Love and Sex.

Maybe the problem of zipless-fuck culture is not that we don't value love enough but that we value it too highly. Love is like enlightenment, this far-off ethereal thing that must never be pretended to. We fuck without love not because we don't want to be in love, but because we don't expect it any time soon--it's too precious.

My friends and I have an instant reaction to anyone with less than a year of dating saying they're in love and anyone with less than five years getting married: "They're crazy." Love at first sight? Fucknuts. How can you make any kind of commitment without a lifetime of deliberation and field-playing? It's too important!

And so we fuck pretty much whoever's handy and doesn't smell funny. I'm not the kind of person who could call this a bad thing--I never really made the emotional connection that being in love has any relation to sexual monogamy anyway--but I think it's perhaps a reaction to the divorces or bad marriages of our parents who married young. How big of a faux pas is it to say "love" to someone you're dating? My young, pervy, mostly-liberal, free-wheeling peer group may be sluts but we're secretly romantics. Because we lost our virginities young and casually, we're not saving ourselves? Nonsense. When we jealously guard our hearts against any but the truest and most tested love, we're saving ourselves.