This summer I was hooking up with someone who had been a friend throughout high school. Then, once things got too intense, I ignored him — or his texts, rather.

“You know, we’re just friends with benefits,” I’d tell my friends.

“Oh we’re just hooking up,” I believed.

“It’s nothing serious, just messing around.”

Maybe.

We were friends with benefits, and if you’ve ever been in this kind of not-really-a relationship-relationship, these statements just begin to scratch the surface of the myths we come up with to keep both ourselves and spectators at bay when the entanglement begins.

Since entering college, I have had a few of my own FWBs. As someone who was in a long-term relationship spanning almost the entirety of high school, this type of relationship was a shock. For an excessively emotional person, it was initially difficult to separate my feelings from my raw desire to spend the night with someone. I was used to being with a person who not only wanted to hold me in bed but also hold my hand in public — not someone who I would only text at night to figure out where we would meet.

But the more it happens, the easier it is to grow numb to any affection you feel toward a person, and you accept that you will use one another to satisfy your sexual desires. As messed up as it sounds, you realize nothing real will ever come of the hookups, so you dispose any craving for mushy, couple-y behavior and succumb to the affair that ends when the sun comes up. According to a 2014 article in Psychology Today, only about 10-20 percent of FWB relationships blossom into a long-term relationship, so the rest of us are left searching for love elsewhere.

A 2014 qualitative study conducted by DePaul University communications professor Kendra Knight, found that communication in FWB relationships is exceptionally limited. Through a series of interviews, she discovered four reasons that seem to lead to this growing silence.

First, many think that because the point of a FWB relationship is an informal union, discussions would complicate and ruin it. While this is a valid statement, it’s almost impossible to feel nothing toward a person you are repeatedly so intimate with.

Second, people are often worried about appearing to be too “clingy or unstable.” In a relationship built solely off of sex, a parameter for communication is never set and thus it’s often scary to tell the other person what you are feeling.

Third, people are scared of coming off as jealous. Even though FWBs are supposed to be informal, it’s normal to be jealous of the other person flirting or hooking up with people outside the FWB.

Finally, if one person decides they want to have a discussion about the direction of the relationship, oftentimes the other person shuts down, just like I did this summer. When things got too serious, it was too hard for me to formulate my thoughts and I believed it would be easier to just not reply. Today, not only is our relationship nonexistent but our friendship is also down the drain.

For the most part, if we’re able to keep our emotions out of the picture, the negotiation should work. At the end of the night, you’re back with that person but during the day you put up a screen to prove that you don’t care.

So know yourself and choose your hookups wisely. If you have to let someone go because your yearnings are different, then do so gracefully before things get too out of hand. And as hard as it may be, try to talk about what it is that you are doing with your partner. At the end of the day, being FWB is nothing to be ashamed of and can be fun. Just make sure you know what your end goal is and don’t make excuses for a relationship that isn’t living up to your expectations.

Published on September 7, 2015 at 7:50 pm