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The vast majority of hookups, however, are probably accidental. When people search for a compatible host, they may inadvertently find themselves with exactly the kind of person they'd like to hook up with under other circumstances.
"When I look for CouchSurfing hosts, I don't just choose the cutest guy in whatever place I'm going to visit," says Pam (another pseudonym), a twenty-seven-year-old graduate student from New York. "But if someone like that also happens to be a cute boy, well, I'm single and traveling alone. No harm in seeing where things go."
Pam recalls couch surfing in Portugal with Mauricio, "this little hipster guy with trendy sunglasses and a nice sometimes-Portuguese, sometimes-British accent who was way cuter than I was expecting based on his picture." Apple was pleasantly surprised when Mauricio made her dinner and poured her wine and pampered her as she relaxed on his balcony.
There was just one problem. "His apartment was spotless and perfectly decorated, and his bathroom was full of hair products," Pam says. After six months in Europe, land of sandals and man-capris, Pam says she thought she'd learned to distinguish metrosexual from gay. Apple was positive Mauricio fell into the later category. Then, at the end of dinner, Mauricio surprised her.
"Almost in one fell swoop, he lit a joint, hit it and then leaned over and blew the smoke in my mouth," she says.
The next few days were full sightseeing, sex and hashish. But for Pam, CouchSurfing wasn't a good place to look for love.
"If we were in the same city, we'd have been afraid of commitment," says a woman who met her husband on CouchSurfing.com. |
"The whole affair was almost entirely without emotion," she says. "We had interesting conversations, but we never talked about how we liked each other. We didn't cuddle, or kiss goodbye when he went to work. He didn't invite me to stay longer, or talk about seeing each other again. Not that I wanted to be his girlfriend, but I felt a little bad about being his whore." She corrects herself, "Well, maybe we were each other's whores."
Lauri Shaw had a different experience. A thirty-year-old music journalist from Los Angeles, she flew to London last December to visit friends. After deciding that three weeks was too long to impose herself, Shaw looked for a host on CouchSurfing, where she met Jack, a marketing executive. Jack, thirty-three, agreed to host her at the end of her trip for three nights, and bought tickets for the two of them to go ice skating. The two ended up meeting ahead of schedule the next night, to go to a CouchSurfing party. What Shaw did not know was that Jack was already in love. "In the middle of the ride down the escalator at Angel Station, he kissed me," says Shaw."I had two choices: slap him or kiss him back."
Shaw opted for the kiss. "When we got to the party I was really nervous about anyone thinking we were hooking up, because I was new to the site," she says. "Had I known them better, I wouldn't have given a toss, actually! Most of them hook up."
Before the end of the month, the two were discussing ways for Shaw to stay in London. On the night of their ice-skating date, Jack proposed. They were married less than a month later in Big Sur, California.
"My flatmates thought I was absolutely insane and so did my family," she says. "But I don't think we'd be together if we met any other way. We were very relaxed around each other,
for starters, because CouchSurfing is not a dating site."
Shaw has another theory. "People our age know that marriage is a real possibility. We hem and haw about whether we should. If we were in the same city, Jack and I would have stalled. We'd have been afraid of commitment and taken it for granted."
A few weeks after her visit, Karine asked me to fly to France to see her. We'd maintained our relationship through semi-bilingual Skype conversations and liberal exchanges of heart-shaped emoticons. Of the French I now knew, eighty percent pertained to love and its various acts. We made plans. We were going to sweep across Europe in her beat up Peugeot hatchback, take in the Venice Biennale, camp out and faire l'amour in the dense European forest.
And then something — what? — happened. A week before I was supposed to leave, our conversations become inexplicably terse. I had a bad feeling as I boarded my plane. Twelve hours later, there was a note waiting for me at the airport instead of Karine. I'd been demoted to taking the bus. When we finally made it to her house, it was late. I touched her shoulder. She pushed my hand away. My heart sank. I asked what was wrong.
"Two months is a long time," she said, apologetically.
We began to argue. I started to protest that this was ridiculous, that two months was nothing, that but then I realized that she was right. In couch-surfing time, two months was an epoch. You could meet, and forget, dozens of people. Eventually I admitted defeat.
"So where am I supposed to sleep?" I asked.
I suppose Karine could have thrown me out. But she'd taken a solemn vow of hospitality. She pointed to the couch.
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| ABOUT THE AUTHOR: |
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A recent graduate of the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism, Justin Clark has written for L.A. Weekly, Psychology Today, Black Book, Architecture, Fuse, and The Fader, among other publications. He is currently researching a history of the American child prodigy, and writing a mystery novel set in Los Angeles.
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©2007 Justin Clark and Nerve.com |
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