A column by anonymous.
I sit in my less-than-spacious airplane seat, watching as it hits hour 13 of my 24-hour journey home to Sydney after six months of student exchange, and think about the expectations I had for my time abroad. I remember gushing to all my friends back home about beautiful Spanish men, and how happy I was to be single so I could really ‘go crazy’ in Barcelona. I recall the stories from my other friends who had just returned from their exchanges, with tales of sensual love affairs, erotic one-night stands, and everything in between the two. Everybody seemed to have a story to tell when it came to their sex life on exchange.
When I first arrived in Barcelona, I was focused on building new friendships above all else, and I succeeded in that aspect. Weeks flew by and I would go out at night with an expectation of meeting a beautiful man who would sweep me off my feet – but the opportunity didn’t present itself. A close friend of mine who was in a long-distance relationship convinced me I should try out a vibrator, and we decided to try buying them together (true girl bonding). I found that it was effective enough that I felt no rush to find a man to bring to my bed, and adopted the blasé attitude of “if it happens, it happens, but i’m not going to force it.”
However, as the months trickled by, I decided to put myself out there more and more – approaching men in bars and clubs and flirting at my very best capability, but to little avail, as (for the second time that week) a pissed off girlfriend stepped towards the guy I’d just called cute after returning from the club bathroom. Eventually, I turned inwards; was there something wrong with me? My body? Was I not as fun, interesting, or ultimately pretty as I believed I was?
Contemplating (love) life
As much as my time was running out, I was reluctant to throw myself at a guy that I didn’t truly find attractive, in terms of personality as well as looks. Finally, I met a security guard in a club in my final month who seemed to be checking me out, and I asked for his number. ‘It’s finally my time!’ I thought. However, his complete lack of English ability and my questionable level of Spanish presented one barrier, whilst his heavy work schedule and my constant travelling presented another. We tried to meet many times over the next few weeks, but it wasn’t seeming like it would work. Wasn’t I telling myself only a couple of months ago that I wasn’t going to force something? The more I thought about it, the less I wanted to screw this guy – we had nothing in common and could hardly communicate, and my experience with one-night stands with men in the past has always been average at best.
But something was nagging at me in the back of my mind – I simply couldn’t go home and tell people that I hadn’t hooked up with anybody in Barcelona after all my bragging. How mortifying… So, after consulting my girlfriends and coming to the conclusion that I just needed to screw him “for the plot”, I decided to try one more time to organise plans to meet him – only to receive no reply.
In my final week of exchange, I decided to spend a weekend in Madrid. The hostel I stayed in organised a pub crawl, and I immediately spotted a very handsome, slightly gay-presenting (although he could just be French) man from Montreal. After setting my sights on him, spending most of my night flirting, and eventually kissing on the dance floor, he made it clear he wanted to go back to the hostel and take it further. We slipped into the showers and he turned me against the wall, it was quick and rough and extremely unromantic. My pleasure was never once his goal, and once he was done, he simply turned the water off – without asking if I had also finished. As I was staring at the shower wall in disappointment and disgust, experiencing an exact repeat of the disappointing one-night stand I’d had with a man six months ago, all I could think was “at least now I have a story to tell about my exchange.”
