Sex, Love, and Dating

An advice column by K

This week, K (pictured) fielded questions from our followers on Instagram about sex, love, and dating. They are reproduced here verbatim. Anonymity was granted whenever requested.

Scroll down for her answers.

My name is K and I am going to give you advice I do not intend for you to take. I am ultimately a faulty informant in the domains of sex, and love, and dating. But even if my advice isn’t best taken, it’s advice that you need to hear. In a world where an emoji could mean ten to twelve things, an earnestly answered Hinge prompt is a political act, and a “relationship” must clear tens of precursory titles just to make it there, it’s nearly impossible to be “right” about love. You see, the age of algorithmic love is exactly the right time to start listening to those of us who have always been clueless. I am here to save you.

You know when a six-year-old announces something unbelievably stupid and obvious and not at all worth saying out loud and you go, “that’s actually sort of the most profound thing I’ve ever heard”? That is the type of thing I am going to be doing here.

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how long is love worth waiting for - anonymous

At least as long as dead soldiers’ dogs wait for them to come home from war. And keep in mind – each of their years is six of ours.

what do u do if u met the person u wanna spend your life with way too early - anonymous

Wait for the right day. Wait for morningtime. Get ready in your work clothes, sit them down on a bed that’s made, tell them that you can’t ensure there’s anything after life and that in a way the heart is something with a lot of pieces that are meant to be given away or dispersed over time, like pine tree branches covered in snow in winter or oak branches laden with acorns in fall. You can tell them K told you she only knows who she is for the people she’s given herself to in error.

My aunt had a friend who met her husband in kindergarten class. They were perfectly devoted to one another for forty years – “true soulmates” is what everyone called it. They had two boys and a dog and a little storybook bungalow. When she turned forty-five she left him out of nowhere. She gave the dog away and rode off on the back of the town misanthrope’s Ducati. Everyone thought it was a horrible idea, obviously. She’s completely happy now. It turns out it was supposed to be her and her soulmate for those forty years and then a completely strange life after the fact, and she’s probably gonna die by the biker’s side. Sometimes you’re wrong; sometimes the answer isn’t singular. Other times it’s a situation like Marina Ambramovic’s, or one of those Nicholas Sparks rain machine reunion situations. Only one way to find out.

I feel like I did too much too quickly - anonymous

Three times this year someone has told me “I love you” after a first date. Once in bed, once a few mornings after our Bushwick make out in his low-ventilation, brain-corroding workspace for graffitiing sweatshirts and other found objects, and once half in jest on Graham avenue. Two of the guys I was sort of frightened by. The third one actually kind of went somewhere. What I learned from all this was that these hasty professions of “love” had nothing to do with whether I pursued things with the boys afterward – because I did, once – and everything to do with the uncanny number of times it happened to me: three. Three times. In a single year. That is a lot of times.

There might be two sorts of people: those who move too quickly and those who are pragmatic, measured, and on great terms with their mothers. For whatever reason, the magnetism is usually only cross-categoric anyway, so you should probably just trust they’re the type of pragmatic to be taken with this sort of thing.

when is the right time to say i love you - sequoia, 27, she/they

Evidently, whenfuckingever. Granted, I am a particularly forgiving person.

I will never have sex or a boyfriend because I’m ashamed. - anonymous

Yes, you will, and this entire first act of your life will become a splinter in your wake. You’ll barely recognize who you were when you didn’t have an air of lustfulness following you around. It’s the secret third puberty we never talk about and it lives smack dab in between getting boobs and getting fat.

I cannot even tell you how sexy shame is to people. Oh my God, I’m like, so self-confident, and I’ll never stop demanding we turn the lights off. Everyone goes fucking crazy for that. “You’re so beautiful,” they’ll tell you, and you’ll get to bow your head in false shame – a late rehearsal of shame – and light the candle. You’ll get there one day. As for the state you’re in currently, well, that’s just the due you pay before wielding it later. Stay the course.

general advice for a person with a fear of intimacy? - Isa, 24, f

Watch porn with your friends and sleep in jeans with your would-be lovers. Blur everything until intimacy cheapens and regular stuff thickens. Wait for sex to become funny, become a relentlessly honest person and announce whenever you don’t know or haven’t tried something, wait until you’re so beautiful you feel like choking on your own spit. And try again.

How I Can get someone to be my non serious gf - David, 23, m

What I wouldn’t give to reach through your screen, pull you into my world, and introduce you to the modern world’s most depraved new inventions: the obvious “situationship” and the not yet popularized “extuationship,” which I’m pretty sure is just new era “backslide.” Right now I am in something he and I have begun to call, between ourselves, a “long distance flirtationship,” because to even call it a “situation” is too precarious for the both of us. Everyone left alive is a sick individual and the titular presence of “gf” has more legs than you might realize.

how do u navigate dating when you’re dealing with mental health issues? - Bimmer, 25, m

What I wouldn’t give to reach through your screen, pull you into my world, and introduce you to the endemic scourge I’ve somewhat affectionately dubbed “BPD chasers.” If anything, it’s easier for us.

I’m kidding. I can’t answer this one. It’s really, really difficult, and I’m really bad at it. Good advice would probably be to “start with being honest” or something like that. For myself I’ve usually done this thing where I tell them to shake me hard if I start to be cruel or distant, but no one wants to do that to someone, I guess.

Its been ~8 Months and im still not fully over her.. - Neša, 22, m

If you were you’d be a total sadist. Never let the world take want from you. It created Instagram to trick you into believing in endless girls. It created Hinge to befuddle you with a mirrored hall of “choice.” Now it’s gone so far as to create pictures of girls who’ve never existed to dupe you into believing there’ll always be another one or ten of her around the corner. But let me guess – none of them would ever [do that one thing] [she does] [in her own way]. You should text her about that thing – that random mannerism that could make you cry. Text her right now and say it like that.

He makes me feel safe Does he need to also have spirit? - anonymous

Very good question. I know that this isn’t what you meant by it, but I slept with a drummer this past summer who had so little money he asked me to buy him a pack of Spirits and promised to “get me back.” I’m no gender fundamentalist, and obliged without hesitation. He, of course, never “got me back.” The last time I saw him, I was sitting on a cement slab in Greenpoint and he was walking into a café with his hand on the lower back of the most beautiful woman I had seen in my life. I wondered whether she was going to be paying. I wanted my blues back. I felt worth the price of a pack.

Spirit as in spirit might be nice, yeah. But at the very least, try and not give your body to anyone with neither twelve dollars to their name nor a single ounce of shame.

Im 21 years old and haven’t had a real relationship tbh. I’ve had flings but nothing more - Alex, 21, m

Blame Coronavirus. Whatever.

Just want to be luved thats all - Gary [alias] / idk bro sometimes i feel like i long for love too much - Plug, 27, m / I fall in love with everyone - anonymous

There are a lot of lies about specialness we tell ourselves, beginning around eight years old with the general fallacy of “ambidextrousness.” I hold that the most detrimental of all these is the completely uninspired conviction that we and we alone want to be loved more than anyone else does. The median amount of love is so much that sometimes old Scottish widows die of arterial collapse and you are but a statistic and when you do fall into it – because you probably will – when you do too get crushed by the very thing that has felled basically everyone in your entire lineage it won’t feel at all revolutionary. It’ll feel like coffee being brought to you in a mug you like.

Am I doing the right thing? - anonymous, 25, f

You need to tell me more I think. But so long as you could corral your entire cohort of lovers and one-offs and torrid affairs and stalkers and deadened nothings and agonizingly unrequited crushes and be absolutely sure no one in the world would share your exact lineup, then I don’t see how not.

I love and admire one girl. I found 1 of her hairs on her bathroom floor. I saved it. - anonymous

Message me.

How can love? Everyone hate🥀 - Zencii, 23, m

I know, baby.

სასნულ - anonymous

I love you, too. Hi from not Georgia. I’ve always wanted to see the mountains from Kazbek.

We haven’t seen each other in very long - Kemal Simar, 20, m

Once I did a group project with a guy in Amsterdam for one day. I was nineteen. I thought maybe there was something there on his end, too, or maybe he just had one of those beat up dog faces with a naturally sensual desolation to it. In any case I wanted him badly. Four years later, after an hours-long scour, I found his LinkedIn profile – despite his having probably the second most common full name in the entire United Kingdom. I messaged him “havent forgotten u.” Guess what? He hadn’t forgotten me, either. He told me to tell him if ever I was in Edinburgh. I told him maybe. I wouldn’t.

Nothing’s ever too long.

I hope he makes himself a life and never dies of arterial collapse.

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K is a diarist from Maine. She writes on Let Me Know When You’re Home.