My professional life has been filled with so much drama of late, because I made the cardinal rookie mistake of failing to define expectations as clearly as possible when the project kicked-off. To be honest I was fearful of the whole process. My contract is pretty open, but my client is really pushy, and I’m not comfortable enough to push back and risk losing their business. Long story short, my situation got me thinking about the same scenario in relation to sex and relationships.

Here’s a minor revelation – I’ve been secretly sharing a bed with a privileged party for a few weeks now, and I’d rather not say who this person is, but let me just iterate that I hope he’s as disconnected to my world as I think he might be (but you never know with Google these days). Back to me. The whole scenario developed unexpectedly. I’m happily single and very flirty with everyone, so when a particular man started paying extra attention to me, I really gave it zero consideration. In fact, I never even noticed him in *that* way. There’s so much more to the story, but suffice it to say we unexpectedly ended up in bed together. No I’m not proud of it, and it certainly wasn’t a defining moment in my life, but it was good and oddly very comfortable.

If you’ve read any of my previous posts, then you probably already know that I’m not the type of girl that has sex just to have sex. I just wasn’t wired that way – the few times I’ve tried to disassociate feelings and do the simply sex thing, the end result was just plain messy. It’s pretty rare these days that I stumble into bed with a relative stranger before setting the sexpectations.

Setting the sexpectations, prior to the act, is the best way for me to let the guy know what he can expect after we start engaging in afternoon delights. I’ll usually lay out the following sexpectations before stripping down:

• Sex with me is complicated.
• I do get emotionally attached.
• I don’t share.
• If you’re going to sleep with someone else, tell me first or stop sleeping with me!
• You can’t be hyper-sensitive to feedback. I communicate what I want and so should you (this includes ways to improve).
• I’ve lived through too many experiences that I’d rather not share, but suffice it to say getting too rough won’t be appreciated.

Okay so now that everyone in the world knows way too much about me, let’s continue…

Here’s the problem. I made the same freakin’ mistake in my personal life that I made in my professional life. I didn’t set the sexpectations prior to the act, and now I’m paying the consequences. Trying to set sexpectations too late is almost as bad as trying to forget the whole thing ever happened.

Example.

The other night I confided in my coital confidant that I’m not interested in being friends who fuck. I was accurately picking up on a vibe that he assumed sex was an added bonus of our friendship (a friendship I’m not even sure really exists yet). Of course I was right. He’s not interested in really getting to know each other, and I was starting to think I could be open to that (but maybe that’s a side effect of good bedding, it makes you want to turn nothing into something to justify your behavior).

There was nothing left to do but to terminate the situation. If life has taught me anything, it has schooled me on the importance of self-preservation. So now I’m out, completely solo once again, and feeling like I violated my own bedroom code-of-conduct. [Said with the inflection of Chandler Bing] Could I be feeling any lower?

I don’t know. What do you guys/gals think? Is there a way to backtrack, after copulation has already occurred, and set sexpectations? Did I back myself into a rookie corner and get what I deserved? Give me some perspective on this.

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