UNFILTERED: Love fills hole left by meaningless hook ups

You have to have a backstory set up, a facade that deserves notice.

It starts off simply. It's night. See someone across the room. You take a swallow of something to get your confidence up and feel it wash around your stomach as you get into character. You approach the girl. She's wearing something that gets you to notice, something tight and hipster.

You have the first few lines of dialogue memorized. It's a subtle compliment. It's a sarcastic knock on what the host is wearing. It's something that makes you look like you know what you're doing, and you do.

She laughs or agrees or smiles or anything, and you continue. You're a writer — or at least trying to be. You tell her your favorite writers, and she hasn't heard of them, which was premeditated. You ask about her. She tells you her major. You exchange names. You get her a drink and down your own. You smoke a cigarette and show her that you're reckless, while keeping the smoke out of her face.

Eventually, you push her hair behind her ear and realize that even the tips of your fingers turn her on as they brush against her face. It's purposeful.

You lead her outside. She says she has to get up in the morning, but her look tells you she's lying. She wants to stay up late. She asks you to walk her away from this party of the host with the bad shirt. You walk down the sidewalk, and she unlocks her car with her keyless remote. She turns to you, five feet away from your car. She takes your hand. You press her body against her passenger side car door and kiss her.

She drives you back to her place. You take off her clothing. She takes off yours. You try to make her come. You finish and roll over and sleep for an hour. You have three missed text messages from your roommate. You ask him to pick you up, and he says OK. You remove your arm from her sleeping head and leave.

You feel nothing. You don't remember her major or what middle-of-nowhere town in Nebraska she's from. You feel like a piece of shit.

The repetition gets tiring, though sometimes I miss knowing what I'm doing.

But it's like playing a video game on a level that's way too easy. I know I am going to win. And winning doesn't mean anything. And what's it for? To stroke my own ego and sustain my validity being able to take someone home? That isn't real. I'm selfish enough in my own mind that transcending that and carrying it over to my relations with women is just wrong.

And then there's the hole in my chest, being disconnected from love.

Love isn't just thinking about someone when you're in bed — that's a crush. Having sex isn't intimacy. Writhing on top of someone until you finally finish isn't satisfaction. It's bullshit for your mind, lying to yourself and thinking you're worth a damn.

Drinking yourself stupid and sipping on a joint until physics makes sense is not as unhealthy as screwing someone — screwing someone in every sense of the word. It's worse.

And somehow, this is OK.

There's a big emphasis on guys, especially when getting to college, to create a mental list. This list contains various degrading things that need to be accomplished before reality sets in. The voices of endless male role models tell us to play the field.

Some of them don't state it so eloquently.

But it's time to turn the voices off, or at least turn them down. It feels really manly to hook up with a girl. It satisfies all kinds of different yearnings: sexual, egotistical and social. But for how long? And what about the rest of your yearnings? Not the ones you talk about around your friends. The secret ones.

Intimacy is holding someone close to you and forgetting you're naked. It's lying in bed proofreading a take-out menu and not wanting to be anywhere else.