The UNEXPECTED REASONS women sleep with men but never confess
Pity Loneliness Politeness Duty Curiosity Fear
ABOUT five years ago, an acquaintance asked me to meet him in a bar. I might have preferred it if he’d given me a choice of a movie or a cafe, but I went along anyway.
I did not fancy him and all the signs suggested nothing would occur between us, but I told myself to keep an open mind.
You may wonder why I bothered, but I was in my late 40s and had been divorced for five years. I’d had a number of ill-judged dalliances with younger men and decided it was time to go out with someone my own age. The thing is, for a woman, accepting a date is not necessarily an indicator of mutual attraction.
We are often willing to give a man a chance if he has a scintilla of charm. After all, an initial lack of spark does not always preclude a positive change of heart further down the line.
Yet it is decidedly more controversial to admit that, when such a date leads to the bedroom, it is not always about mutual attraction either. Whether or not we choose to admit it, many a woman knows the feeling of allowing a situation to progress further than
she might wish, because she is not entirely sure.
Ambivalence in a woman means many a man has scored in the absence of desire.
Often he does so — even if he doesn’t know it — due to her indecision, politeness, loneliness, weariness in the face of the effort required to extricate herself and, on occasion, her fear of inciting anger.
Pity is another instigator. Sometimes we acquiesce purely out of curiosity.
Such encounters are rarely acknowledged in literature, in drama, even conversations between friends.
That’s why a short story in The New Yorker magazine called Cat Person, about a young woman’s desultory sexual encounter with a man, hit a nerve when it came out last December.
The author, Kristen Roupenian, does capture brilliantly the hotcold patches a young (or older and not entirely wiser) woman can feel as she decides to sleep with someone for the first time; someone she doesn’t know well, and about whom she has conflicting feelings.
The
story went viral, and recent interviews with the author have kickstarted the conversation again. What are the thought processes women go through before they decide to sleep with someone?
I can remember, alas all too well, many such awkward encounters in my youth. Regrets: way, way too many, with largely myself to blame.
There was a staggeringly handsome, but feckless, selfish, undergraduate, who to my idiotic mind was glamorous in a damaged sort of way and who took me to digs on the Isle of Wight (single dishevelled bed, orange pile carpet).
And a film director, 20 years older, psychologically abusive, who nearly killed me on the M1 because of his awful driving.
I still went ahead, eyes wide open. And that’s to name but two.
Until I read Cat Person and talked to my girlfriends, I thought I was the only one to have been so wrongheaded. I believed other women had more pride, selfesteem and oomph than me and were generally more assertive, so didn’t allow themselves to wind up in bed with men they didn’t even find attractive.
But what my friends confided reveals so much about the flipside — not to mention the complexities — of female desire. It’s an area that has long perplexed psychologists.
It is thought that sexual desire in females is both more complex and more fragile than in males; less tied to biology, more linked to psychology.
Women’s levels of arousal are linked to how they feel about themselves and their partners, their hormonal state and other events in their lives, not forgetting their partner’s technique for lovemaking.
A woman engages her brain before initiating or consenting to sex, whereas a man’s desire is more visceral.
‘Status and security can be more important than the physical attraction. So women can find themselves in bed with someone where physiological arousal is low on the list,’ says relationship counsellor Rachel Lebus. She adds that, broadly speaking, women have sex ‘to compound the emotional’. Whereas for a man it’s the other way round, in that attraction and sex come first and can then lead to an emotional opening. Why does Lebus think women sleep with men they don’t fancy? ‘Well, a rich man, say, represents safety and security,’ she says. ‘Or she might be lonely. ‘Sex is a currency for connection, in order to feel wanted. I had a client whose husband was short and round. When she had sex with him, she had to fantasise in order to go through with it, even though her husband was incredibly good and kind and she really loved him.’ Lorraine hardy, 38, a social worker from Gerrards Cross, Buckinghamshire, admits to sleeping with men out of pity when she was younger — or a strange sense of duty. Now married to Christopher, 49, and with two children aged six and one, she admits to spending most of her 20s ‘ having sex when I really rather didn’t want to, or felt obliged to’. ‘I’m an intelligent, universityeducated woman, and yet still found myself in situations where I could not say no. On those occasions, the sex has been out of a sense of duty rather than because my libido was raging.’ Take the accountant who was 20 years Lorraine’s senior. ‘I bought my first house when I was 23,’ she explains. ‘I didn’t have three years’ worth of accounts, so had to find a financial adviser to help me prepare my paperwork.
‘I could tell he was attracted to me, whereas I very definitely wasn’t attracted to him.
‘After the final paperwork had been prepared, he asked me out for dinner. While I didn’t fancy him, I felt like I should say yes and, besides, I didn’t want to lose my house.’
The accountant took her to a London restaurant and invited her back home for coffee.
‘That’s when he started down the “Why doesn’t anyone like me?” conversation. he even cried at one point.
‘I felt so bad and sorry for him. Clearly (or so my thinking went at the time) he didn’t feel good about himself. When he began to say: “I understand why you wouldn’t fall for me” . . . well, yes, you can guess the rest. I ended up going to bed with him not because I wanted to, but out of pity.’ But the sympathy vote isn’t reserved only for fleeting encounters. Perhaps harder to admit is that we sometimes make love to our longterm partners for similar reasons.
Lorraine admits: ‘I was in a longterm relationship in my 20s when I began not to fancy him.
‘he had been made redundant and began to let himself go. his confidence was shattered, so I felt
for me to refuse to make love would have been a real kick in the teeth for him. So I went through the motions of having polite sex just to make him feel better about himself.’ I Lorraine is bold enough to confess that there are times today when she agrees to have sex with her husband when she doesn’t really feel like it. "There are times when Chris comes home from work and makes a move on me. Sometimes I’ll say yes and mean it; other times I’ll say yes and not mean it — but won’t want to hurt his feelings.’
Jessica Bailey, 46, runs her own business in the Midlands. But despite her professional success, she says she ‘fails miserably in relationships’. Following two long-term ones in her 20s and 30s, she is happy to be single. But she admits: ‘The number of times I’ve had sex because I’ve been the one to want it, desire it and instigate it, I can count on one hand. ‘Instead, I normally end up agreeing to sleep with someone because I don’t want to hurt their feelings or don’t have the gumption to say no.’ This feeling of not wanting to hurt a man’s feelings is seemingly common — particularly when you’re languishing in a relationship that is past its best. Jessica says: ‘Only in hindsight did I recognise the pattern of doing all I could to get out of having sex, blaming everything from the time of the month to migraines.
‘Admitting, “I don’t fancy you any more” seems far too brutal. So on those occasions when I felt I could no longer get out of it, it was a case of lying back and thinking of England.
‘When a man is open and vulnerable with you, it is very hard to not only close the conversation down, but to push those feelings back in his face by refusing intimacy.’
I don’t expect men realise how much each conquest rests on a knife- edge a lot of the time. If he strikes at the very second his date or partner is feeling positive, he is, like a snake after prey, in luck. Had he tried the minute before, or the minute afterwards, the prey may have eluded his advances.
The difficulty for men is that women’s personal likes and dislikes are all so different and unfathomable. Pointed and light brown shoes — or, worse, grey shoes — are a deal-breaker for me.
For the next woman, grey shoes could be the clincher, the icing on the cake, the very thing which moves her into the bedroom.
In this respect, the short story Cat Person hit a nerve with me, as it did with so many other women.
The writer expressed perfectly how attitudes towards, and desire for, a person can find themselves conflicted. One minute it is a yearning, the next a repulsion, and the switch between the two can turn on a sixpence — or a grey shoe.
My friend Chloe found a former boxer in her flat one night who was lacking a front tooth.
One moment she was thinking this was disgusting, the next that it was quite macho and cool, and these thoughts alternated as the evening progressed into the night.
He happened to lean forward to kiss her during a short patch when she was thinking it macho, and so he was the happy recipient of her bed soon afterwards, never knowing what a close run thing it had been.
The next morning, though, she was less enamoured by the cartoon-ish gap between his teeth, the smell of the boozy night before wafting through it, and sent him sharply on his way. It was an event never to be repeated.
As for my own lacklustre bar ‘date’, he had a tight face as he ordered beer, muscles beneath it clinging onto his skull like elastic bands as if trying to contain anger which might burst out. But he was outwardly friendly.
His talk centred a lot on his mother. Apparently, there was no stronger or more intelligent ‘lady’ on the planet, bless.
But touching though his adoration was, mother eulogies are rarely an aphrodisiac.
His implication that all other ‘ladies’ were wanting in comparison seemed to be freighted with disappointment and misogyny.
Oddly, it was more the use of the word ‘ladies’ (my other pet hate) which was the real turn-off for me. I sat listening to his monologue — no questions asked of me, obviously — slowly turning my glass on the sticky table, politely smiling.
It is not really fair, but it’s amazing how little things can skew desire. And I determined at that moment that the evening would seep into a solitary night. I was not going to sleep with him however persistent he might later turn out to be.
Or so I thought.
Due to my acquaintance droning on, we were the last to leave the bar. The street outside was deserted and freezing, so we both had aerosol breath when we spoke.
I had come by car; he on foot. Just the two of us in the misty dark other than a feeble street light.
When he smiled, I suddenly felt sorry for him and in need of some warmth myself. On a whim, we found ourselves getting into the car together and driving back to my house.
The sex itself was pretty much a damp squib, but the experience was by no means all bad. It felt good, that icy, otherwise lonely night, to have been wrapped in the warm flesh of another person; to feel his beating heart.
I have a few regrets — the proper bad guys of my mottled past — but I don’t regret him, even if he did say ‘ladies’, and it was an event that occurred just once.
Everyone has read novels and seen films of grand passion or physically and/ or psychologically abusive hook-ups and relationships. But those are all at the extreme ends of the spectrum of sexual encounters.
Between the two exist those decidedly lukewarm dalliances, the kind of partnering predicated more on whim.
It is comforting to know that I am not the only one who has lain in this region and, indeed, done so more than once.
I have had possibly more than my fair share of ‘meh’ encounters, but I think all my friends have had a few of their own.
Such encounters are part of life; the flipside of passion. And in this age of social media, where everything is packaged as perfect, it is important to highlight that decidedly mediocre and imperfect couplings happen to us all.