Intimacy – Fact or Fiction?

The other day something absolutely terrible happened to me. I got stood up by a guy I was really looking forward to seeing. OK, so I wasn’t actually stood up in the literal sense, but he sent me a text on the day that we were meant to go on a date saying that he’d forgotten that he already had made plans. Most of my dates lately have been pursued half-heartedly, but I was really looking forward to this one! Tall, good looking, sense of humour, nice job, good sense of style, pierced and tattooed, what more could you want?

So today, as a ritual of recovery I went into town with a friend to have a cheap and secretly indulging lunch (money increasingly becoming a major problem). So after charging a Burger King meal on my Amex my friend started telling me about his relationship, in which he’s been for a couple of months now. For some random reason the topic of conversation lead to that of underwear, which lead to my friend confessing that he was actually wearing his boyfriend’s underwear at the time. After he said it I remained shocked for minutes. I had no idea people did that, and am I really stuck-up and conservative for thinking that it’s odd? My friend couldn’t really understand where I was coming from, highlighting the fact that the pants in question have indeed been washed. Although he justified it as being something functional, as something that you do when you need clean underwear after spending the night, I still couldn’t get it out my head. To me it seems like a very intimate thing, almost like a fetish. Perhaps I should stop being so conventional and just start wearing other people’s underwear. Is it one of those things that all couples do but never talk about?