How to Avoid Sex With a Friend

You’ve been friends forever and either you or he wants to take it one step further. Or so you think. Once you jump into the sack, there’s no going back and a friendship can be changed—even ruined—forever, especially if one of the friends doesn’t feel the urge.

Instructions

Difficulty: Moderately Challenging

1. Stop the advances early, either yours or his. Yours can be stopped by self-restraint. Hopefully his can be stopped with honesty, saying something like: “I love you as a friend but I don’t have a desire to sleep with you.”
2. Write a thorough list of all the reasons you guys are friends in the first place: he’s charming, he’s crafty, you both like monster truck shows. Know all that could be lost if you attempt to take the friendship to the next level. Either memorize the list for your own purposes or share it with the aggressor.
3. Make up some impressive statistics, either to deter yourself or to share with your aggressor. Say that 70 percent of friends who have sex no longer remain friends and the other 30 percent end up hating each other.
4. Date someone else. This will both stop you from lusting after your friend and give him a reason to leave you alone.

Tips & Warnings

• OK, maybe 1 percent of friends who have sex end up happily ever after. Remember your odds with missing the bus or getting a prime parking place. Are you sure you want to risk it?
• Maybe spend a little less time together while the lusting one cools his heels.
• Read erotic literature or vent your sexual frustrations somewhere else, just not on your friend.
• If the friend becomes intolerably obnoxious in his advances, you may need to break off the friendship, even without the sex.
• If you are the one making the advances, imagine yourself in your friend’s place and how you would feel being pursued by someone you didn't want to sleep with. Yuck.