Foreign Exchange
A travelers' website is taking no-string hookup global.
by Justin Clark
July 16, 2007
Two summers ago, I began offering my couch to complete strangers. Even my most idealistic and free-spirited friends thought I was a little nuts.
"You're letting people you don't know into your house while you're sleeping?" is the typical response. "How do you know they aren't axe murderers?"
"Trial and error," I reply.
First came Peter and Lars from Frankfurt, then Rosaria from Mexico City, then Katy from Vienna, then Jonny Danger from Austin, and Jonny Danger's whining girlfriend, whose name, like many others, I've forgotten. I met all of them through the three social-networking websites I belong to, Couchsurfing.com, Hospitality Club and Global Freeloaders, each of which matches hosts with travelers who need a place to stay. The pairing is entirely voluntary, and there is no obligation to be a host or a guest. Users fill out profiles like those found on MySpace,
hoping that their taste in movies or their testimonials from fellow users will persuade their fellow members to give them a place to crash. Or, sometimes, even more.
I'd joined partly out of nostalgia for my hitchhiking-backpacker days, and frustration that I no longer had the money or time to travel — so I would let the world come to me. And it did. The variety of people on the site was astonishing. My L.A. apartment has been coveted by a fifty-year-old Pakistani chemical engineer, an evangelical preacher from Nigeria and a mother from Alabama who wanted to know how far I lived from the film studios in Hollywood. She hoped to launch her daughter's acting career from my couch. That I am still alive attests that most of these encounters have been pleasant and brief, and sometimes pleasantly brief.
Until Karine.
She emailed me in January. An artist from Marseille with kinky blonde hair, wrapped in a blue scarf from Tokyo, she was desperate for a place to stay. On the last leg of an around-the-world trip, she'd just driven down from San Francisco in a rented car and knew no one. When she emailed
that afternoon asking for a couch, I wavered. I was already hosting two couch surfers, a young Russian woman and an older Bulgarian man, and my house was at capacity. Already hesitant, I checked her testimonials, many of which implicitly suggested that she was unreliable, that she sometimes didn't turn up at her hosts' at all, a couch-surfing faux pas for which I'd turned down guests in the past.
Then I read Karine's blog, with its poems about "The Road" — like many French travelers, she was inexplicably mesmerized by Route 66, and a place called Zabriskie Point in Death Valley. If there was anyone who embodied "the world," I decided, it was Karine; she had been rolling through it for a year, picking it up like a snowball, and I wanted some of it. I wrote back that she could stay for a night.
That night we went to a party and came back to find my bed occupied by a snoring Bulgarian. We shared her air mattress. I woke and found her snuggled against me. Nothing else happened. But when Karine and I dropped off the other guests at the train station, we felt strangely like a married couple, relieved to finally have our space back. We got home, took one look at each other and tore each other's clothes off. After all that time sleeping in the same bed, the first time was so hungry it was almost awkward. In bed, Karine forgot all her English, and I my French. Neither was really needed, however.
A week later we watched Zabriskie Point, then drove out to Death Valley and had sex in the weird silence. As we sat half-naked in the dust I remembered the film we'd watched only a few days before. In a single afternoon, a young fugitive lands a stolen plane in the desert, meets a woman there and has an affair with her. At one point, the camera pulls away to reveal that the lovers are surrounded by hundreds of other couples, rolling around ecstatically in the dirt — an homage to free love, travel, and uncertain and temporary freedom.
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-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.
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.
"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.
©2007 Justin Clark and Nerve.com