I heard it as early as my first week on campus. All of the first year students were gathered on the floor of the house common room while the Head of New Students introduced us to the house. We looked up at her, with our freshly cut bangs and yet to be healed piercings, as she repeated “House booty is bad booty” as though it was a mantra. It seemed that if we were to take anything from that meeting that would be it: don’t sleep with people in your house. It made sense. You don’t want to run into past hookups nightly while brushing your teeth or make uncomfortable small talk while waiting for your laundry and you most certainly don’t want to see, or God forbid hear, your ex’s current hookups. So why, in my sophomore year, did I break that cardinal rule?
To be fair, with the Culture of Care guidelines, there is more incentive for in-house hookups. It’s not technically safer to hookup with someone in your house versus someone in another house, but it feels safer. Even though it’s still breaking mask rules (presumably) there’s a safety net. Someone in your house is still in your “bubble,” after all.
Like everyone else on a small college campus, I’d heard the horror stories. The roommates who hooked up and regretted it, a big sib and little sib hooking up, always prompting a swift and awkward housing change. It all seems wrong, dirty, and forbidden. Avoiding house booty is generally a good way to avoid awkward situations and to avoid being fodder for house gossip.
There are even those who take it a step further. I know students at Smith who only date people from Mount Holyoke or the other five colleges in an effort to avoid running into their exes on a daily basis. At a school this size, I can’t fault them. There are a couple people who I dread seeing in the Campus Center too.
But, when I got a dm from a cute girl who just happened to live on my floor, the last thing on my mind was house booty. I was just excited at a prospect. I hadn’t seen anyone romantically in months and although I wasn’t looking for a relationship the idea of being near someone after so many months alone intrigued me. All I had in mind was some good, maybe not-so-clean, fun. And that’s exactly what I got.
One night, I made the short trip to her room four doors down from me. I knocked on her door and she let me in. Unsurprisingly, the room looked a lot like my own room. We watched “The Kissing Booth”, cuddled on the twin XL, and when the movie was over we had sex. It was great.
We hooked up three or four more times after that, and it got progressively less enjoyable. Nothing dramatic happened, our attraction just sort of fizzled out. The last time I went over, we watched reality TV and cuddled. With Tim Gunn talking in the background, she brought up that she thought it might be better to just be friends and forego the physical part of our relationship. I was relieved. I liked her a lot, she was fun to hang out with and we got along well, but our sexual relationship just wasn’t working.
Now, I see her in the bathroom every night. We almost always have a conversation. I know if I’m stressed out, I can always count on her to roll out my muscles and give me a snack. She knows she can always count on me to edit her essays. It’s honestly one of the best relationships I have going on in my life right now.
Obviously this is the ideal. For me, house booty turned out to be the beginning-of-a-meaningful-friendship booty and I’m lucky for that. I think the key to a successful house booty relationship is simple yet extremely challenging: you can’t let feelings get involved. Everyone I know who has disastrous house booty experiences has them because the two people involved didn’t want the same thing. Either they started by hooking up and then one of them caught feelings, or they tried to pursue a serious relationship that quickly went south. Had I fallen for my house hookup things would be different. I would probably be trying to figure out a way to brush my teeth in my bedroom to avoid any contact. But I didn’t. Sex and feelings didn’t intersect and I managed a drama-free house hookup.
I won’t try to give advice on this subject. I can’t tell you not to fall for someone, because that isn’t how the heart works. But I also can’t tell you not to hook up with people in your house, because that would make me a hypocrite, and I imagine if you’re already thinking about it, you’re going to do it anyway. I suppose there is no good answer to “Is house booty really bad booty,” it’s all subjective and everyone’s relationship is different. At the end of the day, it’s about how willing you are to shower next to your hookup for the next two months.
