Welcome to Interviews With My Ex-Girlfriend Ex-One-Night Stand, in which Autostraddle writers get back in touch with their ex-girlfriends ex-one-night stands to ask them Five Simple Questions: (these questions are specific to one-night stands!) why did we end up sleeping together at all, did anything about our sexual encounter surprise you, what do you think the soundtrack to our sexual encounter should’ve been, why did we stop sleeping together and would you invite me to your wedding (why/why not)?
An interview with Fiona, my very first one-night stand and now dear friend.
Maddie: Are you ready? I’m starting recording.
Fiona: I’m just gonna get some water and a mandarin orange.
Maddie: Ok. We have that on the record.
Fiona: Ok, you should transcribe that, so everybody knows. I have no food in the house because I moved in yesterday, but I bought some mandarin oranges.
Maddie: Good. Ok, are you ready? Do you have your water? Do you have your orange?
Fiona: I have my water. I have my orange.
Maddie: Ok. The first question is… Why did we end up hooking up at all?
Fiona: [NAME REDACTED]!!!
[laughter]
Fiona: Umm… an ex-mutual friend pointed us in one-another’s direction at a rave during the second weekend of your freshman year of college, which was my sophomore year of college. Um, and you were pretty! So I took you home.
Maddie: That’s pretty much how I remember it, yeah. So, did anything about our sexual encounter surprise you?
Fiona: Um, the thing that surprised me most about our first sexual encounter is that you didn’t want to have sex.
Maddie: YOU didn’t want to have sex!
Fiona: YOU didn’t want to have sex!
Maddie: Well, yes, I think I didn’t want to have sex, but I also remember that YOU said we weren’t going to have sex.
Fiona: I don’t remember the exact sequence of events. I certainly would have never wanted you to feel like you had to have sex, obviously.
Maddie: Ya.
Fiona: Maybe I was really drunk and already too tired to have sex, that’s possible. I mean, it was a rave!
Maddie: It was a rave. …But I remember we were walking back to your dorm, and you had like three preconditions or something, and I don’t remember what two of them were, but I think one of them was that we weren’t actually going to have sex.
Fiona: Ok, then I think the most surprising thing about our first sexual encounter is that I forgot that I didn’t want to have sex. Put that on the record.
Maddie: Ok.
Fiona: No, to be perfectly honest with you, I was pretty drunk and it’s a little blurry.
Maddie: Fair enough. Question 3: what do you think the soundtrack to our sexual encounter should have been?
Fiona: Oh, I’m so bad at music. So bad. I think I’m too bad at music to answer this question. Strike this all from the record. I can’t give an informed answer.
Maddie: It is so stricken. Ok, oh I’m excited for you to answer this question, which is, why did we stop sleeping together?
Fiona: That’s a funny question — it depends on how you define stop, or I guess like, press pause for a really long time.
[laughter]
Fiona: Well, oh wait! No! There is a good answer to this question! Because I didn’t think it was a good idea to pursue a thing — mostly, in reality, because I was not ready to pursue a thing — when you were two weeks into your freshman year. That seemed to be a good excuse. I had a lot of fun sleeping around my freshman year, and I wouldn’t want anyone else to feel like they couldn’t do the same if they felt so inclined, and so I said something along the lines of, “You’re a freshman!” to which you replied, “Sure, but I’m also older than you are!” Which is, in fact, the case. And then we didn’t speak for a year? Two years?
Maddie: A year.
Fiona: And then we started sleeping together again. Well but that wasn’t ’til…
Maddie: Well then we became friends after a year. But when WAS the next time we hooked up?
Fiona: Well I remember it was winter time. We were near my house and we were holding hands in the snow and you called it nature glitter.
Maddie: Oh yeah! I think we had been at a birthday party for like a second.
Fiona: But I don’t remember whose party.
Maddie: I don’t either.
Fiona: I just remember the nature glitter. So it was sometime in the winter of my senior year.
Maddie: Ok, so the final question is, Would you, at this juncture, invite me to your wedding? Why or why not?
Fiona: Of course I would invite you — well, the thing is, I wouldn’t have a wedding. If I HAD a wedding, of course you would be invited — why wouldn’t you be at my wedding?
Maddie: Well, if you didn’t have one!
Fiona: Yes. But hey, instead, I’m going to have a massive party for my first baby’s one month, because that’s what you do to celebrate the birth of a new baby when you turn one month old in — I was going to say “in Chinese culture,” but that makes me sound like a white person, like, lumping all of east Asia together while getting her cultural relativism on. That’s what we do in my dad’s family, the culture I was raised in, whatever you want to call it — you celebrate the baby’s birth at one month. At my one-month, for example, there are pictures of me next to my suckling pig in an heirloom Christening gown from the 1800’s on my mom’s side of the family. A bicultural upbringing right there… So I’m going to have a like wedding equivalent for my child’s one-month – a huge party with everyone I know, to celebrate the start of my family, which I think is kind of the point of a wedding. And I’m gonna wear a bangin’ dress, though I will be one month out from having my baby, so…
Maddie: I bet you could still rock a bangin’ dress.
Fiona: But I’m gonna have that party, and if you weren’t there, I’d be very upset.
Maddie: I’m really excited for that party.
Fiona: Some people are going to be upset by the suckling pig, but it’s gotta happen.
