Who the fuck is actually wired for a one-night stand?

Turning 27 is great. On the one hand you feel ballsier in your old age. You have enough temerity to VERY sternly reprimand the poor, clueless sales worker at British Gas for NOT HONOURING YOUR ‘COOLING OFF’ CANCELLATION PERIOD, feel a bit less ridiculous when you say ‘I’ll send it to my accountant’ and can shout back at drivers who call you an ‘incompetent whore’ from the next lane over. But at the same time, you’re burdened with a ballast of maturity. The stupid fucking urge to respect yourself. Can we just go back to being 21 where a boy could literally hit you with his car and a week later you’d bump into him and still suck him off in the toilets?  The more I get back into the world of dating, the more it seems to me like literally NO one enjoys the peaks and inevitable troughs of casual sex anymore. We’re all lying to each other. Unless the geez you cuffed in the first place was kind of a nob but acceptable after 2 pints so long as your bedside light was off, no one leaves an open-ended experience feeling better about themselves.

Immediately after? Absofuckinglutely! Whack on some Doechii, take 40 nudes and ask all your male friends to go to the pub with you at 2pm just so you can taunt them with your new sex-laden aura of unattainable pleasure. Do a yoga class in your underwear, convinced that your instructor is eye-fucking you. Anything goes, queen! Literally EVERYONE wants it. You’re the gatekeeper of love and lust. Everyone else would be luckily to skim down the slip and slide beef curtains of your Viagra Falls. (Not that we’ll need it ;)!!!!!!!!)

But if you’re like me, you just love a cuddle. And that’s just you. Maybe even more than the sex itself. Maybe spending nearly the whole night in someone’s arms might leave that little place in your heart reserved for trust and connection a bit more full. I say if you’re like me… I don’t know many girls that aren’t. Not to sound unfeminist. I doubt Betty Friedan would give a flying fuck if a man didn’t send her a post coital courtesy text. She was too busy stopping women from bleeding to death in back street abortions.

If all that happened, all the forehead kisses, fingers through hair, kissing stomachs between chatting and the burrowing into shoulders when the lights go off, is it THAT crazy that I might be pretty upset if someone doesn’t want to see me again, serious or not, stranger or not?

You can say, ah it was just one night. But when that oxytocin has been released, when you’ve literally had someone inside you and they’ve treated you with actually a lot of care…after all the dopamine, the oxytocin, the serotonin and all the other chemicals that literally wire your innards towards that other person, first-meeting or spouse, when you’re left on read, you can’t help but feel like something has been taken from you. Like a precious secret you whispered to a kind stranger has been butchered and warped into a drunken smear.

In moments like these I wish I was a plumber. Hear me out. I’ve been told being an actor pushes me to assign meaning to everything. Here India goes again being dramatic and feeling too much. But I don’t think my professional ability to lean into emotion has in any way clouded my understanding that the delicacy that often comes after sex is a hard-wired thing for human beings to crave.  Aftercare doesn’t stop the moment you put your clothes back on. Aftercare stops hours after you’ve parted ways, when you’re both reflecting on the untold, heartening intimacy permitted between strangers only among unfamiliar bedsheets.

Unless immediately after I left, the mere memory of me geared my man-of-the-night up for a lustful wank so aggressive that BOTH of his hands were literally grated into stumps, I think a text back is physically manageable.

Perhaps its insensitive for me to say, but I’m bored of men dealing with anxieties, intimidation, disinterest or fears of commitment in silence. And I’m bored of the rest of us giving them a free pass in these behaviours because were so impressed that this man is sensitive enough to feel the anxiety in the first place. I’m sick of being told off for being hard on men. I’m sick of hearing that they’re ‘actually just as sensitive.’ After so many years of being victims of thoughtless male behaviour that is totally senseless to us, is it really not understandable that we’d assume they aren’t? I’m here for the delicate man. I crave it. But I won’t be there handing out medals for an eventual apology for lack of communication. Communication is a hack. Its emotional lubricant. It’s the cheating a 50-minute train journey by choosing a 20-minute cycle. But I certainly will not be men’s stabilising wheels while they finally learn to pedal.