Often accompanied by the phrase, "He's not going to buy the cow if he's getting the milk for free." I know my sweet mother doesn't mean to be offensive, but God, does that piss me off when she says that. As if I need to withhold sex in order to get a guy to stick around; as if no one will possibly want to stay with me if I sleep with them before trapping them. This saying comes from a time when a woman's virginity was supposed to be their most prized possession, and if you didn't have it, you weren't worth much. I know that's not what my mom means when she says that, but it's what I hear.
Let's put aside the fact that it's 2019 and a woman is allowed to want sex without being in a relationship. She's allowed to want a casual relationship as much as a man does. Sex does not have to be a prize that you dangle in front of someone in order to get them to continue dating you. Sex is, and should be, a natural part of a functional relationship. Continuing to view sex as an end-goal in a relationship suggests that if you do choose to have sex before "locking him down," there are no other possible reasons for someone to want to continue dating you besides the prospect of sex that you are withholding.
I do understand that some men
What's to stop him from ditching you after waiting a few months to have sex as opposed to a few days or weeks? Hint: nothing. The amount of time you wait to have sex with someone does not change the fact that they are a scumbag that worked a little harder than every other scumbag.
Another thing that is vastly different in the dating world in this generation is what people are dating for. Before social media, people dated to find someone to marry. While that is still true in some cases, as someone who has spent years in the dating pool as a millennial, that's not what men these days want. And I use the word "man" very generously, because that's not what they act like. These "men" get spooked if you so much as hint at the word "girlfriend" or even the word "date." Nowadays, it's just "hanging out," and they still won't call you their girlfriend even if you've been hanging out for months.
Waiting to have sex with someone you start seeing will not change what that person is looking for. If someone says they're looking from something casual, the idea that "playing hard to get" in order to get them to change their mind and realize how great you are is delusional. When you ask someone what they're looking for and they tell you, that's not a challenge to try to convince them otherwise. They told you the truth and you need to believe them.
As women, we always want men to respect our decision when we tell them we're not interested and part of feminism is reciprocating that same respect. I've heard so many women I know tell me about men who don't seem to understand when they tell them that they're not interested, but still persist in trying to take them out. Women also need to be more honest about what they're looking for as well, tell people flat-out that you're not interested instead of politely declining with a weak excuse. But that's another conversation entirely.
Playing hard to get, although it does work in some instances, is an outdated dating tactic. It's based off of the idea that men are the only ones who want sex in a relationship, and that's just not true anymore. It was never true, but now women aren't ashamed to admit that they want sex too. Having sex early in a relationship does not devalue you as a woman and it sure as hell doesn't determine whether or not you're worth sticking around for. You shouldn't have to use sex as a cookie in order to get a man to date you. He should be able to see how great you are with or without sex factored into the equation and if he can't, then he's a boy not a man and not worth your time. There's nothing wrong with wanting something casual as a woman, but if you don't, you don't need to adhere to a decades-old idea. Dating is what you want it to be, not what previous generations decided it should be. Dating and sexuality are constantly evolving and we are allowed to evolve with it.
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