I’ve done a lot of things I’m not proud of in order to have sex. I’ve gone to concerts for bands I abhor. I’ve feigned interest in sports I’ve barely heard of. I’ve taken a bus to Hillsboro. But I’m proud to say that I’ve never gone camping. As the long winter months of cuffing season have given way to the liberation of summer, many Portlanders may be finding themselves engaged in a casual relationship with someone they have little in common with. While a friend with benefits comes with many, well, benefits, it is laden with an equal measure of pitfalls. Two people with electric physical chemistry can go months without realizing how different they are until the first time one asks the other to participate in a hobby or passion. And with the preponderance of campers in our fair city, many may now be staring down the barrel of a proposed journey to the woods with their favorite nighttime friend. If you’re looking for ways to get out of a compulsory camping trip, look no further.

I detest camping. Any amount of tan is terrible for my ephemeral and diaphanous non-binary mystique, so I make a practice of avoiding that giant orange bastard we call the sun. Unfortunately in Portland, being camping-averse can make you somewhat of a social pariah. It’s borderline discrimination to assign some sort of moral superiority around the desire to sit in the smoke and eat beans from a can. People assume that if you prefer to spend your days inside that you must be some sort of antisocial creep or socially maladroit loner. I’ve been dealing with this discrimination since I was 12 years old at summer camp. A propensity for staying at the crafting or music cabins when the rest of my troop wanted to go canoeing or shoot archery earned me the cruel, if somewhat prophetic, nickname of “Girl’s Camp Nancy.” If you are a fellow indoor kid, hello, welcome. Not only are you valid, but in my eyes, superior. The woods aren’t for us. What happens there is none of our business. Human beings spent the last 30,000 years focusing the efforts of our highly developed parietal lobes and opposable thumbs on the task of getting OUT of the woods. Returning to the dwelling place of our Australopithecan past would be downright disrespectful to our ancestors.

Not everyone shares this reverence for our foremothers. For those looking to dodge a potential weekend in the woods, here are a few techniques you might want to try.

The direct and honest route is always the best place to start. You’re both adults, you’ve had each other’s genitals in your mouths. Surely a frank conversation about camping and relationship labels can’t be any more intimate than that? If there’s no pressure to be anything more than fuck buddies and you’re both on board, then there should be no harm in a flat out refusal.

Now, what if you’re racked with social anxiety about the prospect of saying no and have toxic conflict avoidant tendencies? Well, maybe we take a critical look at those another day. For now, let’s weigh some other options.

Lying is always a solid tactic. And the great thing about lying is, the sky’s the limit. A paralyzing fear of wolves, a traumatic childhood experience with a falcon, a fraught sexual relationship with Sasquatch, all valid reasons to opt out of camping. I generally don’t encourage lying to loved ones, so if you plan to use this strategy I’d recommend being fairly certain of the transient nature of this particular relationship. There’s nothing worse than catching feelings and then five years later, the night before your wedding, having to fess up that you aren’t actually deathly allergic to bug spray.

Perhaps it’s not even the camping they’re looking forward to. As their preferred slam piece, you may just be the best available fit for some down and dirty screwing on a dusty hiking trail. If it’s simply the thrill of sexual congress in the dirt or in proximity to squirrels that they’re after, then there’s a plethora of locales within the city limits that could scratch that same itch. A hookup in a public park has a romantic and risky Central Park in the ’70s vibe to it. A quick suck and touch in a bar restroom can be as grimy as backpacking in the Everglades (finish the night off with a s’more roasted over a lit Camel Blue). Hell, if the weather’s too hot for your indoor kid sensibilities, try propositioning your partner for some old-fashioned over the pants stuff in an air conditioned TriMet bus (if you board the 72 after midnight, you could probably get away with a full bacchanal complete with multiple partners and a sacrificial goat).

Finally, this may be an opportune time to try out some structured polyamory. Now, as a pathologically lazy person myself, I don’t see how anyone has the time or energy to sustain relationships with multiple partners. But despite my perhaps meretricious views on polyamory, I have to admit that this is an area where polyamorous people have an edge. Having access to a deep roster of talent comes in handy when needing to make mid-game substitutions during critical moments like this. Even if you yourself aren’t interested in having multiple partners, you might suggest your mate diversify their holdings, so to speak. Spread the love (and by transitive property, the responsibility) around a little. Maybe you can be the “going to the movies-going dancing-getting omakase” partner and they can look elsewhere to find a “going camping-going hiking-getting mosquito bites” partner.

The changing climate means many things for our civilization. For younger people it means there will likely come a time when our relationship with natural resources we’ve taken for granted will change forever. And for indoor kids like myself it will mean putting up with an increasingly long period every year of people pressuring us to enjoy nature. But there is a light on the horizon for us. Eventually climate catastrophe will be so severe that the outdoors will be explicitly hostile to our species. At which point maybe we can successfully convince that one night stand to just stay in and enjoy the AC for the day.