How To Defend Your "Guilty Pleasure" Hook-Up
Photo by Adham Elsharkawi
Your roommate left the room to go to class and you finally have some alone time... at least a little while. Free of judgment, you curl up into a ball on your bed and snuggle up under your covers. Your face is dimly lit by the glow of your laptop screen. You turn to your top-secret favorite TV show. Suddenly, your ears are bombarded with the voice of the fabulous Maury Povich screaming, “You are not the Father!” You know the Maury Show is probably the worst thing you can possibly watch on television, but you don’t care. You’d gladly spend your day rotting your brain while watching it. You know as soon as you hear the jiggling of keys in the door, your roommate is back. Your guilty pleasure time is up with a slam of a laptop screen.
All of us have all encountered something or someone in our lives that we admit to be our guilty pleasure. You know if anyone found out about you involvement with these certain things, you’d have some serious explaining to do. So what happens when we apply the idea of guilty pleasures to hook ups? At one point or another, everyone has met, sustained and perpetuated intimate relations with an individual that has no rationally positive affect to their lives. In the words of R Kelly, “my mind’s telling me no, but my body, my body is tellin’ me yes.” We’ve all had a guilty pleasure hook up, so how do we go about defending them?
In the (revised) words of R Kelly, here’s what to do when “my [friend’s] telling me no, but my [horny drunken-ness] is telling me yes.” First, you have to identify what exactly makes your pleasure "guilty." In other words, what is it about this person that makes you almost ashamed of being attracted to them? In a general sense, we can classify this issue into two categories.
1) His personality is simply not on your level.
Including (but not limited to): having no ambition. He probably has no idea what Career Services is and you doubt he's ever hit Bird Library. May or may not be the guy who frequently rips a bong, is usually rude to his mom on the phone, has several slutty tendencies (STD’s are real), is an aggressive drunk, gossips more than you do, and generally embodies Logan from Zoey 101.
Chances are this kid probably sucks. If your friends are telling you that you should definitely break it off with him, they are just trying to protect you from the fuck boy that he is. You can proceed with caution with this kind of guilty pleasure hookup as long as you don’t catch the feels and the relationship is purely physical. However, it’s probably bad PR for yourself to be seen with such a d-bag and for that reason it might be a good idea to break it off.
2. His attractiveness is not on your level.
If your friends are telling you he’s not attractive enough to be with you but you’ve got the hots for him, screw your friends. No one has any right to tell someone else that they are not beautiful. This is not a justified reason to cut it off with your guilty pleasure hook up. If he has a hygiene problem on the other hand, that’s kind of gross and maybe consider breaking it off for your own health. Other than that, everyone has his or her own perception of beauty.
While a guilty pleasure hook up is bad personal branding, if you’re into it, you’re into it. So silence the quarrels of your friends and keep doing you.