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I have had the fascinating pleasure of seeing what it's like being a FWB from a male point of view via a friend of mine who seems  to enjoy discussing his.... exploits. I shall call him Lot, short for Lothario. I always heard the term "modern-day Lothario", but I never knew where it came from, only that it was used to refer to guys who pick up a lot. Wikipedia to the rescue! Lothario: Lothario is a male first name which came to connote an unscrupulous seducer of women. Sounds about right!

He showed me a message in which one of his girls said something along the lines of, "I don't want to do this anymore, this will be the last time you ever hear from me." He claims that he did nothing wrong, and I think he's a good enough at reading people to know whether he has pissed them off or not, so I trust him on that point. While everyone else who saw that message was saying how he was in big trouble, I had a different reaction to that message - because I had done something similar myself.

This, titled Why You're Not Married, reminded me of it:


3. You're a Slut.
Hooking up with some guy in a hot tub on a rooftop is fine for the ladies of Jersey Shore -- but they're not trying to get married. You are. Which means, unfortunately, that if you're having sex outside committed relationships, you will have to stop. Why? Because past a certain age, casual sex is like recreational heroin -- it doesn't stay recreational for long.


That's due in part to this thing called oxytocin -- a bonding hormone that is released when a woman a) nurses her baby and b) has an orgasm -- that will totally mess up your casual-sex game. It's why you can be f**k-buddying with some dude who isn't even all that great and the next thing you know, you're totally strung out on him. And you have no idea how it happened. Oxytocin, that's how it happened. And since nature can't discriminate between marriage material and Charlie Sheen, you're going to have to start being way more selective than you are right now.

While I don't entirely agree with that, I have to say, there is some truth to it. There were a few times when I said to Charmeleon that I wanted to stop being FWB. I found that I wasn't really looking for someone else - at least, not seriously, because I guess one of my needs was being taken care of already. But like Mr Sheen, I kept going back for another hit. Obviously, I managed to stop eventually (and then got engaged, maybe that article is telling the truth... (I really doubt it)), but it was so easy going back.

Sometimes, I think that maybe there was a bit of Hollywood romcom in my reasoning. Like Hugh Grant in Two Weeks Notice, I think a part of me was hoping that since I wasn't around anymore, he would realise he missed me and want me back. Like Sandra Bullock, the female FWB filled certain niches that the guy never knew he wanted, and so once she was gone, he would be stuck trying to decide between two different types of envelopes and be completely lost.

Lot completely blew that out of the water. He doesn't seem to care all that much, and he is completely confident that she will return to him. I think he's even planning his next big conquest. I don't know, it just seems weird. I find it hard to believe that he doesn't care about any of these girls at all, as he seems to talk about them quite often, and not just to brag. He seems to enjoy spending time with them, and thinks about them when they're not around - that's a sign that he cares about them, right? Maybe I'm just biased because of how I saw the situation when it was reversed.

Either way, I'm also fairly confident she'll go back to him.