Work Slut

Built for Grinding

Work is the new sex. Do you know what’s even better than NRE? Working at a very fast paced AI startup in San Francisco. I get all the same adrenaline rush but without the emotional complications. And I get paid.

Here’s the other thing about working 12+ hour days: I no longer have any mental or emotional bandwidth to cultivate new crushes. I used to spend hours per day fantasizing about dancing or sex with my crushes and that disappeared overnight.

At the same time I have no tolerance for emotional bullshit. Every single interaction outside of work and husband and family, I’m now filtering through the lens of “does this relieve my stress or increase my stress?” If it increases stress, I cut it out.

How do other people have the time and energy to date polyamorously and also work?

Here’s the thing about San Francisco that outsiders don’t fully understand. At its most elemental, the city runs on two economies. There’s the tech economy, and then there’s what I think of as the fuck economy: the secondary ecosystem of artists, dancers, musicians, and free spirits that crystallizes around the tech money like a beautiful barnacle. This isn’t new. It goes back to Stewart Brand and the Whole Earth Catalog, to the 60s counterculture bleeding directly into the personal computer movement. The original Silicon Valley nerds and the Bay Area hippies were neighbors who kept ending up at the same parties.

Burning Man in recent years feels less like a countercultural experiment and more like a corporate offsite with better costumes. Vibecamp is the more self-aware version of this dynamic, explicitly designed as a reminder to techies to touch grass, with artsy hippies as the guides and the techies themselves quietly footing the bill. It works because each side genuinely has something the other can’t generate alone.

The techies bring money and intellectual rigor. The artists bring beauty and embodiment and the stubborn insistence that human bodies need to feel things.

When they date, the artists tend to have more time and do more of the emotional labor in romantic relationships, regardless of their gender.

I’ve been both types, so I have a unique window into this world. And what I’ve noticed is that the women navigating the executive side of it often develop a coping strategy I find quietly depressing. I know several high powered female lawyers, engineers, and executives who’ve solved the “I’m too intimidating” problem by simply hiding. They date artists or tradespeople and make an implicit agreement never to bring work home. Work stays in one box. Fun and sexy and dancing and hobbies go in another box. Their partners know one side of them. The full picture stays private.

I understand why. I’m just not capable of it.

I want to be fully myself, sometimes fierce and intimidating, sometimes silly and playful. I don’t want to perform a partial version of myself to make someone more comfortable, whether in a relationship or a casual sexual dynamic.

Because I date primarily founders, I’ve dated a lot of CEOs, mostly men, who work very high stress and high responsibility jobs and use poly dating as their stress relief. They’re able to date because it’s their primary hobby and form of decompression after work each day.

When I first moved to San Francisco, I dated a CEO whose favorite kind of date with me went something like this. After work, he would book us a hot tub with a private room and bed for an hour. We would start by relaxing and enjoying the hot water. Then we would start kissing passionately. I have synesthesia and experience warm water as intensely pleasureful. I would crawl into his lap facing him and start massaging his neck and back and shoulders while moaning as his hands traced over my hips and my butt pulling me closer. Eventually he’d pick me up over the side of the hot tub, standing facing me, and fuck me roughly, hanging out over the edge. Usually next to the hot tub and again on the bed. Then we would shower at the end. We would go out to omakase afterwards for really nice sushi.

Another similar dynamic was with a CEO who once got coffee with me and then took me to his new office on Montgomery Street at 7am before anyone had arrived for work that day. Look at this big beautiful office with all these nice standing desks we just purchased, he says, isn’t it a nice office? What about that couch in the middle of the room? It hasn’t been broken in yet and no one’s here yet, want to go have sex on that couch?

Yes readers, yes I did.

He fucked me on the office couch in the middle of the room, where anyone could have walked in at any point. We left a small stain on the couch from me squirting unexpectedly. Oops. For months after he told me that whenever he got stressed at work, he would look at that little stain and feel instant relief and joy again.

I was the decompression. I was the artsy hippie reminding the founder to feel something after a long day of optimizing.

I’m not unused to that dynamic. I’m just not used to being on the other end of it, being the one who needs the decompression and having no idea how to find it.

Maybe in some ideal parallel universe I would figure out how to find a handful of low commitment lovers to service me sexually after a long, hard day at work. But I don’t really like casual encounters. I want all of my sexual partners to genuinely like me as a person and find me funny and clever.

I’ve also been reflecting lately on what actually feels good to me at this stage, and dating younger or less experienced founders just doesn’t do it for me anymore. My husband is an exited founder, I’m now a senior executive myself, and dating down no longer feels fun in the way it used to. I’m only open to dating exited founders these days.

In the meantime, I’m having much better sex with my husband lately. As both of our jobs pick up, we’re using each other heavily for stress relief and it’s going well.

But underneath that is another fear I haven’t fully shaken. Not the fear of being too intimidating or too busy to date. The fear that I’ll gradually hollow out. That without enough time for dancing, for deep friendships, for the slow cultivation of real connection, I’ll become exactly what I was most afraid of becoming: a corporate zombie who is extremely good at her job and very boring at everything else.

The CEOs I dated understood this intuitively. Dating was their decompression, their way of staying human. I used to be the one they were decompressing with. Now I understand, viscerally, why they needed it.

Yes, I’m a slut. But I’m also a work slut.

And I need to find my own way to stay human.