Hooking up with a stranger leads to hot, no-holds-barred, button-popping, get-out-the-rug-burn-ointment sex...

...Clothes-tearing, furniture-busting, sweaty, walking-funny-the-next-day sex. Sex with a stranger is supposedly waaaay hotter than sex with a long-term partner. You know, sex with a long-term partner: boring, repetitive, now he's going to do that thing with his tongue again because I said I liked it that one time sex.

This is why the theme is so often paired with the cheating theme. Perhaps the most famous movie example is the ecstatic shagging between Dan (Michael Douglas) and crazy Alex (Glenn Close) in Adrian Lyne's Fatal Attraction. (Lyne, who also directed Indecent Proposal and Unfaithful, is clearly a student-slash-fan of cheating). That Alex woman could boil a mean rabbit and she was a great lay. What's not to love?

Cheating isn't an absolutely necessary part of the equation, though. Stranger-banging is still regarded as wilder than committed-relationship-banging regardless of whether you're actually in a relationship or not. It's why we often have the best sex of our lives during the first three months of any relationship, when everything is new and exciting. One way to keep the novelty alive is to do it with new people.

A recent study released by the UK's Dating Direct found that more than one in three single women confessed to meeting someone for no-strings-attached sex -- which is sort of a broader definition of what we mean here.

After all, once you have sex with someone more than once, they're not technically a "stranger" anymore but can still be wild and new. The line lies somewhere between "That was great. What's your name anyway?" and "Get your cold feet off my side of the bed. Thanks. G'night."

Those who don't quite have the guts to do it can read about it. It's a subject we have found enticing since Lady Chatterley got down with the gardener. Heck, adultery gets name-checked in the Old Testament. French journalist Catherine Millet caused a scandal with her 2001 memoir, La Vie Sexuelle de Catherine M., an account of her doing it with pretty much everything that moved over the course of 30 years.

More recently, UK memoirist Suzanne Portnoy made a name for herself chronicling her sexual awakening after ending a 10-year marriage in her book The Butcher, The Baker, The Candlestick Maker. Her newest book, The Not So Invisible Woman, reveals more of Portnoy's exploits and encounters with "a different man each time, sometimes multiple men."

The entertainment publicist and single mother of two has said that time is one issue. With a career and kids, how is one supposed to cultivate a new relationship? She also says, "I love that first kiss, first touch and first sexual experience with a new partner. I dress up, my body feels heightened and it turns me on. You just don't get that in a long term relationship."

And that's the thing, isn't it? We feel that for something to be "exciting" it has to be "the first" which isn't necessarily true. Skydivers probably get excited every time they jump. Also, there's this idea that there are no "firsts" with a long-term partner.

Recently I was reading an article in which the author discussed the one-night stand in such a manner, extolling it as a situation in which you can really let go and get wild, because you don't have to worry about seeing this person again. And I thought, "Yes, that is a pervasive view... but why?"

"When people are in relationships," says Cory Silverberg, a certified sex educator and founding member of the Toronto-based, co-operatively owned sex shop Come As You Are, "and they say they want the sex to be better or hotter, usually what they mean is they want it to be the way it used to be. One of the hottest things about sex is the unknown, the mystery. It's either the mystery of what someone is going to be like in bed or, once you've had sex with someone, the mystery of what's going to happen next."

Silverberg muses that part of the problem is how easy it is to habituate our sexual practices and fall into patterns. "So, people think 'I would never have anal sex with my partner but maybe if I had sex with a sex trade worker and I was paying I'd want to try that.' We habituate our behaviors and set boundaries and then treat them as though they aren't negotiable. And we do it in a way that is unspoken. People don't talk about this stuff a lot. It's just established in the beginning of the relationship."