Friends with no strings attached benefits

“Friends with benefits” seems to be a popular theme in Hollywood this year. Two films are due to be released in the next month or so, both exploring the idea of no-strings attached sex with a friend. Rather unimaginatively, one, starring Mila Kunis and Justin Timberlake, is called Friends With Benefits, while the other, starring Natalie Portman and Ashton Kutcher, is called No Strings Attached. See what they did there?

So, do these kinds of set-ups ever work? In my experience, no. It’s a situation that’s inevitably fraught with all kinds of complications and one, if not both parties, almost always ends up desperately hurt. The trouble is that the guy is usually genuinely delighted with the arrangement while the girl pretends she’s all fine and dandy and laidback about it but secretly hopes he’ll fall madly in love with her. Which never happens.  Except maybe in a Hollywood film.

Waiting for the wedding night

I'm always dreaming up new ideas for interesting stories and earlier this week, on a whim, I started looking for women who've waited until the wedding night to sleep with their partner.
For our grandparents' generation, there would have been nothing unusual about waiting but in this day and age it's almost unheard of and I thought it'd make a good feature.
It's not something I could do, although I know a few people who have (they tend to be the ones who get married young I find!). Usually it's for religious reasons but I was hoping to find a woman who'd chosen to wait for a different reason - maybe they were both virgins, or wanted to keep it special for "the one". Whatever the reason, it's certainly an interesting issue and something that, in today's culture, seems quite romantic and old-fashioned.
Someone else must have been having the same thought because the very next day a request from a glossy magazine popped into my inbox - looking for a woman who hadn't slept with her partner before the wedding night. Maybe they'd picked up on my thought waves...