A study reveals the important difference between a one-night stand and a booty call.

Not ready for the commitment and the time required to make a long-term relationship work? But do you want a little more sexual experimentation and a lower risk of disease than you’d get from a one-night stand?

Behold, the booty call.

Stephanie Pappas at MSNBC shares a report hoping to unearth important details about modern sexual relationships. The study looks at students who have been involved in long-term relationships, one-night stands, and booty calls.

The booty call, as Pappas describes it, is a series of consecutive “late night calls to arrange a sexual rendezvous.” You go out, have fun, come home, call your “partner,” and then have some more fun. Rinse and repeat.

The booty-call relationship was the red-headed stepchild of relationship studies until the recent report compiled by Peter Jonason, formerly a psychologist at the University of West Florida.

Jonason gathered a group of about 300 students who all admitted to being in one of the three aforementioned sexual relationships. Each student then took an online survey where they answered questions about how frequently they committed specific emotional and sexual acts.

The results showed booty calls to be less emotional than long-term relationships, but much more sexual than one-night stands. In fact, booty calls were the least emotional-based out of the three.

Presumably, long-term relationships require hand-holding, kissing, and hugging. In a one-night stand, though, participants try to get all the kissing and hand-holding out of the way early, so they can get to the sex.

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With a booty call, everything is pretty cut and dry. You meet somewhere, you have sex, and then you go home. And since the booty call happens more than once, the sex is more experimental because of the presumed level of trust developed in the previous meetings.

After all, how could you not trust someone who sees you only as an object for sex and nothing more?

The most common cause for a booty-call breakup, according to Jonason, was “when one partner pushes the other for something more committed than casual sex.”

Imagine that.

—Ryan O’Hanlon