Modern dating gains sex but it also loses intimacy

Maureen Dowd

I’ve noticed a weird pattern, in fiction and life, about sexual encounters: Women decide they’re not attracted to a guy they’re nestling with. Limerence is not in the cards. But they go ahead and have sex anyhow.

First, we have college student Margot in The New Yorker’s much-discussed short fictional story “Cat Person” who recoils as she watches Robert undress. “But the thought of what it would take to stop what she had set in motion was overwhelming; it would require an amount of tact and gentleness that she felt was impossible to summon.” Margot doesn’t want to seem spoiled or capricious, so she takes a sip of whiskey to “bludgeon her resistance into submission.”

Then we have the 23-year-old Brooklyn-based photographer who hooked up with comedian Aziz Ansari at his Tribeca apartment and talked about it anonymously to the website Babe. She was distressed by his arbitrary choice of white wine at dinner, his rush to sex, the way he jammed two fingers in a V-shape down her throat.

But at his request, she gave him oral sex twice; he briefly performed it on her once.

After “Cat Person” became a phenomenon on the perils of romance in the digital age, its 36-yearold author, Kristen Roupenian, told The New Yorker that Margot succumbing “speaks to the way that many women, especially young women, move through the world: not making people angry, taking responsibility for other people’s emotions, working extremely hard to keep everyone around them happy. It’s reflexive and self-protective, and it’s also exhausting.”

So you’d rather have bad sex with someone who doesn’t appeal to you than find a way to extricate yourself ? You can Lean In but you can’t Walk Out?

I call Joanna Coles, the chief content officer of Hearst magazines and the former editrix of Cosmopolitan and Marie Claire. The 55-year-old Brit has a new book called “Love Rules,” a guide to avoiding the digital sand traps in relationships.

“Getting naked and having sex with strangers is hard,” she tells me. “We portray it as fun and we pretend it’s fun. But people crave intimacy, which is not easy to create in a hookup. That’s why Britain just appointed a loneliness minister.”

In her book, Coles quotes cyberpsychologist Mary Aiken on the dangers of losing your inhibitions more easily when you are in the “immersive environment” of cyberspace — a space designed by men.

“Online dating is very crowded,” Aiken said. “There are four people in it: two real, normal selves, and two virtual selves.”

Echoing a theme from “Cat Person,” Coles tells me: “Things go from naught to 60 really fast. When you have a lot of communication online before you go out with someone, it builds up a false sense of who the person is. There’s a tendency to fill in the blanks with positive information.” (She points to a study showing a sixfold increase in sexual assault associated with online dating.)

“It’s very easy to imagine someone online in a positive way,” she says, “but it’s only when you sit down, with all five senses in play, that you can really tell, ‘Do I find this person attractive?’”

“Good sex is a wonderful high,” Coles says. “It’s what great novels and great music are about. And it’s free! But we’ve lost track of what a brilliant thing it is. It’s so transactional now, it’s bleak.”