9 Simple Rules For Successfully Sleeping With Your Ex

Perhaps you’re feeling lonely. Maybe you’re just fantastically bored. Maybe you just miss them or you’re fighting to remember them or their bed is starting to look like the DeLorean and who could turn that ride down? Regardless of the circumstance used to validate your reasoning, there are a few essential guidelines that, if followed, will leave you satisfied instead of shattered.

Wait

Wait until any anger pain hurt sadness resentment love is gone. While scraping all the morose marrow from your soul is impossible, and lobotomies are highly discouraged, time does heal. Let the clock’s arthritic hands repair what they broke. Let history smooth over the ugly fights and the hurtful words and the debilitating moments that created your ending. Unless you wait, seeing them will only tear out the stitches you begged for.

Be Straightforward

Leave the sexual games and unending power struggles for those actually trying to date. This is sex, boys and girls, and it should be as easy as a buffet. Look, this is what you can have. Yes, you will have to choose if this is, in fact, what you would like to have. Oh, it is? Then let’s decide when you would like to eat, let’s arrange where dinner is served, and let’s get down to business. If attempting to make the magic happen becomes as messy as baby’s first birthday cake, walk away.

Stay Light

Talk about the weather or your opposing political views or your endless job. Talk about a movie you’ve seen or an album you’ve listened to or the fact that the New York Yankees can’t stay healthy this season. This isn’t a time to reminisce on what was, inquire as to what could have been, and dust off a book you both shut long ago. The time to wax philosophically on the intricate failings of your forever is over.

Ignore

Ignore the end table that used to be yours. Look over the television that once adorned your living room and housed the shows you two would watch. Disregard their smell that once followed you around a shared apartment. All are nothing more than a shattered past wrapped in lust and masquerading as the present. Let the residual ache of every palpable failure act as water in the desert, capable of erasing even the strongest mirage.

Drink

Yes, you will need to toe the line between “baby, pull my hair” and “baby, pull my hair back while I vomit.” Yes, gentlemen, you’ll have to keep in mind that whiskey dick is fun for absolutely no one. However, a cocktail or three is crucial to reaching that coveted mental state where you’re relaxed enough to believe everything you do or say is sexy.

Detach

When their hands are falling through your hair or firmly placed behind your neck or caressing the hip bone they once claimed to be their favorite part of you, don’t think. Don’t think about the first time you felt their fingers smell your shampoo. Don’t think about all the times they placed their hand on the back of your neck while you were driving. Don’t think about the kisses they used to tattoo your hips. Those days are dead and no amount of heavy breathing will revive them. That was then, this is “fuck me now.”

Leave Early

This doesn’t necessarily mean “sneak off in the middle of the night” mind you, as that isn’t necessarily appreciated. However, if a sleepover is called for and the sharing of the bed has been established, don’t wait for them to make it the next morning before you decide it’s time to leave. Laying perfectly still will not secure a prolonged visit. This isn’t Jurassic Park. They can still see you.

Remember Why

When you’re pulling away from his house or leaving his apartment or watching him walk out the door, remember why he didn’t last. When the orgasm is still stinging your cheeks and you can still taste her lips and you’re sinking in pleasure, remember why she’s the past tense to your present. Don’t mistake the beautiful ability of making sex work for the difficult ability of making a relationship work.

Repeat

Oh god yes. Repeat.