The new rules of engagement

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This article was published 04/12/2011 (5251 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

OTTAWA — One-night stands, booty calls, friends with benefits…

They’re all casual sexual relationships and they’re all different. Young people, whether they have had casual sex or not, understand the parameters and nuances of each relationship, says a University of Ottawa study published Thursday in The Canadian Journal of Human Sexuality.

“It suggests that these definitions are pretty widespread. Even people who haven’t had sex were able to identify the relationships,” says lead author Jocelyn Wentland, a PhD student in psychology at the university’s Human Sexuality Research Laboratory.

The study was based on focus groups with 23 undergraduates and sex educators. The undergraduates, with a median age of just over 19, were divided into three groups, one of men, one of women and a mixed group. The median age of the sex educators was 22. Nineteen of the participants had been involved in a casual sexual relationship.

In recent years, there has been wide acceptance of no-strings sexual relationships among young people. A number of studies in the U.S., for example, suggest about half of all college freshmen have had at least one friends-with-benefits encounter — that is, they have had sex with a friend with no intention of the relationship getting romantic.

“It’s pretty standard,” says Wentland, who believes young adult are developing “broader conceptualizations” of what constitutes a relationship.

“I think it has changed. But casual sex is not new. Our names for it are new.”

Wentland found each type of casual sexual relationship was different in terms of how it is initiated, its code of conduct, how it is communicated, the interaction and how the relationship is terminated.

A “booty call,” for example, is usually requested late at night while the caller is impaired, often through a text message. If there is no response, there is no feeling of rejection.

A booty call would not be added as a Facebook friend, but a “friend with benefits” is already a friend. You could text message a booty call, have sex, then go out with friends without feeling guilty. You probably wouldn’t do that with a friend with benefits because a level of respect exists.

A one-night stand might include staying until the morning, but breakfast, or even coffee, is not part of the bargain. On the other hand, a one-night stand could develop into a romance, and so could a friendship with benefits, but a booty call is only about the sex. A “f– buddy,” on the other hand, suggests a more frequent sexual relationship and the possibility of friendship.

However, investing too much emotionally into a friends-with-benefits relationship was acknowledged as a risk — “like if one person’s gonna fall for the other one and it just ruins it and it’s not the same for both sides anymore,” explained one female participant. “It could end with you losing a friend,” said another.

These kinds of casual relationships are showing up in pop culture. This year alone, for example, Hollywood released two romantic comedies about friends-with-benefits relationships, No Strings Attached with Natalie Portman and Ashton Kutcher and Friends With Benefits with Justin Timberlake and Mila Kunis.

“The unfortunate thing is that both these movies portray couples as staying together in the end,” says Wentland. “For many friends with benefits, it doesn’t end that way.”

She believes there are a lot of reasons why there is a spectrum of clearly defined casual sex relationships among young people. Young people are in an experimental time of life, they spend a lot of time studying, and the average age of first marriage is now almost 30 years old.

Many young people spend more than a decade between high school and marriage, says Wentland.

“It’s a long time to be a free agent. These relationships offer an in-the-meantime kind of access to sex. That’s not a bad thing.”

And neither do young women feel these relationships are demeaning to them, although Wentland suspects women who initiate casual sexual relationships are still judged more harshly by both men and women.

Some women reported using booty call relationships to determine whether they want to date, for example, says Wentland. One woman said the f– buddy relationship was the best because “it is what it is, and it is communicated clearly.” In other words, you only get together to have sex.

Women also have a lot of power in these relationships. “Men say they’re the ones who initiate one-night stands, but women decide if sex is going to happen,” says Wentland. “I don’t think these relationships are one-sided. Women can be willing participants and initiators.”

Alex McKay, research co-ordinator at the Sex Information and Education Council of Canada, believes these relationships are widespread throughout North America. A lot of research has already been done on the prevalence of friends with benefits, for example.

“A lot of it has to do with the information age. It has led to an integration of youth culture that is almost global in scale,” he says. “What’s going on in one subculture will inform what’s going on in other subcultures.”

McKay, who traces the origin of the term “friends with benefits” to Alanis Morissette’s 1995 song Head Over Feet, points to a study of 889 students between the ages of 17 and 25 at a U.S. university. It found 54 per cent of the males and almost 43 per cent of the females reported they had been in a friends-with-benefits relationship over the past 12 months.

The same study found that about a quarter of the men and 40 per cent of the women hoped the relationship would evolve into something more committed.

But another study of 125 students at the University of Michigan found less than 10 per cent of friends with benefits became romantic partners. Just over a quarter remained friends with benefits and a similar number ended both the sex and the friendship. The remainder stopped having sex, but remained friends.

McKay says when he was an undergraduate at McGill University in the 1980s, there were two kinds of sex: one-night stands and relationship sex.

Why this changed isn’t clear, but there has been a liberalization of sexual norms in Western culture, which has led to an increasing feeling of empowerment on the part of both young men and women to make controlled decisions about sexuality, he says.

It has led some people to explore alternative types of relationships beyond the two polarities of one-night stands and committed relationships. Spelling out the terms and conditions helps to minimize the emotional fallout.

“They know what to expect going in,” says McKay.

“There have always been substantial emotional risks in any type of sexual relationship. If the boundaries are clear, then individuals will be on firm ground when they’re navigating this new relationship territory.”

Historically, people have had little chance to explore their sexuality and preferences before they got into a committed relationship. The new landscape gives young people a chance to learn more about themselves in that decade between high school and marriage.

“It enables them to make good choices in term of long-term relationships,” McKay says.

— Postmedia News