Everyone takes their sex life seriously. No matter how cutely self-deprecating your friends might be about every other aspect of their lives, they harbour the enduring belief that they are snakey-hipped love geniuses. Their thrusting endeavours are to them as steamily erotic as a Cambridge based Bertolucci film. Even in the tawdriest moments; lurking in Boots to purchase a new bottle of Pina Colada lube, wiping that stain off an Edward Hopper print, or doing the Walk of Shame in a tutu and heels, we are all convinced that, while everyone else’s love lives are a banal litany of mini disasters, ours constitutes a heady romance.

I know a girl who tells the story of being lured back to an archaeology grad’s room and plied with seven varieties of whiskey, which he insisted on analysing at length for flavour, expense etc., like horrible grandfatherly foreplay. While she tells this story with amused disdain, it is clear that a large part of her looks back with fondness on that whiskey tasting marathon. Because sex is probably the best thing there is, apart from Nesquik chocolate-flavoured milkshake mix, the lamest sexual encounters take on a kind of filmic quality. Even on the way back from two minutes in heaven with a goofily drunk first year you can convince yourself that, as you stroll through the moonlit streets, you are like a beautiful sex rogue, breaking hearts and never taking numbers.

When there’s a lull in Actual Proper Sex, like during lectures or more puritanical supervisions, you can keep yourself distracted with the next best thing; implausible sex fantasies. During the course of a lecture series you can conjure up an entire imaginary affair with that strong jawed boy who sits in the row in front of you, occasionally looking worriedly behind him. This is more difficult if you do English and the only people in your lecture are anaemic girls with a line in arch neuroticism and fur coats. But if undergrads hold no illicit appeal then look elsewhere in the university hierarchy.

The power of the imagined also extends to a night out, when often your idealised vision of how the evening develops beats the reality hands down. You start out gently tipsy, wearing your best shorts and tingling with wit and confidence. You’ve been swapping barbed one liners with a crazy beautiful historian, and you can already see how you’ll hate-flirt your way into bed. But four hours later you’re drowsy with double vodkas, eyelinering your forehead and booty-calling a Regrettable.

As Russell Brand protested to an audience member on The Big Fat Quiz of The Year, who hotly questioned why he had settled down and was no longer prolifically buggering his way around the female population: "But I got round as many of you as I could! And besides, there was the crippling loneliness of an evening." Few of us are lucky enough to shag our way to oblivion quite as effectively as Mr Brand. But most of us can recognise his point, that there are few things more isolating and soul numbing than sharing a bed with someone who doesn’t quite get you, who fails to chuckle even when you make a pretty brilliant post-coital joke, and who you can’t even sustain conversation with while they’re getting dressed. By all means fuck around until you have a fearsome reputation and a stash of antibiotics. But keep a lookout for the kind of lust object who’ll also write you a limerick, make you a mixtape, and not tell everyone when you let them bum you. It’s soothing to wake up with someone who understands your fear of sharks and your love of 30 Rock, rather than with a stranger who’s never heard of Sarah Silverman.