I get bothered by the fact that I haven't really been physically intimate in any way for a year and a half; but at the same time I'm not particularly interested in the effort it would take to hook up with/commit to somebody I don't feel an emotional bond to. I don't know if this is normal.

Yes, of course it is normal.

It is perfectly normal to not feel like being sexually/romantically involved with anybody just now. I've gone up to three years at a time without being particularly interested in anyone (or even interested in the idea of finding someone I might be interested in). And I don't consider myself weird. There will probably be times in the future that I am happily single for longer.

It is also, in my opinion, a good thing that you are not interested in becoming romantically involved with someone you don't feel an emotional bond to. Doing so would be dishonest, in my opinion, and you would only end up hurting the other person.

I will also say that, in my late 20's, I have plenty of friends who didn't date a whole lot in college (some who didn't date at all, and a good number who graduated as virgins). It doesn't seem that unusual to me. Probably at some future point you will find someone who you know you want to pursue either a sexual or romantic relationship with, and, well, it'll just happen. Don't worry so much about it.
posted by Sara C. at 8:15 PM on July 11, 2010

If you are curious if you are missing out on extra happiness by not dating/hooking up/being in a relationship, why don't you give it a try?
posted by gumtree at 8:18 PM on July 11, 2010

Also zardoz has a good point about considering whether you're telling yourself you don't want to date simply to avoid the difficulty and pain of dating. It is difficult and painful, but like jumping into cold water it's not as bad once you're doing it as it seems when you're just contemplating it. Okay, sometimes it is.

is there some point at which I'll find people start being more and more like me, more contemplative and less fucklusty?

There are a ton of those people around at any age, but maybe you don't notice them as readily?
posted by hattifattener at 8:22 PM on July 11, 2010

This is a perfect time to figure out what turns your crank and what you can't stand. Your opinions on who is "emotionally compatible" will change a lot over the next five years, and it's best to get some actual data rather than contemplate your navel. Try sensibly indulging in the people you are lusting after, some of them may turn out to be much nicer people than you think.
posted by benzenedream at 8:58 PM on July 11, 2010

internet fraud detective squad, station number 9: "The older the get the less invested I am in classifying myself (and others) as various types or fitting into one mold or another."

At the same time, I think that the older you get, the more these groups start to break down as well. I think relationships definitely become easier for contemplative, shy people as they get older— especially for young men.
posted by anonymuk at 9:13 PM on July 11, 2010 [1 favorite]

You've basically described me and my group of friends when I was at the end of high school.

Within these circles of friends there're a lot who feel the same way as I do, and the same quiet anxiety about whether we should all be doing more fucking than we are.

I had a big group of friends at that time (I was 18), and most of us weren't doing that much fucking. We were also smart and, dare I say it, just a little bit into ourselves--thought we were a bit superior. Not because we didn't have much sex, but because we were so smart and we were all such good friends and had such great connections with each other. Not that that's how you seem--you come off as very grounded and humble.

But I worry sometimes that in this contented place I'm being an idiot and missing a world of sexual activity that seemingly everybody outside this closed little circle is experiencing.

I can't say how it'll go for you, but I do know that when I lost my virginity, I did feel exactly like this in retrospect. But that doesn't matter, because you're not really missing out on anything. Sex will come eventually, and then you'll be having it for a long time, and you won't even think about it. Others may disagree, but IMO a life in which you're having sex isn't necessarily better than one in which you're not, especially if you don't know what you're missing. It sounds like your current life is great, and for the most part uncomplicated by all your friends fucking all your other friends and the wonderful unisex (it sounds like) nurturing environment that you have now being dashed apart by the ensuing multi-pronged fallouts. That is a cool and special situation you have there, a group of friends not fucking each other, and you probably won't have it again, so appreciate it and learn from it now, and you'll look back on it fondly.

As to your above-the-fold question that the rest of your question doesn't really seem to be about: I'm emotionally attracted to different people than the ones I'm physically attracted to. Is this abnormal?

Yes, this is totally, comically normal. Huge problem of humanity. However, if I may project just a little bit from my own experiences, it sounds to me like the subtext of what you're saying (especially here: is there some point at which I'll find people start being more and more like me, more contemplative and less fucklusty?) may be something like: "I am smart and I like to be around smart people, yet sometimes I am also horny and from what I can see it is mostly dumbish people who are fucking all the time, and I'm not interested in having sex with a dumbish person." When I was young, and I think when a lot of people are young, this is not a delusion but in fact an accurate description of the state of affairs you find yourself in. From talking to Some Europeans I Know it sounds like things may be different there, and I don't know much about coming of age in other parts of the world, but I think there might be something in North American culture that promotes the idea that "sexy" and "smart" lay at opposite ends of some mysterious axis. In turn, I think this influences--or perhaps compounds some natural biological differentiating--how young people in North America organize themselves into various subcultures. "Sex-having and dumb" vs "not-sex-having and smart." As you get older you may find that, to some degree, "dumb" and "smart" in some ways is a matter of cultural alignment rather than a mental property of people. Likewise, to some degree, "hot" vs "not-hot" is a matter of dressing and behaving rather than a physical property of people. My point is that I think that in North America, maybe because of puritan roots, maybe because of Hollywood, maybe for other reasons, the culture of young people gets differentiated along "dumb/sexy" and "smart/not-sexy" lines (even when the scatterplot of actual young people may not describe that dichotomy any more than say "shy/lusty-as-fuck" vs "bubbly/not-that-sexual"). This is known colloquially as "high school." And I sense that the situation you find yourself in may look something like this, and you might be like "Damn! I want a sexy smart person but that type of person doesn't exist! Shitttt, what to do?" (Again I may be totally projecting).

The thing though that you learn when you get older, is that, luckily, those people totally, totally do exist. In fact there are tons and tons of them. I've been equivocating a bit between "hot" and "sexy," but I'll come out and say it: there are a ton of hot smart people. You'll discover this eventually, and it will be wonderful, and it will make you want to raise your game yourself.

In fact, if you're in college, you might already be in this world, but not know it. It just occurred to me that--I'll switch to first person because I really don't want to project anymore than I have been doing--because in my high school it was culturally impossible to be both "hot" and "smart," even if you actually were both, I was educated into thinking that the two were actually mutually exclusive categories. This is real. Because I had no example of someone who was good-looking and smart, I came to jump to the conclusion when I saw someone who was good-looking that they were dumb (this was also probably exacerbated by my not being intimate with the "hot" people, and so only being exposed to their public personalities, which I'm sure were stupider than their private personalities). So this prejudice persisted until I met--actually it probably persisted until I actually became involved in a relationship with someone who was both hot and smart. And even then it took a lot to disabuse me of that terrible prejudice. That "person" was a girl, and I suppose it's likely gender stereotypes played into that quite a bit too.

Anyway. The point of this long, project-y comment is that if you happen to be under the impression that smart, sexy/hot people don't exist, I am here to deliver to you the wonderful news that they do, and they are wonderful.
posted by skwt at 10:49 PM on July 11, 2010 [2 favorites]

It seems to me that you're asking separate questions here.

In response to the one above the fold, I'll ask another question in response. What makes you think that people you're physically attracted to can't possess the mental qualities that you're attracted to?

In response to the rest of the post: Yes, you're normal. Asking these questions is normal and necessary for you to figure out that these questions are ultimately nonsensical. What does normal mean to you? Having the things you wish you had that you see other people getting? What makes you think they're normal? What would normal mean in referring to another person?
posted by cmoj at 12:03 PM on July 12, 2010