The Buddy System   

No significant other? No problem.
Find yourself a sex buddy.

By Ainsley Maloney
Philly EDGE Correspondent

Alex, 23, has three special female friends.

They're there for him when he needs someone to talk to at night; they'll come out to the bar and get drunk with him on the weekends.

And they'll come over when Alex wants to have sex, even though they aren’t in a relationship with him.

These girls are Alex's "friends with benefits" (fwb): girls he sees semi-regularly, hangs out with, has a good time with, and, also, has sex with.

"They're just like any other friend," Alex, a Manayunk resident, says. "It just so happens at the end of the night (when) all of my other friends go home…we end up in the backseat of my car."

Alex, who is in a band, spends most of his time traveling across the country. He said the fwb scene is a perfect situation for him.

"It's great 'cause there's nothing to it,” he said.  "What's there not to like about it? No checking in; no buying presents or long phone calls; no having to eat dinner with her parents."

None of the girls know about one another, Alex said, but they all know they're not his girlfriend; he plans to keep it that way.

"I know I'm a scumbag," he said with a laugh. "But when you're in a relationship, you're not yourself anymore. Everything is like 'we.' … Oh, there are 'our' friends, there's 'our' favorite restaurant…. I don't like that. I'm too young for that shit."

But the truth is, Alex says, these girls are all more to him than just pieces of ass. He spends time hanging out with them and getting to know them. He says he talks to at least one of the girls on the phone every night.

"It takes a lot of work; I'm not gonna front," he said. "I usually like to have at least three girls I can call whenever I feel like it. Ya know, you don't always want to play the same video game, but you got a favorite video game… That's kind of how it is."

Even though Alex is in what seem to be laid-back and flexible relationships, he still has rules: no kissing and no dates.

"Kissing is just so intimate," he said. "All you're trying to do is get off, let's be serious. You gotta lay it on the line the second you're about to get into the sheets and you have a somewhat coherent mind. You gotta be like, ‘Listen, we're gonna do what we're gonna do and nothing's gonna come of it. We're not gonna go out on dates. We don't go to the movies…. We go to bars. We get drunk and go back to my place and we call it a Wednesday night. That's it.’"

Amy, a petite 23-year-old college grad from Philadelphia, says that sometimes, adding "benefits" to a friendship can actually make it stronger.

She says she has a group of about 10 guy friends from high school, five or six of whom she has hooked up with through the course of their friendship.

But, that "hooking up" was mostly kissing and playful fooling around – not sex.

"We have this bond now that no one else has," she said. "I guess that by the fact that you hooked up with them and aren't getting weird about it, they feel as though, 'She's cool, let's keep her around.' When I'm around them now, they'll treat me like one of the guys."

Her relationship with them will always be sexually charged, she says.

"We've all been drunk together, played strip poker; we'll watch porn and turn off the sound and make our own dialogue," Amy said. "To (be able to) sit there with a girl and be able to joke about it, I think it makes them feel like they can be themselves more."

Jen, a 20-year-old from Langhorne, swears she's somehow always in a “friends with benefits” relationship. Her longest one lasted four years of high school.

"I'm not a girl who likes to be tied down," she said. "To me, it's just perfect because they're there when you need them as a support network or to talk about my problems. I guess they helped me 'relieve stress,' " she said, laughing.

Jen, who is studying to be a family and sex therapist, is energetic and bubbly. She isn't the least bit embarrassed to admit she's "very inappropriate and can talk about anything."

"Some people think I'm a slut, but I'm not. I just like to talk about it," she said.

Jen's advice to women: everyone should have a fwb at some point in their life.

"There shouldn't be this taboo feeling when talking about sex," she said. "You need someone who will learn with you or experience it with you. As you get older, you have this thing - your sexuality - that's so powerful… It needs to be explored and figured out, because no one tells you how to. It's great if you have someone you can trust and who respects you to help you with that."

Jen's former fwb relationship started with long, intellectual conversations online. After Jen realized they could relate on a deeper level, things started to get playful.

"Some of our conversations were like porn," she said. "We realized we both had this sexual energy and it needed to go somewhere."

They hung out two or three times a week for the next four years, sometimes driving to a vacant parking lot to have sex. But the reason they stayed friends is that, along with having sex, they spent a lot of time talking, and getting to know each other.

"I've talked to him about more things than some of the people I've dated," she said.

What stopped them from taking their “friendship” a step further into a serious relationship, Jen says, was that, as much as she loved him, there were times she could have killed him.

"We irritate the hell out of each other," she said. "We're so similar that if we're together too much, he gets on my nerves. We're both extremely that it's our way or no way; neither of us is ever wrong."

Jen is certain that staying friends, with benefits, made them closer than she ever would have been as his girlfriend.

"With us, there were no uncertainties or doubts; we knew exactly where we were. In relationships, you're not sure," she said. "We didn't have that stepping over toes to test each other. I didn't get upset if something fell through, because there wasn't this huge meaning behind it.”

Having a friend with benefits does take work, Jen said, but it's not the stressful kind. And, even if her friend with benefits dated someone else, it wouldn't have brought about the jealous feelings sometimes common in other relationships.

"There's no bullshit, no drama. I knew if I wanted him, he'd be there. Even if he was with someone else, it never threatened me because I knew we'd still be special to each other in some way," she said.

What makes these relationships work is that everything else aside, your friendship will be there no matter what, says Cat, a 22-year-old student at Temple. She has a friend with benefits and said the "friends" part is important.

"A friend with benefits is someone who knows you personally, not just sexually," Cat says. "It's someone you stay up taking to until four in the morning… Sometimes you hook up with them, sometimes you don't – but they never treat you like just a piece of ass for the night."

Jen says there are a lot of ways people screw up a friends with benefits relationship.

"The most important thing is to be 100 percent open with each other and to know each other's expectations," she said. "You can't have one person wanting a relationship and another not wanting it."

Nadan, a 21-year-old student at Penn, found that out the hard way after trying to turn a long-term girlfriend into a friend with benefits.

"I could just tell she was holding onto something. She'd be saying 'I miss you' and what do you say? Do you honestly tell her, 'No, I don't miss you that much?'" he said.

“Friends with benefits is bullshit. It doesn't work unless both people have no relationship baggage at all."

Another thing that's important is respect, Jen says, so no one feels like they're being used.

Amy knows first-hand how shitty it feels when a friend doesn't show any respect.

When an online conversation with a friend in college turned sexual, Amy thought she'd be able to hook up with him like she had with her friends in high school. What she got was far from what she expected.

"He walked in and just dropped (his pants)," she said. "I was like, ‘Whoa! This isn't gonna work. We need some type of connection.’ He was like, 'Why? It's just sex.' There was just a massive lack of respect. I'm not looking for romance, but I want to feel like it means something. You don't want to feel used and trashy. I was like: ‘You might as well just leave me $20 on the nightstand.’"