“It’s not serious, we’re just hooking up.”
I’ve heard this more times than I can count. It seems to be Gen Z’s, “They might just be the one.”
Personally, I’m of the mind that everything really is that deep, so I’ve long been a skeptic of casual sex. I’d be lying if I said sleeping with someone doesn’t leave me incredibly involved. Call it soul ties, call it qi, the transfer of sexual energy has long been said to leave lasting impressions on our souls.
But I mean, really, who has time for all that? My generation is insatiable with our wants — and impatient, too. Blame the rampant dopamine addiction, blame Mark Zuckerberg. Our primal desires are more accessible than ever before. Your favourite meal can be at your door in 20 minutes. We’ve grown used to convenience.
In place of a slow-burning courtship, I can select partners with a brief swipe or Netflix hangout. Physical connection often comes before the emotional. Casual sex is quick, it’s fun and if lucky enough, it’s mutually rewarding. Our bodies pump out feel-good chemicals to encourage bonding, and we enjoy the temporary high of pleasure without obligation. In fleeting moments, it seems we’ve hacked the system.
But is it really possible to get the gratification we crave without getting caught up in the messy emotions and attachments we want to avoid? Is casual sex ever possible, or is it simply another oxymoron we use despite knowing better, like civil and war?
To investigate, I asked 15 of my friends, all of whom are in the last year of their degrees or have just graduated — meaning that combined, they’ve seen just about every version of campus romance (or whatever the opposite of romance is).
Spoiler alert: 5/5 men polled responded yes, casual sex exists, while 8/10 women replied no, it doesn’t.
The casual sex deniers agree it’s a rigged game.
“There’s always someone who’s getting what they want out of it, and someone who’s not,” one of my girlfriends said. One person always falls in love.
If casual sex is a clean, even exchange, there shouldn’t be so many participants who feel short-changed. But feelings break the one vital rule of a situationship: don’t get attached.
On the pro-casual side, responses varied. One friend said it’s simply about having fun and doing what you want in the moment. A guy friend explained a more methodical approach: find someone you find attractive but have zero feelings for or desire to date.
Another girlfriend took it a step further, “If you’re good at regulating your feelings, you can have casual sex. You also need to hate them a bit.”
If you have to hate someone to keep things light, is that really casual? That seems like a sure sign that casual sex is not attachment-proof. If it were, we wouldn’t need tricks and rules to protect ourselves from the feelings that are almost guaranteed to show up when we strip down.
To make matters worse, no one knows how to end things, myself included. Casual connections are supposed to make things simpler, but as a result, we avoid the tough conversations.
Ghosting. The dreaded word. I’ve heard it most often justified under the guise of not owing anyone anything. So, we replace communication and the possibility of growth with distance. It’s a slow, cold demise of one-word replies, all to prove who cared the least.
The name of this phenomenon itself, ghosting, suggests a lingering presence. In my experience, the closest thing to closure is shared with friends months later and sounds like “It’s so stupid,” and “We weren’t even a thing.”
The problem is in the expectation that intimacy should somehow leave us untouched. We aren’t robots, thank God, and our complexity and sensitivity are boundless. Of course, sex affects us. We owe it to ourselves to see through the false advertising our generation has marketed as casual sex.
Like debunked sushi-grade fish, its label makes no real promises; it’s still raw and risky. When we acknowledge that attachment, care and disappointment are always possibilities, these emotions will no longer feel like some personal failure.
Feelings will inevitably form. When sex strips you bare, how could they not?
I’ve moved from a skeptic to a confident disbeliever that intimacy can be casual. The appeal of casual sex is obvious: a promising connection without the risk of pain or defeat.
But intimacy and risk don’t disappear just because we ask them to. In fact, they seem to chase after us the more we run from them. With our clothes off, there’s really no place to hide.
