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Nerve.com
Free couches and free love aren't the same thing, and yet the symbiosis of sex and travel is more obvious in couch surfing than any other kind of travel. Fresh off the plane or train in a strange city, you find yourself invited back to someone's place, into their bedroom. You're wrapped in their sheets, entrusting yourself to their hospitality, learning their habits, listening to them shower in the other room. In a shared space, attraction is more difficult to conceal, and sometimes more problematic. For better or for worse, it all happens much faster than it would even on a date. A couch-surfing fling has no strings attached: the guest will move onto a new couch, a new host, a new city.
A couch-surfing fling doesn't just begin or end at the airport curb, however. Couch surfers tend to see themselves as part of a tribe; unlike two people hooking up at a bar, they meet under an altruistic premise. One does not host with the expectation of anything in return, and that conditions the circumstances of the hook-up — it seems less like an act of self-gratification than one of mutual generosity. In the best of circumstances, couchsurfing puts the kindness back into sex, and perhaps relationships in general.
In my long-term relationships, cohabitation has always been the stumbling block. After my last girlfriend moved out, I had no desire to live with anyone ever again; I'm too controlling of my space. Yet Karine ended up staying for an entire month. Not once did I feel like I needed my space back, or that I was being taken advantage of. Neither did she, she later told me. It was hard for me to comprehend at the time, but now I do. Our parents had communes. What our generation has, I thought, is couch surfing.
Like many social experiments built on trust, hospitality websites exist in a precarious space. At a time when social
The founders of CouchSurfing.com forbid members from using it to date. |
-networking sites such as MySpace have come under the scrutiny of the world's concerned adults, CouchSurfing's organizers strive to keep its members safe and interacting according to idealistic principles. Members are asked to check each other's identity on their passports, and encouraged to verify their location by making a small credit card contribution to the site.
The system isn't foolproof. One con artist who used the site to rob his hosts was recently apprehended in Hawaii with the help of site members. Still, with about 230,000 members, the site has stayed remarkably clear of trouble. It is clear on one point: "Couchsurfing is not a dating site. We do not tolerate members using couchsurfing to find romance or sexual relationships . . . "
It isn't hard to see why the rule exists. When I proposed writing this article, some members of the community were alarmed. "We are battling to keep the website as safe as possible," I was told by Konstantinos, a member of CouchSurfing's leadership team and one of about 350 site ambassadors. "[Your article] would probably attract people who would arrive for that reason and create problems."
Those problems might resemble those facing MySpace's operators, who began removing the profiles of 7,000 sex offenders earlier this year, in response to growing concern among parents and lawmakers that the site had become a hunting ground for sexual predators. Owned by a major corporation and funded by ad revenue, MySpace can afford to maintain its own company, Sentinel Tech Holding Corp., to monitor its 180 million members. An ad-free nonprofit with only a fraction of the users and funding of MySpace, CouchSurfing's challenge is different. On one hand, users need to be adults to use the site, which eliminates some of the risk and hysteria; on the other, they are inviting each other into their homes, and are largely responsible for monitoring themselves.
As a result, the founders of CouchSurfing decided from the beginning to forbid members from using it to date. "Not much discussion was required," says co-founder Dan Hoffer, who started the site in 2003 along with computer programmer Casey Fenton. "It was self-evident what the risks were." When complaints arise, Hoffer says, members are reprimanded or expelled. A "safety team" handles these complaints, but for the most part the members police themselves, using the reference system.
Yet judging by the stories I've heard from fellow couch surfers, the no-hook-up rule is broken all the time. (Indeed, says Hoffer, the first CouchSurfing baby has already been born to a Scandinavian and an Australian who met through the site.) One American couch surfer who prefers to be called Nyla attended a party organized through the website in East London. After an hour of drinking Pimms, she met another member and found herself immediately attracted. They made it as far as the back doorway of a church, she says, "and pawed each other's clothes off until we were both mostly naked, kissing and going down on each other."
Wilder still is the story of Sexy Suzie, a twenty-eight-year-old CouchSurfing ambassador who was verified by no less than the site's founder, Casey Fenton, under her real name. Sexy Suzie maintains a second profile for hookups, however — the profile links to her MySpace blog, which anonymously details her experiences attending swinging parties with other couch surfers.
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