Every other Thursday, a group of friends from college and I get together for dinner. It’s a great way for us to stay in touch with what’s going on with each other and have a mini-support group. We usually talk about work and family, but mostly just men, be it how to get, or in some cases, get rid of one, and, more importantly, what to do once you have one. We are a pretty diverse group, I think. Of the six of us, one’s newly married, one is recently (and bitterly) divorced, one is so career driven that she hasn’t even ‘scheduled’ a date at least 3 months, there’s the token gay guy (and yes, he’s fabulous!), and then there’s the one that’s always unlucky in love (yeah, I didn’t mention me, but we’ll get to that later). After listening to Julie, a friend from college, recount yet another story of ‘Mr. Right gone wrong’, and all of the various nuggets of advice from the table, I decided to go against my better judgment, and add my two cents (which I don’t usually do when it comes to Julie, as she never heeds anyone’s warnings).

Julie’s newest tragedy started about a month ago, when she proclaimed that she was fed up with relationships and was going to just have meaningless, casual sex like men are fabled to do (background: Julie is the type that has, in the past, thought that a couple of ‘hook-ups’ or a few dates made a guy her ‘man’). After the last guy, Joey, decided she was getting too serious, Julie just wanted to have fun and not get bogged down by a relationship. What’s worse, she decided to try her new, casual and carefree self out on Alex, a really hot trainer at her gym. I pointed out to her that she just signed up for another year at the gym and, should things go bad, as per usual, she still had to go where Alex works for another 11 months. Julie’s response: what could go wrong, she was going to be casual about things so it wouldn’t get bad, they would just be cool.

Long story short: the sex was great and hot, and the more she had the harder it was to keep things casual. And now, she couldn’t understand why he didn’t feel the same connection with her. She began to pull out all the stops in hopes of luring him in. She would buy new lingerie, and do all manner of kink to make him happy. The more she tried, the better he got, the more she waned to make him hers, the more elusive he was. She would try to get him to cuddle with her after sex, or to do things that weren’t sex related, like go out, or rent a movie, but he would have no part of it. She was getting sucked in more and more with each booty call, but he seemed as unaffected as their first ‘date’ (which, incidentally, was him coming over to split a pizza and watch a movie; they didn’t make it 20 minutes in before her top was off!). I couldn’t take it anymore.

I told Julie I had put a lot of thought into her plight. Having been there a couple of times myself, I understood the frustration of trying to turn ‘booty call’ into a boyfriend. It was tricky, and more times than not, wouldn’t work out in your favor. The reason, in my very unprofessional, very unsolicited opinion, was that men have outies, women have innies. The whole table looked at me like I had just taken my bra off and flung it onto my plate. I needed to elaborate.

“Men,” I explained, “have outies.” I pointed my index finger in and out to demonstrate. “Men go out, women go in.” Still looks of confusion. “Men’s penises are outside of their bodies. Women’s vagina’s are inside. So, sex is outside of men, and inside of women’s bodies. That’s why women get so emotionally attached; we have to let men inside of us. It’s chemical. It makes it harder for women to stray, and harder for men to get attached. So we are less likely to stray, and they are more likely to spread their seed.” They looked at me as if I had said both the most profound and most ridiculous thing they had ever heard. I thought everyone knew that. That’s why, I reasoned to them, women (and this is generally speaking, I’m sure there are some exceptions) can’t have meaningless, casual sex the way men can.

They all seemed to be considering this, trying to decide if my theory carried water. Then Julie got a look on her face, very similar to those ‘ah-ha’ moments that Oprah is always talking about. Julie said that it seemed to make sense, on at least a very basic level. Maybe she would realize that instead of a hook-up with a really hot guy (I take yoga at her gym, and I would’ve been all over it too if I didn’t already have a great guy to have hot sex with!), she was looking for a deeper connection. Maybe she would see that sex wasn’t fulfilling her. I wonder if she would, perhaps, look less for a man to make her complete, and instead, try to be content with who she was alone before she tried to be in a relationship with someone else. She said that she had a lot to go home and consider; that my thoughts on the situation had given her a lot to think about.

At our next get together, I learned just how much impact my words had had on her. She decided that there was something to my whole ‘outie and innie’ theory. Because of what I had said, she stopped sleeping with Alex. Instead, she’s going to try dating a girl that works at the coffee shop next door to the gym. After all, if an outie gave her that much trouble, maybe she’ll do better with an innie. I can’t wait to see how this goes.

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Kit Sheppard is a 29yo hayseed from Snow Hill, NC, who enjoys writing and baking, and is a beginning knitter(but can only make scarves), and has been descibed by many as 'the one who got away' (particularly by law enforcement!).