Libby Peck’s sex column takes a turn when her love life takes a new turn as well – with newfound monogamy.
When it came time for me to write this week’s column, I originally wanted to focus on mixing business with pleasure, the whole “workplace romance” thing. I soon realized I just couldn’t get into it because it’s not really a part of my current love life. 
I don’t have a job right now – and my wallet is feeling it. The only sex that goes on at my internship is book-ogling. (It’s a publishing company, not a weird fetish. Plus, the only person I know who is involved in a workplace romance right now is a friend with an unrequited crush at the Fresh Grocer bakery, if that counts. So, I thought I should write about something more applicable.
Like being a girlfriend.
Former Editor-in-Chief of Cosmopolitan Helen Gurley Brown, if she were dead, would be rolling in her grave. Employees of the state store at 22nd and Diamond streets are confused as to why they can suddenly keep Vladmir vodka in stock. My own mother questioned the reality of the situation. And my dignity is thanking me profusely that it can begin to build itself back up to what it used to be. (Isn’t it adorable that it thinks it’s still somewhat intact?)
You see, I’ve been single since high school – officially single. Yes, there have been flings, hookups – adoring readers, you understand – and guys I’ve “kind of been seeing off and on for a year.”
Even when I dated my serious high school boyfriend, I might as well have been single, because it was his best friend who took me to their school’s homecoming dance, and in retrospect, I never liked him that much in the first place.
But this isn’t high school (Brand New reference for the win); it’s college, which means it’s about damn time I found someone to cut the crap and put a Facebook relationship status on it.
Of course, it helps that he’s a poet – and wrote a poem about me after our first date. It helps that he has thick red hair and a pair of eyes bluer than mine with a freckle in the right. It helps that he loves the Flyers even more than I love the Chicago Blackhawks. It helps that he thinks I’m as beautiful with eyes perfectly lined at night as I am with that same makeup smeared all over my face in the morning.
But, Jesus, what kind of monster has this made me into? Am I actually gushing about a boy? Is this layer of bitterness slowly but surely turning saccharine? Will I start tweeting things like, “OMG can’t wayt 2 see mah bebeh 2nite 101!”
OK, I’ll answer the hypotheticals for you: “No” to the latter statement, and “yes” to the first two, obviously. If I ever start purposely misspelling words, you – yes, you – have full permission to perform an intervention in this relationship.
But it’s so weird, this whole you-actually-text-me-first thing, this let’s-go-on-a-date-in-the-city thing, this I-want-you-to-meet-my-family-and-I-think-they’ll-like-you thing, this we-shouldn’t-think-about-the-future-because-this-is-so-perfect-right-now thing. I’ve grown so used to living for myself, by myself, that I forgot what it was like to grow with someone else.
So, for now, my business is the pleasure of being in a relationship – and getting paid to write about it. And hey, I managed to incorporate mixing business and pleasure after all. I’m thoroughly satisfied; time to watch more Olympic hockey on the other side of a romantic late-night Thursday Gmail chat.
Libby Peck can be reached at elizabeth.peck@temple.edu.
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