Part of the sweetness of a hookup is getting to see the looks of envy on your friends’ faces the next day. But gossiping in the locker room or around the water cooler doesn’t always get you noticed the right way. If you want to be able to spill the details and get away with it, here are the guidelines you should follow.

1. Use Common Sense

If you’re honest with yourself, you know who you definitely should not be telling about these hookups. If you have one friend who is always telling you other people’s business, don’t think that he won’t tell other people yours. Even if he’s your best friend, if he’s known for blabbing you’ve got to keep your conquest stories away from him. One talkative friend can get the story out there to a lot of people. You’ll get a reputation, or worse. The information could get back to your wife.

2. Don’t Tell Guys with Wives or Girlfriends

“Your friends might ditch you and tell your wife about your hookup”

Even if they’re great guys who wouldn’t normally blab, guys in committed relationships can’t be trusted. Sooner or later, they tell just about everything to their women. Women are honor bound to tell other women about men’s conquests (and if they’re gossiping about said conquests). Tell a guy with a woman anything, and you can be sure that your woman is going to be hearing about it very soon. You’ll do better confiding in guys who have never or rarely told you gossip.

3. Wait If You Can

“Keep the hook-up memories to yourself”

The sexy details of your hookup with the third floor accountant will still be sexy in six months. What they won’t be is as potentially damaging or embarrassing. For bragging purposes you’ve still got plenty of play, but for embarrassment purposes it’s already old news. If you’re bragging about the things that a woman lets you do to her, wait until the two of you are no longer dating or hooking up regularly to brag about it. The sexiness factor never goes away, so if you can keep a lid on your extracurricular sexual activities for a few months, you’ll greatly diminish the side effects of telling.

It also helps to have a backlog of sexual brags that you can whip out anytime the guys at the bar are getting a little out of hand when it comes to exaggerating their conquests. Pulling out something that you’ve done that they’ve never heard of will be an impressive move. It gives you an air of mystery, and makes them wonder what else you might have done and not mentioned. To us, that totally outweighs being able to talk about it the day after.

A little common sense and patience can go a long way towards keeping your personal stories out of the public eye. Whether you don’t want the info to get back to one specific woman or you don’t want to gain a reputation, there are still ways to avoid the pitfalls that come with kissing and telling.