I met him at a bar by my house. He was a friend of a friend of a friend … or, something.

Not hot. Not funny. Nothing in common.

He was just … there. Present. With a heartbeat.

I took him back to my place and fucked him out of sheer boredom. It was so mediocre that I forgot it happened until I rolled over the next morning and was met not by the comforting emptiness I expected, but by a snoring wad of a human who was stockpiling all my covers like it was Y2K.

Not exactly a great way to start the day, but, when he left, something weird happened: I kind of missed him. I wanted him to text me. I wanted the validation of knowing he'd enjoyed my sexual offerings.

Despite the fact that I wanted nothing to do with him, I felt attached. And that was inconvenient. I had no time for that shit — I was not in a place where pining after a Hogwarts-looking stranger who fucked me about as well as a mailbox could made sense in my life.

So often, our attachment to our sexual partners makes it difficult to reap the positive benefits of sex without getting caught in the emotional spider-web that accompanies it. Even if we're not ready for a relationship, not emotionally available, dating other people or certain that the person we've just slept with is diametrically wrong for us, we still have a tendency to care about their sorry asses afterwards. It's a common human inefficiency that seems more like an evolutionary relic than a viable adaptation to the modern world, and if you're anything like me, you're pretty sick of it.

If only there was something we could do. You know, like bio-back our brains to erase all forms of emotional attachment following a fuck?

Oh wait. Turns out, that's exactly what you can do.

It's entirely possible to fuck with the hormonal systems that facilitate attachment during and after sex and render yourself a heartless, apathetic automaton when you want to avoid catching feels. But first, it's helpful to understand what those systems are.

Most of what we know about romantic attachment systems comes courtesy of a small, rat-like mammal called the prairie vole.

Prairie voles are unique in that they're one of the 3 percent of species who practice strict monogamy. They form extremely strong, lifetime attachments to each other, embarking on the kind of relationship that really only exists on Hallmark cards. When given a choice, prairie voles will opt to sit with, groom and mate with their partners and their partners only. So, scientists often use them for experiments that examine human sexual commitment, as we've been known to get a little monogamous now and then ourselves.

In prairie vole studies, researchers have isolated two hormones responsible for the whirlwind rodent romance: oxytocin and vasopressin, both of which are released when prairie voles fuck each other's tiny brains out. More specifically, when male voles are given vasopressin and females are given oxytocin, the animals will instantly bond with the nearest potential opposite-sex mate, before the pair even has sex. It's all very hasty.

Contrarily, when male voles are given a drug that blocks vasopressin, they no longer give two shits about their partner. They become single bachelors on the hunt for tail. And when female voles are chemically robbed of their oxytocin, they become strong, independent ladies who don't need no man.

Thus, researchers have concluded that vasopressin and oxytocin are the two hormones responsible for monogamy, binding a pair together until one of them gets decapitated by a screeching eagle, or whatever happens to voles in nature.

But wait, there's more. There's a whole dopamine component to consider here, too.

"There's a cocktail of chemicals going on in the brain, and one of them is oxytocin," Larry Young, a researcher at Emory University whose research specializes in the social behavior of prairie voles explains. "It makes the brain absorb the social cues of the sexual partner — things like their face, their smell, how they sound."

When the voles make sweet, passionate love, a part of their brain called the nucleus accumbens makes a connection between the social cues the oxytocin causes them to observe and the sense of physical pleasure they get from sex, something that precipitates an explosive dump of dopamine (the pleasure hormone) in their brains.

As dopamine and oxytocin are linked in the brains of the prairie voles post-sex, attachment grows. "It's where the bonding comes from," says Young. "It takes place in the part of your brain that's involved with addiction, as well."

Those exact same processes happen in the human brain during and after sex. Using that background information then — that vasopressin, oxytocin and dopamine are involved in romantic attachment — it's possible to target exactly where to interfere, so you can finally stop yourself from sobbing over the one-night-stand you had in Cabo seven years ago.

Dr. Young has some advice on how:

1. Pretend you don't have nipples

Humans are special snowflakes when it comes to nipple play. We're the only species on this entire, flat planet that has evolved to derive sexual pleasure from nipple stimulation.

And just how does that happen?

Say it with us: O-X-Y-T-O-C-I-N. Yep, that thing we just learned about. See, nipple play stimulates oxytocin release in both men and women (though more so women), and, as we just learned, oxytocin makes you feel attached. In fact, the act of breastfeeding floods the brain with the stuff, which is one of the ways mothers are biologically coaxed into caring about their babies.

Does this mean that, if you're a dude and you don't want the chick you're jack-hammering your micro-dick into to develop feelings for you, that you should avoid boob-honking, tit-grabbing and the other various forms of clumsy breast examination you regularly dole out? Couldn't hurt.

And, if you're the female-identified recipient of such action, it also wouldn't hurt to swat your partner's hands away from your boobs if you're dead-set on staying emotionally stoic. On the flip side, stay away from his nipples too — men are also capable of bonding over nipple play. Oxytocin can even cause them to lactate … it just generally takes an accident or disease to do it.

2. Do all the drugs

While we'd never ordinarily condone the use of narcotics, we understand that remaining emotionally dead following a hate-fuck with your boss is a special scenario.

Certain drugs will actually interfere with the oxytocin and vasopressin that get released during sex, meaning that if you time things right, it's possible to chemically render yourself apathetic and skirt the whole attachment phase entirely.

"Cocaine and methamphetamine increase dopamine secretion, and dopamine is what is involved in creating pair bonds in the first place. If you exogenously increase this dopamine prior to an intimate moment, then it won't have the same impact later," Young explains. "The specialness of the sex, and the differential caused by the dopamine release won't be so high."

Translation? If you get high before fucking your partner, you're less likely to associate the ooey-gooey feelings of "Fuck, I think I like you" with them, and more likely to attribute those emotion to the drugs.

Brilliant.

However, a caveat: it's not the same story with alcohol, especially for women. Whereas certain narcotics can increase heartlessness, alcohol can actually enhance feelings of dependency and attachment following your butt sex marathon.

When male voles drink alcohol they become promiscuous and it prevents them from bonding," Young told Broadly, citing a study he's currently conducting in which male voles are given alcohol and then allowed to mate with a lady vole. "Normally, if the male vole mated with a female, the next day when we put him in a three-chambered cage containing three female voles, he'll opt to sit with the vole he previously mated with."

Yet, if the guy vole was drunk when he fucked the girl vole, he'll choose not to sit with her. Instead, he'll "prefer the novel females." Heartbreaking.

Weirdly, the opposite is true for lady voles. When they get drunk and bone a male vole, the alcohol actually increases the likelihood she'll bond to him. Heartbreaking 2.0.

 3. Blindfold yourself

Blindfolds: they're not just for the kinky. They're also the perfect tool for annihilating the possibility of eye contact, something that's been proven to increase brain levels of oxytocin, which, as you've read 203 times now, enhances bonding and attachment during sex.

"When you're having sex with someone," Young says, "you're making an intimate connection with their face and eyes particularly. This is going into your brain, and it's inherently rewarding. Love and attachment are very much like addiction. They have a lot of the same chemicals. So if you can divert that information from coming in by not having that eye contact, that will help."

4. Picture Bill Murray on top of you

When all else fails, the best way to stop yourself from emotionally attaching to your GlutenFreeSingles date is to imagine they're someone else. Someone unattainable. Someone you'll never actually meet. That way, you're deferring the emotion away from your actual partner, which slashes the chances you'll associate feelings of attraction and attachment with them, and onto someone who it's easier to get over.

My personal go to is Bill Murray, although I'm optimistic we'll meet someday. Preferably in the nude. Preferably on June 21, 2017, in Los Angeles California. Say, around 8 p.m.? I'll be waiting.

However, if you've tried all these industry secrets and you still find yourself inconceivably attracted to the toothless, married person lying next to you in the Chevy Tahoe truck bed, don't even worry. You're not a robot, after all. Having emotions — however irrational they may be — is just part of what makes you human. And if you go through life avoiding your feelings and ignoring your nipples in an attempt to save yourself from the temporary inconvenience of emotion, you're not really living, you're just … not dying.

As sex therapist Nan Wise says, "Those feelings towards a person are a natural, wired-in mammalian reaction. It's like a drug, that sense of infatuation. But you can learn to manage it. Don't regard it as terribly significant. The feelings aren't coming from that person [you've just slept with]; rather, they're coming from your reaction to the stimulation."

See? It's not that the person you just rodeo-fucked is so great, or that you're meant to be together. It's just that your emotions are a slave to your natural brain chemistry, which acts the way it does because evolution hasn't caught up to the demands of contemporary dating culture. You're simply under the spell of hormonal attachment, something that's as fleeting and insignificant as the night you spent with that friend of a friend of a friend of a friend who didn't even go down on you. You'll be fine.