Hooking Up With An Ex

It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single person having recently gone through a breakup must be in want of f*cking their ex.

You know what I’m talking about. Even if your friends have stolen your phone and changed your ex's name to NO or STOP or UGH in your phone (or, in your friend Cat’s case, it’s an unflattering pun on their name, plus two emoji poops… yeah), you still know who’s on the other side of the line, and you still really, really, really wanna get it.

Sleeping with your ex — especially the idea of it — is comforting. Unlike a Tinder rando, you already know their body, and you already know y’all are good at boning. You’ve definitely racked up at least a little bit of experience doing it. And you miss them.

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So maybe, you think, you can go back to just… doin’ it. No emotional entanglement necessary. Or maybe, like me, you crave that emotional intensity again — wanting to be close to them again, by whatever means possible. Maybe you’re more angry than you are sad, and the idea of hate-f*cking them sounds absolutely enticing.

When you date in your friend group, it’s hard to avoid your exes at parties, and an accidental run-in can pretty quickly turn into accidental boning, if you’re both drunk and horny enough — or convinced that maybe you can make things work again. And even if you don’t happen to encounter an ex in your social circle, when we’ve all got cell phones, it makes it waaaaaay too easy to send a “u up?” text that you may or may not regret. So what happens next?

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The last time I slept with an ex — hell yeah, you show me yours and I’ll show you mine — was a few weeks after we’d broken up. We were getting drinks because I wanted to “talk.” Yeah.

Talk we did, and I’m sure I said intelligent, emotionally aware things, but at some point, I realized that perhaps more than I missed this person, I missed his body. I’d tried to hook up with a rando post-breakup, but that experience had left me feeling terrible, and what I now craved was the familiarity of my ex next to me; the knowledge that our sex would be as good as I remembered.

Yep. I f*cked him.

And… honestly, it was pretty great. With the confines of the relationship removed, and more than a little tension built over the course of the evening, we were immediately all over each other as soon as possible. We made out in the cab, stumbled into his apartment, had sex in as many positions as we could manage, and then passed out.

Sex with your ex can feel light, even liberating. When I slept with my ex I felt the same physical attraction we’d always shared, unspooled from the relationship that had made both of us feel restless and unhappy. It felt freeing—there was nothing tying us together. It felt like a choice that we were both making, and it was a ton of fun.

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But there was the undercurrent, too, of the emotional intensity that came from us still being unresolved — he was still him, not just any other person off the street, and that mattered. It mattered that I still hurt a little. It mattered that he was the one who’d hurt me, too.

And with the relationship dissolved, so too were our obligations to each other. When you have sex with your ex, they’re your ex — they don’t owe you anything. They’re probably trying to get over you just as much as you’re trying to get over them, and that’s where things can get tangled. You might want to see each other, but you’re both also probably trying to see other people. Sex with your ex requires treading a delicate balance.

So is it possible? Can it be done? Well, yeah, it’s gonna be done. Probably more than once, if you’re like me and have poor impulse control. Is it smart? Well… probably not. Sex with your ex can seem like the cure-all, a way to make things better, or a way to get back what you’ve lost. But relationships end for a reason, and though they can be repaired with work, sex… is not that work. It’s just boning!

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So go forth, my friends, and drunk text your exes and have sex with them too — I’ve done it, you’ve done it. But do yourself a favor and don’t expect anything to change, because let’s be real: It won’t.

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