To Sleep With Or Not To Sleep With?

That is the question.

Photo Credit: Pylyp Sukhenko

For Marguga. I hope to see you again soon ✨ 🤗.

One day, you will receive a very tempting offer: to blend the personal with the professional. A man will tap on your shoulder and stop you in the street. Later, when you stalk him on IMDB, you will learn he’s a very accomplished and successful writer. 

But you don’t know this yet, so you will tell him you are a writer, and he will tell you that his movie is about to come out on Netflix. And the last thing he will ask you before you walk away is,

“Can I take you out for a drink?”

You will look at him and pause and try to do Maths in your head. He’s potentially handsome, if not slightly on the older side. You will be flattered because he’s successful. Suddenly, a whiff of possibilities will surround you in the air. This guy has contacts. In fact, he has a ginormous network. He got a hold of things before the internet had even been invented. He built the machines. He is the machine. He is the power. Power that could become yours. 

If only you let him take you out for a drink. That’s all he’s asking you for—a single, silly little drink. You’ve dilly-dallyed on dates with people from Bumble and Hinge before. Those randos hoovered up whole hours of your life. So, why not him? 

As you see the San Francisco sunset reflecting in his clear blue eyes, you will ask yourself:

Does he care for my brains? Or just my body? Does that even matter? It’s not his fault he’s attracted to me. I’ve spent my whole life being groomed to attract his kind. I’m like a rose bush that needs to be pruned. I’d have a lot more potential if I weren’t so horny. Thorny. You get what I mean. 

You will give him your number. And you will wonder that afternoon whether you will meet up with him. But on some perverted, subconscious level, you already know that you will. 

In the dive bar, you will notice the way he smiles behind his slightly thick cheeks, and his scruffy salt-and-pepper beard, and you will feel your cold, English heart begin to thaw. You will know that he is 13 years older than you. You will listen to his stories. Those are what you will fall in love with first. This man who has been a professional chef, a journalist at the height of the Afghan war, and now a Netflix producer extraordinaire. And you will wonder whether you like these stories because he is adventurous and interesting, or just because he has lived so much more life than you. During your time together, he will field calls from a hoard of hounding assistants in Los Angeles. They pester him wherever he is in the world.

You start to think that the inevitable will happen. Whatever you are building with him, nascent as it is, already reeks with the stench of strategic sex. As he sips his second negroni, this time his eyes seem to say to you:

I’m already in the places you want to go. So, let’s just get to know each other. You’re learning, see. And I like looking into your eyes. You’re young, but you’re also kind of wonderful. You say you like Maya Angelou. Could I...ever see...the diamonds at the meeting of your thighs? 

You will consider that the creative industry is full of hot and influential people. You will fantasize that hopping into bed with him might level the playing field of your pleasure and your power and your potential. 

He will follow you to Mexico. Over your first dinner together, he will offer to take you to Pujol, the most expensive restaurant in the city. But you will know this is just his fanfare to win you over quick. Later, you will wander past the Airbnb he is staying in on your way home. You will politely decline when he offers. Not because you don’t want to sleep with him, but because you do. You will want something with him that lasts. Not the sudden riding high and sheer drop of a rollercoaster that you were always too afraid to go on as a child. 

That week, you will wonder: 

Am I only valuable if I keep him on his toes? Keep myself like the rose under the vase in Beauty and The Beast? A precise, delicate thing that he can look at but never touch?

You will be tempted to fuck it, literally. To be a complete slut. You will remember there’s no such thing as a woman’s value going down because of sex. That’s what the religious people enshrined in you to believe so that you would never discover the light that courses through your veins if you angle the showerhead in the right way. Have your way with the world. It is your world, too, after all. 

As he makes promises to you, you will remember your successful, narcissistic friends whose dust you hoped would rub off on you, but it never did. When he says he has to take a quick trip to LA, but he’ll text you soon, you will decide that if you ever do sleep with him, you will just enjoy it. Relish in it, even. You will keep it light and fun and casual and flirty. Darling, you’re almost 30. Don’t stop now. 

He will never message you back. You will have to use the pain of his silence, his rejection, as fuel for the fire of your own life. You will be forced to remember that you are a woman of the 21st century with a career and a brain of your own. And you would be better off building your own table than waiting for a seat at his. It will take a while, but you will learn that you can get to wherever you want to go without this hot piece of meat and fuckery. 

A random Wednesday in late August will mark the end of your 60-day detox from him, who you now refer to as writer-man. 

You will be glad that you decided to do your dreams on your own, just as you had planned all along.