women and men: try a little tenderness

Can men handle sex without strings? Can anyone? In reply to a testimony two weeks ago John Pressman argues that there's no such thing as casual se

two weeks ago in this space, Annalisa Barbieri posed the question, "Why can't men handle casual sex?", stating that she had "woken up one morning to discover she could detach love from sex" and relating how men she had come to sex-only arrangements with had been unable to deal with not being in control of the situation.

Her testimony struck a chord, not because of its hectoring tone - it seemed to me to be full of generalisations about the nature of people - but because I have been on the receiving end of a woman who claimed to have detached sex from love. And like Barbieri's case studies, I was unable to handle it.

I met Sarah when I was 24, and within a few weeks I had developed a crush - an infatuation, near as dammit. She was two years older; slim and dark where I was wide and blonde; staunchly socialist where I was politically confused; a child of the city where I am provincial. She invited me to her house one day, we talked and she said we should go to bed. She asked me back the next night and the night after that and pretty soon I was living more at hers than at mine.

We talked about our sexual endeavours; I asked the questions, she provided the answers. She had had 30 partners to my paltry 10 (though I doubled it for her benefit). She had slept with people whose names she didn't know, with people who had been too drunk to remember, with all shapes, sizes, sexes and races. It was clear to me that I was the latest of a long line of lovers, but I was intrigued enough not to care.

Her flatmate moved out, I moved in, and everything was rosy for a year and a half. That was when we found we had to move house - into a place that was too small. We talked about buying somewhere. It would have to work, we agreed, even if we were no longer going out together. But it was too much commitment, and things started to go wrong. I came back from a holiday and things were awkward. I fretted for a couple of days, then asked her to come home early for a talk. She turned up, half cut, at 10.30pm.

"I think you've been sleeping with other people," I said.

She lit a cigarette, looked at me and said: "Well, I have ... But it doesn't make any difference. Sex has nothing to do with it. It has nothing to do with anything."

One lover, it turned out, was her boss, in our bed while I was away on holiday, if that makes a difference. Another she had met at a conference somewhere. It had only begun recently, she said. Then she started packing: she had told her sister she would stay with her that night. "What do you want to do?" she asked. Her assumption was that I would move out. "It's my flat," she said. "You moved in with me. If we're going to split up you have to go."

I dithered. A few days later, she asked me if I would stay. The crux of the matter for me was whether I would be the only person she would have sex with. "No," she said. "You know what I'm like. You knew when you met me."

I pointed out that that was two years ago, that until recently she had not slept with anyone else, and that if she had decided to change the rules then perhaps she might have said something. As far as she was concerned the rules had never changed. If I was suffering it was because I had assumed rights I was not entitled to. Soon after that I left.

Was she right or was I? Was Barbieri right to expect that a verbal "just sex, please" would last months, years? Can someone be blamed for thinking there is something else there? At the time I'd have looked it up in the relationships rule book, if such a thing existed.

The only judgment I have come up with since then is that I could expect, and will expect next time, that after one month, six months or two years of monogamous sex I would have good reason to have gotten a little involved. Love is a misleading emotion. If it existed for me then, it was closely guarded by jealousy, lust, anger and self-pity, which certainly have the same sticky feel to them. Unsurprisingly, it took time for me to discern one from the other.

I almost immediately started seeing someone else, and we had bad sex for a couple of months before it fizzled out. And then I found another whom I only half fancied, and with whom I secured, like Barbieri, a verbal agreement that this was just about sex. We slept together twice: I didn't want it to happen again but she did, and rang me up weeks later to tell me how if only it could happen again, everything would be hunky dory. I didn't believe her, and stopped what I had never intended to start.

This is not about being dumped or dumping. Nor is it about what women do to men or men to women; it's about what people do to people. Barbieri's "Why can't men handle casual sex?" is extrapolated from two cases: with a similarly low level of evidence (and what is Testimony if it isn't that?) I could write the retort "Why can't women handle casual sex?"

But more to the point would be "Why most people can't handle casual sex (and why they bloody well shouldn't have to)". In my experience as both perpetrator and victim, sex for sex's sake is usually a hurt inflicted by the emotionally dysfunctional on the sexually naive.

Sarah could have made me sign a written contract saying "this relationship is purely about sex", she could have written it on a placard and hung it over the bed; it wouldn't have made much difference. Which isn't to say it isn't possible for sex and emotion to be divorced, just that you shouldn't expect it: you can spend your life looking for the eternal zipless fuck, but you shouldn't feign surprise if from time to time you get your fingers caught in the mechanism.

I will continue to expect attachments to develop, not because I can't fend off the feelings, but because in the end it seems cowardly and pointless to do anything else. If I ever get round to handing out a contract to my lovers, it would read: "It's pretty unlikely that we're perfect for each other, but let's try and see." And the people peddling sex without strings, sex as entertainment, I would ask politely to stay home. Preferably alone.