The City Series of SEXUAL Ambivalence

April Breakups Bring May Hookups

As the winter comes to a close, daylight lasts longer, temperatures rise and you’ve finally dropped the extra holiday weight, fitting back into your favorite pair of jeans. But before the heat wave kicks in, April showers consume our days this month. They’ll be coming in handy for the poor, unexpected folks on the receiving end of a breakup, for tears are hidden in the pouring rain. Mating season becomes dating season, and the summer itch is booming.

Just this week, I got the expected phone call from my best friend Julius, a successful thirty-something Latino Dream who doesn’t look a day over 21. He informed me that he was now single, which came as no surprise. As long as I have known him he has never been able to maintain a relationship to make it to the summer, let alone all of spring. The summer itch is more common than one might be inclined to think. Even I have never been in a relationship during the dog days. What is the cause of this break-up-a-demic? Simple: SEX.

Let’s be real. There’s something about the boys of summer that infects our minds, causing an adrenaline rush by the midsummer heat wave. Are the roaring calls from Fire Island or the debut of the summer collection of Rufskin too much for us to resist? Could it be as transparent as the smell of testosterone in the musty air being more powerful than the snuggly days spent with a lover? If that’s the case, and it is all about sex, could it be that we can let go of a relationship so easily due to the fact that we just might be sex addicts?

Julius, like so many of us, will embark this summer as a single man. So let’s just go with the flow. And when the first leaf falls, the hunt for sex demises and winter monopolizes each of our five senses, for the cold can make it unbearable to hunt, causing us to pick our winter companion early.

By doing this, are we fucked up or fucking smart? At the end of the day, I wonder: Is there such a thing as summer love?

///BY Riccardo Rivera