‘The only difference between sex for money and sex for free is that sex for money usually costs less.’ These are the words of Brendan Francis, published in ‘Playboy’ in 1985.

Those individuals misguided enough to be in a college relationship may be paying a higher cost than they otherwise anticipated. When most guys think about the cost of courting a female, they take into account only the explicit costs, such as taking her out to dinner or driving her around. One may go so far as to say that he and his girlfriend split everything, so my argument does not apply ‘ but he would be wrong in that assertion.

I find that by far the biggest cost of courting is the time investment. Even if you’re a broke, unemployed college kid like me, your time is still worth something; shit, if it wasn’t, we’d probably do all that volunteering business I’ve been hearing so much about.

Truth is, every bad joke or pointless story has an increasingly high marginal cost to the average guy. Eventually, when this cost becomes high enough, he has no choice but to get rid of her (either explicitly by breaking up or implicitly by creating an emotional barrier and demanding back his weekends and friends).

Another cost is the additional investment of time and patience to deal with her annoying friends. This cost is especially high when dating freshman girls who immediately introduce you to and adopt you into their circle of misfit friends. Soon enough you’re getting IMs from her best friend asking you to pre-register her for a course or asking why you’re mad at her friend. That not being bad enough, you actually have to spend time with them, drive them to Wal-Mart and hear about how the most recent guy she hooked up with at the Rat won’t call her. This time spent is especially bad because it will not directly contribute to your getting in the girl’s pants, but a refusal to play along will prevent you from getting anywhere.

In short, it only has a downside.

The worst part of the investment is that it’s not guaranteed, but far from it! The opportunity cost is especially high for faithful boyfriends who spend countless Friday and Saturday nights with her, enduring another ‘movie night’ or helping scrape one of her friends who drank too much off the pavement in Downtown Binghamton and helping to take her home while trying to convince the cabbie that he is not allowed to charge her $50 if she threw up in the cab because Pipe Dream said so last semester. Finally, after getting her to her dorm, you have to prevent her from drunk dialing her ex-boyfriend because apparently he’s such a jerk and hooked up with her best friend. After an hour long discussion with her and her 15 closest friends about whether they should call Harpur’s Ferry or not, your girlfriend finally decides to let you take her back to her room, and not get any action.

Instead of reading about these kinds of situations in the Police Watch section of the Pipe Dream as a form of cruel abuse and harassment, we sit by experiencing them or listening to friends retell these stories, weekend after weekend.

After enough of these stories, we realize that what Robert A. Heinlein so beautifully phrased as ‘there’s no such thing as a free lunch’ equally applies to pussy.

‘ Branko Blagojevic is a senior management major.