Dear Sars,

Dear Weary,

You’ve got a lot going on here. You have issues with commitment and abandonment because of your childhood; you have lingering bitterness and self-esteem crap carried over from your last serious relationship; you have a whole cart of baggage in the form of “failed attempts” to make it work with the current man.

With all of that in mind, yes, I do think you should move on, and here’s why — you need to take a step back, look at all of these factors, and find a way to deal with them one by one. You need to think about why and how the absence of a father figure affects you as an adult, and to come to closure and learn to separate your last boyfriend’s jerkiness from your own self-worth. Those things exist as part of your tangle of feelings for The One, and you can’t untangle that stuff from the middle of the situation.

You have things in your past that you have to deal with, and until you do that somehow — therapy, journalling, jujitsu, whatever — you’ll keep failing to make emotional connections the way you want to. Unfortunately, you’ll have to let this guy go in order to get that work done, but it doesn’t sound like things have worked out with him thus far anyway; it’s for the best, and confronting these problems now will pay off down the road.

Sars,

Dear Wondering,

Sure, it’s possible. It happens all the time. I don’t think you’ve fooled yourself, and I don’t think you need therapy — I mean, maybe you have, and maybe you do, but based solely on the fact that you’ve had fuck-buddy arrangements? No. There’s nothing wrong with them per se. Not everyone is built for that distance, but it’s not inherently harmful.

The problem with fuck-buddy relationships in my experience, both in life and in writing an advice column, is that, most of the time, one buddy wants more than fucking but won’t admit it. I’ve labored under that same delusion — I wanted more, so I’d hang in there with it for awhile, hoping that it would evolve into a “real” relationship, thinking that maybe the physical intimacy would turn into emotional intimacy, and then into love. I didn’t want to hear “no” or “that won’t happen,” and I’d go around telling myself that I didn’t mind keeping it casual and I didn’t have time for a boyfriend anyway and it’s really quite modern and blah blah blah, because I wanted it to be true — I wanted not to care, but I did care, and that’s when fuck-buddy arrangements get, er, fucked up.

That’s where problems arise with fuck-buddies. I mean, there’s “fuck-buddies” as in “we are friends that fuck, no more, no less,” and then there’s “fuck-buddies” as in “I want to marry him, but he’s not about that, so I’ll just take what I can get and hope he comes to his senses.” But they almost never do.

I want to make it clear that I don’t judge anyone for taking a trip to Fuckbuddyville, regardless of their motives or of the outcome. Shit happens. Hope dies hard. Mistakes get made. It’s ideal if everyone’s on the same page with it — if both parties understand what’s going on, and don’t lie to themselves about what it means — but that doesn’t always happen. If it does, though, you shouldn’t assume that you have some sort of emotional disorder just because you haven’t gotten burned.

Short answer? The fuck-buddy set-up itself is fine. It’s just dangerous sometimes. If you can avoid the dangers and you feel okay with it, good for you and don’t worry about it.

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