Early in my tenure as a continually horny grad student, I thought of making friends with benefits. After all, my program was only 2 years long, and I had a pretty heavy workload, so I didn’t have the time for a long-term relationship. Plus, it would be great to make a new friend at a school that was 2,000 miles away from home with no one else I knew attending it.
I didn’t know what Tinder was at that point, so I posted an online ad on Craigslist and had little to no expectations on getting a legitimate response. To my surprise, I actually did! I got a well-written response from a girl named Mikki who also attended the same school. She liked what she read, was looking for a friends-with-benefits arrangement after a recent breakup, was African-American, and was 19 years old. Those last details took me aback, especially as I had never been either with a woman of black descent or one who was that much younger than me (I was 24). Undeterred, I responded back and we exchanged messages over email, swapped face pictures with each other, and eventually exchanged numbers.