The morning after a Friendsgiving extravaganza, my husband and I sat on the basement couch with our partner. Their house had hosted as usual, and the kitchen counters upstairs were still bursting with goodies friends had left behind. Basking in the listlessness of a holiday weekend, we had nowhere to be other than where we were. It was divine.
Down walked our partner’s roommate, D. Sweet, glorious D was toting a pound cake...and was naked as the day she was born. Plopping down on the couch, she curled up next to my husband, and watched him play her video game.
Our relationship with D was as varied as the potluck had been last night. After meeting at a play party where she gave me the spanking of a lifetime, we’d become close friends. She and my husband had been coworkers, even. Sometimes, but not often, we’d slept together. Usually, it was just this: snuggles, intimacy, or an appreciative wink. But above everything else, we were emotionally close.
You can call this configuration whatever you’d like; I’ll call it a sexual friendship.
Whenever talk comes around about casually getting sexy, the phrase “friends with benefits” is inevitable. It creeps into every corner of our culture, especially rom coms, which are so persistent with the myth that we all know by now exactly how a fuck buddy scenario is supposed to end: disaster and a wedding. Usually in that order.
But if you’ve ever actually had a friend with benefits, you know that’s not how it goes down. Muddied feelings, mismatched demands, and mangled expectations let the whole thing fizzle. And when you’re done sleeping together? The “friends” part is a distant memory.
Think back to your last fuck buddy. Odds are, you kept them at arms’ length, sparing them the innermost details of your lives. You didn’t hang out to collage or go to happy hour. You got to together for one thing only: sex.
As far as friends go, you’re mutually pretty crappy ones.
Sexual friendships are different – and what sets them apart is that you’re friends first, and lovers second. You value building intimacy together in every form. As friends, your job is to support each other, uplift each other, be vulnerable with each other – and sometimes, get each other off.
But the end goal isn’t sex. In fact, when entering a sexual friendship, you should just throw out any concept of an end goal at all. There’s no finish line. Pleasure comes from making out, flirting, a well-placed wink. If and when sex happens, you’re both on the same page, and you end the night exactly where you were before.
The heart of a good sexual friendship is small moments of sexuality. Making out is a beautiful way to appreciate your friends and show them affection. Little spaces of intimacy and arousal are powerful – more than a race to the Big O. Friends, sexual or otherwise, have fun together, get to know each other.
That trust that friendship builds takes pressure off any need to go “all the way,” and any expectation that there’s some destination y’all need to reach at all. One night, you might just lay your head on their shoulder at a party, or run your fingers through their hair while you watch a movie. Other nights, they might stay up til dawn in your bed as you slurp each other down like mango.
To folks who have never had a sexual friendship, this could all just sound like someone twisting the situation to get all the perks of a significant other without any of the commitment. But the truth is a bit flipped: in a sexual friendship, you’re dedicated and committed to your friend’s wellbeing – including when it comes to them finding their happily ever after somewhere else.
Freed from the stress of wedding bells, or even monogamy, you and your sexy friends get to be yourselves, nothing barred. You share your thoughts just as messily as you did before, and talk about feelings with abandon. And when your friend finds a significant other and starts to fall in love with them, you get to lean back into your friendship, clean and simple, and be as close as you were before.
Freed of any romantic ideas of planning a future together, a sexual friendship gives you license to get weird.
As a nonjudgmental space to explore your sexuality, what better chance do you have to try something new? Pull up new porn to watch together, read some erotica, or learn how to eat someone out finally. A sexual friendship is the least A to Z style relationship you’ve ever been in – and it’s liberating.
Many people dip their toes into the world of sexual friendships through exchanging platonic nudes. Butts are amazing, and friends want to support each other. Everyone should have at least one person they send mutual nudes to, who they know will always pump them up. The ideas for expressing yourselves together don’t end there. You might paint on each other’s naked bodies one day, or kiss on the dancefloor just for the pure joy of feeling their body on yours. And if you’re two horndogs looking to make a buck, some sexual friendships might even evolve into camming together or selling panties as a dream duo.
Whatever you choose together, go for it, free of expectation. The point is to let your platonic relationship bloom in fresh and fascinating ways in a safe and sensual space. Because think about it: what better way can two amateur switches practice their flogging skills than by exploring different dynamics as a team?
Worst case scenario, if you two try a new sex thing and it flops, at least you know it happened with someone you can laugh it off with – not with someone you’re still bending over backwards to impress.
We’ve got a big and troublesome myth in our world: the relationship escalator It starts with flirtation and base by base, we crawl our way to sex, until suddenly, we’re picking out IKEA furniture for our first home, and before we know it, there are wedding bells and the shriek of a newborn hammering at your ears. If you’re not steadily ascending the escalator, it’s generally understood that there’s something wrong with you. Something lacking. Your parents and grandparents constantly ask you about your love life, or say, “I need grandbabies!” during an awkward holiday dinner.
That lifestyle push is a sham – and it turns out you can hop off it at any time. Just ask Amy Gahran. After gathering four years of data on relationships, she wrote the book Stepping off the Relationship Escalator: Uncommon Love and Life. In it, through outlining our “customs” and expectations in a relationship, she encourages readers to question the way we think intimacy and love should unfold.
It’s not to say that there should be no escalator at all. For some people, myself included, a committed relationship is fulfilling. I love being married. But I think I love it so much because I have read up on it and actively made the choice to share my life with this one, specific person.
Not all frisky relationships need to be as cut and dry as a marriage. A good sexual friendship has no escalator at all. You let the relationship be what it is, free of the expectation that it reaches some “logical” conclusion.
Have you ever seriously stopped to contemplate if a traditional, monogamous relationship serves you? To find a thriving sexual friendship, maybe it’s time you did a little homework. Watch a TED Talk or a YouTuber who breaks it all down. The more you challenge the way you think about relationships, the more deeply you can feel and embody the ones you’re in – platonic, romantic, and everywhere in between.
Knowing the other options out there only enriches your current choices. If it scares you to look at other models of intimacy, or makes you feel a little queasy just thinking about it, maybe it’s time you asked yourself: are you confident in your monogamy? If you were fully sold on the idea, then hearing about other ways people get together wouldn’t make you squirm. You’d just accept it, the same way you can accept that some people eat meat when you’re a vegan.
For a relationship to be intimate and sexual without being romantic, you need to do a little digging to uncover your own divisions of intimacy. The work may be scary, but the rewards are (truly) boundless.
After you’ve started unpacking the tricky and shocking pressure monogamy has put on you from birth, you still won’t get anywhere with a sexual friendship without some Grade A communication thrown in. If you aren’t direct with friends about what you’re hoping for or daydreaming about, they won’t know your fantasies or be able to talk about exploring new facets of friendship.
So take the plunge. Talk about sexual friendships and all the things that might come from it. Bringing up an article like this is a great way to break that ice If you can’t fathom your friends being receptive to having this kind of conversation, that’s okay. They may not be the people you form deep and lasting friendships with that get a little hot and heavy.
And that’s okay. Communication is essential, but it only works to build what you want if you expand your friends group to include more receptive folks. If all your friends are married to the idea of intimacy leading to marriage, or at least romance, it may be hard to give voice to your desires.
So be direct. If you’re looking to make new friends, find groups of people with similar goals, or make a very honest dating profile. Being direct is smartest. After all, a sexual friendship stresses friendship first, right? As friends, you share, you talk, you root for each other. And with it all comes honesty.
If you’re in a flirty friendship with someone already, be bold and mention it. See what happens. If they say no, just let it go, and accept it with grace. I had a friend once who threw it out there, caution to the wind, and suggested a threesome. Although I turned him down, it didn’t change our relationship, because he dropped it as casually as he’d mentioned it. If anything, his illustrious proposal only deepened our platonic bond.
When I landed my first genuine sexual friendship, it was because I came at a friend with total honesty. We’d both been recently dumped, and he asked me on a date. After turning him down, I just asked if we could have sex instead – and he was game.
It was so refreshing to be that frank, and have someone in my life I could trust, and was good friends with, that could also get sexy with me. We forged intimacy without any of the muck. When we both eventually got back together with our respective exes, we were rooting for each other, and excited for each other to be happy. He and his then-girlfriend invited me to join their kickball team. It was sweet and normal.
What made it work was the mutual understanding that we’d communicate as soon as something changed – and wouldn’t be weird about it when they did.
Okay, this is where it gets complicated – and where the rules for straight people change a little bit. If your friendships are all very hetero, you might be hard-pressed to find people down to canoodle as besties. But if you’re in a juicy queer bubble of open-minded folks, then your pals are probably not strangers to making out wih a friend from time to time.
Because of that, you don’t need to hash it out each time you smooch someone new. Remember, kissing in a sexual friendship doesn’t always equal sex. It just means intimacy. You may snuggle that night, hang out at a barbeque, or give each other head. It’s all on the table. When your friends group is this open, the relationships can just exist any way that it blossoms – and you don’t need to worry about talking it out.
There are few things more delightful or innocent than kissing a friend after a really good conversation, or laying on them in the heat of a dance night – and if you and your crew are used to that kind of love, you can skip any clarifying text messages or intense conversations after a night of fun – because you’ve all already laid your cards on the table.
Straight people though, be warned: you’ll probably need to have several talks in order for your sexual friendships to gel.
Whoever you are, compersion helps. The opposite of jealousy, it’s something we could all use a little more of, no matter if we’re monogamous or polyamorous.
With compersion, you learn to let your partner’s pleasure bring pleasure instead of feeling upset or jealous. Even if their happiness comes from somewhere outside of you, you’re excited for them to experience whatever comes their way – and you trust them to treat you with respect as their pleasure unfolds.
It can be hard to build compersion at first with a romantic partner. We’re taught possessiveness is love, and jealousy shows that you care. In reality, it’s unhealthy at best and abusive at worst. That’s where sexual friendships come in.
Start slow by practicing compersion first in this honest and intimate kind of friendship. You don’t own any partner, but especially not someone you may make out with sometimes, or just have sex casually in an intense friendship. It’s a sweet, strange feeling to be able to lay in bed with someone and talk honestly about heartbreak, or share hopes for the future that don’t include the person whose arm is wrapped around you, without any jealousy.
When that same sexual friendship I talked about earlier became platonic again, I was excited; it meant my friend was getting back together with the person he loved. Being able to support him and still be close felt healthy and abundant. No jealousy, no grieving, and no feeling of something ending arose. Instead, our relationship just changed shapes.
With compersion, I kept my friendship – and ten years later, we still keep in touch.
Of course, as perfect as sexual friendship sounds, it almost goes without saying that some friendships are meant to stay platonic. There are many reasons why it wouldn’t work well, and all of them boil down to you using your common sense – but there are three things to look out for when falling into a sexual friendship.
When you can’t seem to sync up about morals and life goals, you may not be compatible for anything beyond a little banter at brunch. Before diving into exploring who’s the right candidate for a sexual friendship, get clear on who to ask – and who to skip. If you have a good friend who can’t fathom casual flings, they’re clearly not the person to proposition if you’re looking to keep things simple and vulnerable and friendly.
Start by communicating openly with friends about your opinions on sexual friendships, and tell them what you’re looking for, so your friend doesn’t hold any hopes that the relationship will become romantic. Find someone who you don’t expect to have feelings for, either – and be honest with yourself. You may need to try things on with a friend who’s different enough from you that you don’t start daydreaming about plant babies and vacations and visiting each other’s families for Thanksgiving.
You probably already have that friend in your life: the one that you love platonically and deeply, but who would butt heads with you too many times if you ever tried to really share a life together. If you’re both new to it, then they’re your prime candidate. And so long as you enter the scene with nothing but honesty, you’ll both emerge from a sexual friendship better than when you started.
When you’re exploring sexual friendships, know the power dynamics at play. It can be easy to fall into traps and tropes when navigating the ripe world of sexual friendships. If you and your friend are in different stages of life, or have some kind of visible power difference between you two, it might be impossible to have a healthy dose of intimacy without playing into imbalances or heightening them.
The most obvious case is in professional situations. No matter what the workplace environment or how close you are, a supervisor or scheduling manager should clearly never propose a sexual friendship with an employee. You may have known each other for years, but they will eventually worry about how you’ll handle their schedule or career future if the arrangement ever changes.
Likewise, age is always a factor in navigating more complex dynamics. Watch for how an age gap, resources gap, or experience gap may make you seem like you hold some kind of keys to a kingdom, leading to sexual friendships that your friend may not actually want, but not know how to say no to.
And while this is inevitable in many sexual situations, be aware of the gender dynamic. If you’re a cisgender man dating women, be aware of the ways your intimacy shows itself, and how clear you are in your intentions. Learn how to take a rejection, and be a good, communicative friend who listens to the people around you.
Power dynamics and expectations aside, the best way to make sure your sexual friendship is a success is to have the same perspective diving in. Whatever the reason for exploring a sexual friendship with someone, make sure they’re coming at it from the same perspective. A monogamous person who’s been jilted will probably have different perspectives than someone who is polyamorous and wants to appreciate their friends sexually.
While both have good intentions, the different understanding of why you’re sharing intimacy could make your friendship implode. On the same page, you and your friends can thrive while getting it on.
Some of my favorite sexual friendships have arisen out of mutual heartbreak. With two different lovers, we were just looking to lean on a friend, get off, and have fun with someone we trusted. It was nice to work through things, talk about breakups, and still have good sex.
Being on different pages will only muddy things – but knowing where you’re both coming from will only make the evolution of your friendship that much sweeter.
If you’ve spent your life wading through traditional models of lovin’, sexual friendships may sound like a head trip. Sitting on the couch with my partner, my husband, and the undefinable D could sound like a monogamous person’s nightmare. But this kind of life is giving and tender, and is something everyone can have with a little communication.
It starts with stepping off that escalator – so when will you make the leap?
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