Exhibit A

Early last month, something super-hot happened. In fairness, this has been a year of super-hot stuff happening (seriously, 2015 will live long in the erotic memory), but this was squirmy and sexy and different enough to be bookmarked and filed away in its own special mental folder…despite being, on the face of it, really fucking simple, and – superficially at least – not overtly sexual.

Context is everything, I guess. I’ve written before about shaving (or being shaved) as a kink – in a short story in April this year, and as part of one of my earliest Sinful Sunday posts – but until recently it was something I’d never explored with a partner in person. Not really. When that changed though, it changed in a big way…

—

Wielding an old-fashioned straight razor and perched on the bench seat in my shower, Malin James slowly, carefully (and with unbroken concentration) stripped away all the hair above and around my twitching cock.

She had flown over from San Francisco a few days earlier, and this was just one of many things on our mutual ‘to do’ list. On one level it fed into a broader, more general D/S dynamic, due to the control she’d have over my body at the time, but it was also something that I’d initially raised as part of that basic, longstanding sexual fantasy.

I flinched at first, as Malin unfolded the razor, but I trust her implicitly and she knows that. She also knows how that trust gets built and reinforced; calmly, she skimmed the blade across her own arm, to show that it couldn’t do any damage.

All I had to do was stand naked in front of her, shivering on the inside while doing my best to remain stock-still. Everything about her radiated control, from the slight frown on her face to the way she pressed her fingers against my hip to hold me in place. I looked down at her lissom body as she massaged shaving gel into my skin, only then to lift it clear with deft, deliberate flicks of the sharp, cold steel, until I was completely bare. Leaning in, she kissed the base of my cock in a way that almost made my knees buckle, and I knew then that it was definitely time to get out of the shower…

I’m not going to write about what happened next, because that isn’t really the point of this post: it’s enough to say that we were both very happy with the results. For days afterwards, I found myself sliding fingers down under the waistband of my jeans to stroke the smooth, hairless skin – on more than one occasion, the resulting tingle was enough to have me stroking other things too.

Why did that whole process turn me on so much? Why does writing about it turn me on again now? And does it really matter either way? Let’s come back to that last one.

—

Back in September I asked people to send me all the sex questions they’d like answered from a male perspective. I got close to a dozen responses, and one of my 2016 resolutions is to make sure I address all of them in some way before the year is out. To kick-start that process, I thought I’d tackle this query from a Twitter follower, @emerlee__, who wanted to know what guys think about female pubic hair…

“Do men truly care/not care about how a woman chooses to groom down there? Be that not at all, or somewhat, or completely?

I have my own preferences, of course, of how I like my cunt to look but I still find myself nervous when the likelihood of first time sex with a new partner arises. I almost feel I need to somehow (sneakily, or not so sneakily probably) find out *his* preferred look and adapt accordingly before things go down, so to speak…”

Ok, the short answer is yes, there are men out there who clearly do care. And that’s fine, as far as it goes. ‘Care’ is a bit of a slippery word in this context, but sure, we all have a vested interest in what we’re nuzzling up against when we kiss, hug, or go down on a sexual partner. Those are all incredibly intimate acts, which demand (or induce) an instinctive physical response, and whether you’re male or female it’s natural both to hold and express the preferences associated with them.

Equally, there’s nothing wrong with accommodating, discussing or negotiating those preferences when they’re expressed by someone else. There’s no such thing as a perfect partner, after all, and it doesn’t make sense to grumble about other people unless you’re also willing to recognize that fact in yourself. The recent Marie Claire article on pre-sex grooming attracted a lot of criticism for its attempt to universalise/standardise female behaviour, and with good reason (crass, tone-deaf, simplistic, etc etc); but at the same time I have no real problem with the idea of wanting to impress a sexual partner, whether that involves nice underwear, make-up, cologne, or just some killer facial/pubic hair.

The key point is this though: never, ever do something that makes you unhappy or uncomfortable, just to impress another person. If he ‘cares’ more about your pubic hair than he does about you, ask yourself whether he’s really worth another second of your time. Why does he care, and how does he articulate that? Is his preference genuine or gendered? Has he talked to you about it, or has he tried to impose it upon you? Does he respect the fact that it’s your body, not his?

Those are the questions you ought to be asking about him. Of yourself, you need only ask this: how much do I care? Because honestly, for a lot of people the answer will be “fuck it, I don’t give two shits.” And that gives you flexibility. When I was sketching out this post, I started thinking about it in graphical terms. Relationships are about compromise, after all, which in this case is best explained by two fairly broad axes:

• Cost of conformity (AKA “how much do I care?”)
• Level of partner satisfaction (AKA “how much does s/he care?”)

A quick example. Five years ago, I was getting ready to move out of my flat in Oxford. I was seeing someone at the time, and she encouraged me to use it as an opportunity to throw out a bunch of clothes I no longer needed. Inevitably, our definitions of ‘need’ varied wildly. Two items in particular drew her attention: one, a pair of skintight salmon pink jeans; the other, my fuchsia Ralph Lauren corduroy trousers. She hated the salmon jeans and thought the fuchsia cords were ridiculous; I was fairly indifferent to the former, but loved the latter with a fierce, possessive passion. Outcome: one went into the bin, while the other came with me to Swindon, Warsaw, and ultimately the wardrobe I can see from my bed right now.

Plot those on a graph, add a few other things we bickered about, and you have something like this:

She thought it was weird that I stored – and enjoyed – gay porn on my laptop. She’d have preferred me not to have facial hair. She thought I should throw out underwear the second a hole appeared. Left to my own devices, none of these things would have changed. Again though, relationships are about compromise, so of course I started to weigh them up in my head, and this is roughly where I ended up:

In reality we all do those mental calculations, even if it’s on a subconscious level. What’s important to me? What’s important to her? How important is it? Do I think she has a right to care? We use the data gathered to help us figure out when to acquiesce/conform/compromise and when to stick to our guns. Like it or not, “love me for who I am or don’t love me at all” will only take us so far in life; at some point, when we’re comfortable in ourselves and our relationships, we will all change something about our appearance or behaviour in order to make a partner happy, and there’s NOTHING WRONG WITH THAT. Nothing at all.

—

So @emerlee__, I say this to you: some men will care about your pubic hair. Some won’t. Some men will care far more about their own pubic hair than they will yours, because that’s just how they’re wired. All of that is irrelevant though, until you’ve decided how much you care about it (and them!). If you see body hair as a political battleground, you’re probably not bothered by some random fuckboy’s opinion. If you have a strong aesthetic preference, perhaps that will matter most; alternatively you might not give a crap either way, at which point it becomes one of those things you can start to play around with a bit, whether in a sexual context or not. Each of those is a valid position to take, and you shouldn’t let yourself be shamed for coming at it from your own, personal angle.

My pubic hair is 4/5 important to me. Keeping it short makes me feel good, and having it shaved made me realise what a strong, visceral role it can play in my sexual expression. Once I’m sure my partner respects my own preferences, I’m far more likely to incorporate hers into what I do with it.

With her pubic hair, I can honestly say that as long as she’s happy, so am I; fully shaving/waxing, or rocking some sort of landing strip, can make oral a bit easier, but there’s not much different either way, and it’s far more important to me that the person I’m in bed with is comfortable and relaxed in her own body/appearance.

Of course, I can’t speak for other guys, and in this case I really wouldn’t want to. As I said, some will care and others won’t. However, if any of them see it as a relationship dealbreaker – or even a sexual one – I’d suggest you might want to view that as a red flag and act accordingly.

First though, figure out how much you care, and what role different types of grooming play in your own pleasure. As I learnt this year, you’ll reap far more value from that than you will worrying about what other people think, or how they see you.

“Love never dies a natural death. It dies because we don’t know how to replenish its source. It dies of blindness and errors and betrayals. It dies of illness and wounds; it dies of weariness, of witherings, of tarnishings.”

Anaïs Nin

—

New York City, 16^th October 2015

It is strange to think that 10 years have passed since we entered each other’s lives. 10 whole years! Stranger still is the fact that our relationship (at least in its first, conventional incarnation) lasted for little more than two of those. You burn bright or you burn long, I guess, even if it always felt like the time we spent together was honey-dipped and golden in its slow, rich sweetness. In her love, I found a warmth and nourishment that made it easy to open and share my own cautious heart in return.

How easy? Well, less than a month after that first Thanksgiving, she flew over for Christmas, taking advantage of flexible working arrangements to spend five weeks with me, my housemates, and – for a few days over the holiday, at least – my family. I look back at that period now with wonder and a pinch of mild disbelief, as if perhaps it happened to someone else; with barely a second thought, I not only allowed the compartments into which I’d so carefully packed my life to be messed around – I helped this woman, this gleeful human wrecking ball, to break them down altogether.

In some ways, it helped that neither of us really knew what we were doing during that first year. Forced to make it up as we went along, we often felt like two conspirators, whispering across the pillow late at night, and sharing secrets under the duvet the next morning. The future we invented together seemed inviolate, built as it was on a love that shone with clear, pure strength. We allowed ourselves to be swept towards it by our own accelerated intensity, oblivious to the rip currents that gathered beneath us.

Of course distance facilitates that strain of wilful blindness, especially when the heart is singing loudly enough to drown out any additional alarms. Each time we came together, a giddy, surging swell of happiness held at bay the grinding reality of a life spent staring across an ocean. We sacrificed stability for excitement, forgetting that intimacy maintains a steady state only through the application of regular – and equal – pressure from both sides; when this slackens, its core warps and degrades, and it starts to die, long before the impact is visible from the outside.

Even when the tiny cracks that formed below the surface widened out into deep, gouging scars, we continued to cling to a sort of shared romantic idealism. I guess all love is trial and error – especially when you’re young – and that goes for its ending too. The longer we wait to deploy our emotional parachutes, the harder the landing when we do finally hit the ground – wait too long, and all that’s left is one huge fucking mess. She and I plummeted down together, hurled from our crumbling cliff edge; to disengage, to bug out and float to safety, would have felt like the worst form of selfishness – instead we conspired to doom each other.

For all that, it would be disingenuous to call it a fait accompli. I hurt her, and I hurt her badly – with luck, it will remain the worst thing I do in life. Cheating is much simpler when you don’t have to go home that night and look someone in the eye, but by the same token it breeds an acute, corrosive awareness of one’s own cowardice. I carried that with me for a long time, and its poison filtered through into everything we said and did to one another.

Sepsis both necessitates and precludes a clean break. Grimly we tried to flush out the toxins, but succeeded only in making ourselves even sicker. Perversely, geographical separation made closure more elusive: it is too easy to hold onto something (or someone) rendered intangible by distance. A lonely heart selects soft-focus memories, and avoids those that must be wrenched up from the cognitive depths; an instinctive self-preservation that merely serves to extend the process of radioactive decay beyond its natural half-life.

We became guest stars in each other’s lives. Each cameo, each little vignette, came loaded with expectation and tinged – but not tainted – by unvoiced grief. A hotel room in Amsterdam. A long, sunny spring weekend in Boston, starting on the day the volcano erupted, and ending just as we’d started to hope that the skies might never reopen. California by car, huddling up high in the Sierra Nevada, and chasing each other across sun-kissed beaches on the endless drive down the coast.

However, stasis can only endure for so long. Without realising it, we were anchored to our shared past, rather than using it to shape a better, happier future. We ignored the weight for as long as we could, but slowly it dragged us down…

—

We finally hit the bottom in December 2011. It was made worse by the fact that we could both feel it coming up to meet us, even before the first sad, stretched smiles outside the terminal at Logan – the ones that don’t quite reach the eyes. As they fell from our faces, the recriminations we’d spent years biting back came flooding down with them, bringing far more pain than we were able to process at the time. Instead we fucked and fought for five days straight, until neither of us had anything left to pour into the other. I flew back from Boston hollowed-out – almost translucent – and it felt like the perfect final chapter to a story we both knew would have no more sequels.

Except…except…

—

She lives in New York now, a student again at 37. She will never really be 37 though, not to me – there is a Peter Pan quality to her that I love and envy in equal measure. I think about her within seconds of booking my flight. It’s impossible not to – this city will always mean Thanksgiving in the cold, and spring in Central Park; oral sex on the Subway and hand jobs at the back of the Chinatown bus; her…and us.

Still, I almost don’t tell her I’m coming. What is there left to say? How can we sit and chat over coffee, as if we weren’t once each other’s everything? Far harder than a surfeit of emotion is staring into the void where it used to be; the footprints we allow another person to leave on our heart are never really erased. Whole lives are lived in the small, agonising silences that bubble up between two people who have forgotten how to speak to each other – or who know how much must remain unsaid.

How can I put myself through that?

How can I not?

—

I wait for 20 minutes in an Irish pub near Times Square, nursing a pint. My eyes flick from the TV above the bar to the door, then down to my phone; I feel 24 again, and my foot taps the floor with an impatience I don’t even try to control. Maybe anticipation is a better word for it – despite everything, I want to see her.

This time though, she has the jump on me. I look up to find her standing in the doorway, that familiar grin already splitting her face; she moves into the warmth of the bar, and I half-stand to greet her, my heart a heavy, tender lump in my chest. The blonde hair is long gone, and it tumbles down below her shoulders now in soft, chestnut waves, which I brush back when I pull her into a hug.

I can feel her breath on my neck. I’m wearing the same cologne she first bought me for Christmas nearly ten years ago now, and she presses her nose against my skin with a small sigh. I stand very still, one arm wrapped round her body, the other loose and awkward at my side.

Our story was never destined to have a happy ending – not many do – and it is too late to change that now; some damage cannot be undone, and we both carry wounds that even time will never heal. As I hold her though, I realise that whatever else this evening brings, it will give us one thing we haven’t had until now. Here in New York, on another cold, crisp, autumnal night, we have one chance – maybe one last chance – to make sure that we’ll never again regret the time we spent writing it together.

She steps back and hops up onto the stool opposite mine. She is still radiantly beautiful. We smile at each other in silence, for long enough that I have to clear my throat before I trust myself to speak.

“It’s so good to see you,” I say.

And I mean it.

(November 2005 was a month of firsts. First trip to North America. First threesome. And, at my first Thanksgiving dinner, during my first visit to New York City, a first date with the woman who would go on to be my first big love…)

For side two, click here…and click here for the coda.

—

“Time it was

And what a time it was, it was

A time of innocence

A time of confidences

Long ago it must be

I have a photograph

Preserve your memories

They’re all that’s left you”

—

New York City, 24^th November 2005

I wait in Arrivals at JFK for nearly an hour. I am too tired and groggy to stand, so I slump against the wall, knees hugged up to my chest. All around me, families are reunited for the holiday. Parents reach for their grown-up children; young couples almost leap into each other’s arms. My mobile phone doesn’t work here, and I have nowhere else to stay if she doesn’t show up, but I feel strangely calm – I know she will come.

It’s more than that though. I am 24 years old, and this is the first time I’ve really been certain of anything. It’s as if I’m standing on top of a mountain, looking down over a lush, green valley; I can see everything laid out in front of me like a map, almost otherworldly in its beauty, and I just want to go gather it up in my arms. I’ve been travelling for 18 hours to get here – sleeping on the floor at Gatwick before the indirect flight (via Milan) that I still couldn’t really afford – but in this neon-lit terminal there is a serenity that I neither thought nor hoped to find.

For others that is just the unthinking confidence of youth. I have always envied them that, even as I’ve clung fiercely to my own neuroses; nurtured my blooming scars. I am brittle and skittish at 24; the sudden faith I place in my lack of butterflies is rooted in an optimism I’ve rarely been able to tap into until now.

Where has it come from, this certainty? I am almost afraid to pierce its skin and find out – as if doing so will let the air out of a balloon we’ve managed to inflate together. All I know is that she will come and this thing, this crazy adventure, will change me in ways I won’t understand until it’s already happened.

I see her before she sees me. We have been exchanging emails for four months now, and talking on Skype for nearly two, but it is still a shock to find this living, breathing woman growing larger in front of me as she weaves through the crush of people. My facial muscles are the first to react, and when they pull the corners of my mouth up into a beaming smile it sets off a chain reaction in my cheeks, which flush red with a sort of dimpled, awkward shyness.

I’ve closed maybe half the distance between us when she turns, and I watch the same process unfold on her – god – just radiantly beautiful face.

“I’m so sorry,” she starts to say. “Your flight was a code-share, and I went to the wrong terminal, and…”

The gap between us can be measured in inches now. She is shorter than I expected – this will become a running joke, though neither of us knows that yet – and she smells amazing, all of which I’ll only really register much later, when I’ve remembered how to breathe again. Our hands find each other, and her fingers twist in mine as she talks. I have to bend to kiss her, or maybe she pulls me down, I don’t know, but suddenly the words stop and there is just the wonderfully gentle smush of lips and tongues, cutting through any remaining anxiety – dispelling any last, lingering doubts.

We are already late for Thanksgiving Dinner at her friend’s house, but the walk to her car is still peppered and punctuated with all the stolen kisses we’ve stored up between us. I am drunk on exhaustion and a sudden, giddy sense that I’ve just started living the first line of my obituary (“He married S____ and they lived happily ever after…”). Already our silences feel comfortable, and each smile, each squeeze of her hand is like the plunger on a pinball machine: it sends the blood whizzing round my body – I’m powerless to stop it.

The parking lot is eerily quiet, and so cold that my skin prickles whenever I turn my face into the knifing wind. Over the years, we will turn these last few steps into our own frantic foreplay. I’ll fuck her on the bonnet of my car at Heathrow, our icy breath billowing out across the deserted concrete rooftop as she wraps her legs around my arse and stares up at the stars. She’ll push me onto the back seat of her SUV at Logan and suck my cock in broad daylight, till I come down her throat with a six-week shudder of joy and relief.

Tonight though, we are still feeling each other out; when I lean across to touch her, my fingers are greedy and tentative in equal measure. She is clumsy too, which puts me at ease, even as she is swearing at the belt on my jeans and slipping her hand inside them instead. There is no great intent here, not yet – we are both just caught up in the wonder of doing this in 3D. For the first time, I can take the picture of her that my brain has lovingly formed, and bring each sweeping curve to life. I barely know where to start, until she leans back in the driver’s seat, eyes closed, legs spread as wide as her suede skirt will allow, and I may be 24 but I’m not stupid, not now, not when I can feel the heat from her cunt before I’m even halfway up her thigh.

Dinner is a blur. “Yes, I’m her internet boyfriend,” I say, my voice stiff to my own ears, but everyone laughs and best of all they’re just really nice; it cuts through my natural reserve, and I find myself smiling with them, smiling till my jaw aches with the happiness my heart is only now daring to release. Her hand finds mine under the table, and I don’t even have to look at her to know that she understands this internal conflict – what others see as aloof or emotionally cold, she has brushed past, and gone right to the core of who I am.

Or maybe I’m just different with her.

We hustle back to the subway, sacrificing intimacy for the prospect of relative warmth. I am not dressed for New York in November and the cold is merciless – it bites into me a little deeper with every step. I am weak and woozy on the train, but she strokes my face and nuzzles into my chest, her bleached blonde hair still soft under my fingers.

We’re staying in Hell’s Kitchen, in an apartment she found on Craigslist. It is cosy but stylish; the owner has good taste, and somehow that matters, even if it shouldn’t. The bed is low to the ground. I pull her down onto it, but she wriggles out and rolls on top of me, her teeth flashing in the lamplight. Fuck, that smile. I love it already, and what’s more I tell her I love it, the words spilling out of my mouth before I can stop them.

We love hard when we’re young, I think; harder – purer – than we realise at the time. We’ve not yet been muddied by our wounds – instead the blood pumps through our bodies, rich and fierce, and we don’t know how to stem the flow. In thick, hot gouts, it washes over us, like the thundering rain that chases a tropical storm.

The sex is indescribable, and I use that word in its literal sense. The way her back arches when I enter her for the first time could not be done justice by prose alone, not even now. Not if I live till I’m 100. By the time it straightens out again, we are in too deep to pull back; she is drugged and drowsy, a dead weight in my arms. I swim down with her, each breath shorter than the last.

I wake up early the next morning and she drags me back out into the weak, watery sunshine. “You’re not dressed for this,” she says. I nod helplessly; she just laughs and steers me towards the nearest street merchant.

We cross over 59^th Street, into Central Park. It is everything and nothing I expected, all at the same time. On a low, stone bridge she burrows into my body, as if it’s home. There are couples ice skating on the frozen rink below us, but everything we want is up here, in the fuzzy heat of her cheek on mine. It is the 26^th November, 2005 – the day after Thanksgiving – and we are no longer strangers. We are woven into each other’s fabric; we are stitches that cannot be pulled out. Not without pain, anyway…

About a month ago, shortly after writing this blog post, I tweeted the following request:

Are you a woman? Do you date? If so, I’d love you to email/DM me with your thoughts re who should pay on a first date… (Pls RT!)

— Exhibit A (@EA_unadorned) October 27, 2015

The response was fascinating, not least because it confirmed something I’d been thinking even as I tapped out the tweet on my phone. Here’s a small, representative sample of what people said:

“I am not that comfortable with having a guy front the bill. I like to split the bill. I pay my half, he pays his. I won’t ever bite a dude’s head off for wanting to pay for me, but I have never and will never expect him to take care of it just because.”

“I think a first date should be paid in rounds or halves…[but]…in my opinion a man should always pay for the first drink. I like it when it’s not completely equal, when the men pay attention to when you’re about to finish your drink and offer to get the next one. It’s a nice feeling, it shows – in my opinion – that the guy is having a good time and is interested.”

“If I’ve been taken out for dinner by a gentleman, they tend to be precisely that and have always paid. They’ve asked to take me out for dinner and chosen the place, so I believe that’s right. I’m quite traditional, I suppose and get extremely annoyed when women mount their high Shetland Pony of feminism on this particular issue.”

“I find it so annoying that this is a ‘thing’. It harks back to daft old fashioned ways of dating from when men were in charge. I don’t think you should ever assume a man will pay for a first date. You wouldn’t go out with a friend and wonder who was paying, you’d go with money in your pocket because it’s fair to pay your way – so why would you assume someone you’ve never even met would pay for you? By the same token, really don’t sweat the small stuff – play it by ear. If the bloke really wants to pay then let him, don’t be a twat and make a song and dance about it on principle, just say ‘thank you’. But also, be intuitive and pay the whole bill yourself sometimes if it’s appropriate.”

“This is the bane of my life. I believe that if a guy asks you out then really I’m expecting him to pay. I find it very unattractive when someone isn’t generous. Recently I went out with a guy and he came in as I was at the bar ordering; I asked what he wanted, and when the bartender brought our drinks he didn’t offer to pay. I paid. From that we went round each but I was a bit put off. I’m a feminist and wouldn’t expect to always be paid for but it’s manners and a good first impression.”

Conclusion: even women are all over the place on this subject. So much so that as a guy it can often feel like a bit of a minefield: take the initiative, pay the bill, and risk being side-eyed as a chauvinist; or casually suggest going Dutch and leave your date silently fuming at your lack of generosity.

That was going to be my original angle, anyway. I had my sleeves rolled up, ready to dig into both sides of the argument, with the ultimate aim of calling for some sort of consensus – some sort of compromise – which would enable all of us poor benighted men to know exactly where we stand. ‘Just get together, decide among yourselves, and let us know the outcome,’ I wanted to say. ‘We don’t care what that outcome is, we just don’t want to think about it any more!’

Stirring stuff…with one tiny drawback. Because whenever I sat down to write the damn thing, a giant wave of apathy just swept right over me; I’d sit here, fingers poised over the keyboard, waiting for the words to form in my head, only to realise each time that as much as I’d love to work up a mental sweat on this one, ultimately I Just. Don’t. Care.

To some extent that’s economic privilege talking, along with the experience (and thickness of skin) I’ve built up over the years. For the most part I can afford not to care, and of course that makes it a lot easier to avoid at least some of those awkward post-dinner moments; if I’m unsure – and that happens much less often these days – I’ll generally err on the side of picking up the bill, even though it jars a bit with my overall outlook on dating etiquette.

Either way, I stayed in that holding pattern all the way through till Sunday night, when I stumbled into a Twitter conversation about another hot-button dating topic: first-date sex. It was sparked by this particularly unpleasant tweet…

I have zero respect for women who fuck on the 1st date. That is so skanky!! It’s no wonder men expect it on date #1. We have you to thank! ?

— Samantha Weller (@samanthaweller1) November 22, 2015

…after which, things kicked off in predictably riotous fashion. And that was the lightbulb moment. The more I thought about it the next morning, the more I just felt thoroughly depressed by the whole fucking concept of dating rules – and not just because most of them are rooted in outdated gender-based bullshit. It’s more that they miss one of the fundamental truths about how we approach pretty much any human interaction…

…actually, no, that’s not the fundamental truth. That’s just because I like pirates.

The fundamental truth is pretty closely related though, and here it is: there are no fucking rules! Trying to codify dating – something so deeply personal – is like trying nail jelly to a wall; it will always slip away from you, because we are just not wired to let other people dictate our social interactions. In that sense, we are cats rather than dogs: herd us at your peril!

Dating rules often do one of two things, neither of them good. They tell us that men and women are fundamentally different (“don’t put out too quickly, he won’t respect you”, “always pay, she should be treated like a lady”) or they ask us to insert structural gender politics into what, for most of us, are inherently individual choices (“while the wage gap exists, men should still pay”, “letting him pick up the bill just reinforces the patriarchy”). In doing so, they not only heap even more pressure onto those interactions – because we’re all working from different manuals, they also fail the basic test of pretty much any set of rules: things become less safe, less fun, and somehow less clear to just about everyone.

I’m not saying there can’t – or shouldn’t – be dating dealbreakers. We all have our lines in the sand, many of which will appear arbitrary or shallow to other people; even if, in reality, they merely align with our own moral and aesthetic values, both voiced and subconscious. I won’t date someone who smokes cigarettes, for example, or who votes Conservative. I probably won’t date someone who doesn’t drink alcohol, or who only wants to have sex with the lights off. Fair or not, those are things that matter to me – in isolation and because of what they tell me about our general compatibility – and that makes them hard to ignore when assessing potential partners.

What’s important to keep in mind though is that those aren’t dating principles – they’re preferences. And more to the point, they’re my preferences. If I wind up having a drink with someone who doesn’t share them – or doesn’t fit them – that’s just how the game works. Suck it up and move on.

Are there exceptions? Sure, I’d say so. Violent? Racist? Violently racist? I’ll call you a terrible person, and my conscience will be clean when I do so. I’ll probably tell other people that you’re a terrible person too. Don’t offer to pick up your half of the bill, on the other hand? Insist on a three-date sex rule? Meh, I’m not ecstatic about either, but I’ll live. I might even go out with you again.

What I won’t do is seize on that preference and universalize it, or extrapolate it out into a wider assessment of your ‘dating character’. I might be mentally rolling my eyes while you talk about it, but in the end that’s just how you’re wired, or what you think/feel/believe. With a few big exceptions, moral absolutism has no place on a first date: if your values are different to mine, I should be able to accept that without feeling like I’ve been personally wronged in some way.

In the end, “should men pay on a first date?” and “should women have sex on a first date?” are (or should be*) fundamentally meaningless questions, because the answer will always depend on the individuals concerned, and on the situations in which they find themselves. Even asking them has the potential to do damage, because in doing so we risk implying that external moral judgment – whether good or bad – can be applied to those actions…when in fact they really ought to be navigated and negotiated between the two (or more) people involved, according to their various, respective preferences.

So yes, by all means have your own dating rules, and draw those from whatever sources and principles you like. Always pay your share on a first date or never pay. Fuck someone you just met if you feel like fucking them, or don’t fuck anyone until date three. Unless and until it affects me, I don’t care. What I do care about is people who use their own set of dating rules to judge the behaviour of others, or to tell them what they should be doing. There is no ‘should’ in dating: there is only what works for you, and no-one else gets to decide what that has to be.

That’s why my initial take on this was off the mark. Asking y’all to decide on a common approach just doesn’t work with this kind of thing. Awkward or not, we’re going to have to keep figuring it out as we go along.

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*A small caveat: there is obviously value in asking/discussing stuff like this where doing so illustrates – and challenges – harmful conventional wisdom. When we ask “should women fuck on a first date?”, we’re often really saying “hey, let’s have a conversation about slut-shaming and why it sucks”…and that’s definitely not something we should shy away from doing.