After six years of the security, support, and occasional suffocation that comes with a long-term monogamous relationship, I recently became single for the first time as an adult out of college. I knew dating again would be a strange and possibly emotionally difficult experience after so long with one person. But what I didn’t expect, and what nobody warned me about, was the sexism.
With feminism almost universally embraced, I had long assumed that anyone I’d be interested in hanging out with would know that the traditional, heterosexual dating rules are ridiculous. And why play some outdated game when you’ve absolutely no intention of starting a serious relationship?
The first time I met someone I was interested in post-break-up, none of those rules were relevant. We had sex, texted, and hung out without counting the hours between messages or https://getbride.org/sv/kinesiska-kvinnor/ playing hard to get. The second time, however, I was not so lucky. In a scenario familiar to millions of people, yet honestly surprising to me, I had sex with a guy (we’ll call him Dan) and never heard from him again. I didn’t know him well and certainly wasn’t emotionally invested, but the interaction still rankled me. We’d got on incredibly well and, for all the nonchalance endemic to casual hook ups, sex is an unavoidably intimate experience. The radio silence post-coitus seemed strangely cold.