The dichotomy of sex and love
Recently I have been attracted to the idea of legendary love: the love that survives time, tests and is the thread that holds your life together. This temptation stems from my exhaustion with the single life; I see great loves around me and desire one of my own. But this longing for love has made me even more confused about the concept of sex and its association with chance. This confusion is that we have singled out love as purely emotional and sex as purely physical. After all, people can have casual sex, but not casual love. A union that once existed together, sex and love have become so foreign to each other that we suddenly no longer understand how they coexist.
Open to discussion in these modern times is the idea that we don’t need to associate sex with love and can happily engage in it that way. While I agree that for some it may be, I ask if it should be, weighing what this very honest fluke in our sex lives has cost our relationships. For me, sex without love is like ice cream without fat. While it may be good, it’s just not the same.
Ideologically, our views on sex have been drastic for thirty years. More people are having more sex with more partners now than ever before. Covert and blatant sexuality permeates our lives to an unprecedented extent. This flood has made us more aware, but to some extent more careless. We no longer believe that sex has a defining quality for developing a relationship, so we engage in it quickly and randomly, almost to the point where you want to get it out of the way so you can “really get to know someone.” . “.
Herein lies our self-sustaining paradox. We believe that sex does not make a relationship, but we look at it to define it. Interestingly, in an age where one-night stands and sex buddies are commonplace, sleeping with someone you’re ‘dating’ implies a feeling of partial bonding, and even entitlement. The disjunction is that you have physically achieved an intimacy that you do not have emotionally. In other words, actions can get ahead of intentions and even though you are physically familiar with someone, you are still trying to get to know each other and decide if you want to be in a relationship.
Clutter is created in our intimate interactions with the opposite sex through the merging of traditional (albeit confusing) definitions of sex and love with the modern conventions that society has created. In many ways we feel a sense of moral hypocrisy. At some point we think that we should love who we sleep with and, in turn, sleep with who we love. When this is not the case, after a certain period of time, our nature is to employ the “fight or flight” instinct. Either we address the problem with our partner or we walk away. So essentially, sex brings people together or distances them.
Consequently, sex in a new relationship can hinder its development or help it. This is too complex a dilemma to generalize and say definitively one way or the other. However, I will speculate that having sex too soon makes it harder to get to know someone. This is because sex can get in the way of establishing an emotional connection or intellectual interest, since the focus is on the physical aspects. As I mentioned earlier, sex also creates expectations. Of course I am no longer naive enough to believe what Mom taught, that a man who has ‘got the milk’ does not ‘buy the cow’. (We as women don’t even want to be ‘bought’ anymore.) But I do believe that abstaining from sex builds the excitement and anticipation that is an inherent part of dating. In addition, desire for someone also allows time to get to know them without the distraction of sexual elements.
Relationships, especially in the early stages, thrive on change. There needs to be a variety of activities that you do together. It’s common that once two people discover sexual chemistry, they stop doing anything else and sex becomes a distraction rather than an asset. There’s a delicate balance to be struck, but rather than trying to strike that balance, it would be easier to refrain from sex until there’s a solid relationship and, though I risk sounding like an old-fashioned romantic, until you’re in love.
After all, I’m talking about a legendary love. And I am speculating that the chance of sex has cost us the sacredness of it, and that may have cost us the opportunity to have great loves in our lives. Not because of the sex, but because the opportunity to truly know someone was passed up. I want to clarify that I am not talking about reserving sex for marriage. That’s unrealistic in today’s world and possibly a huge fault on both sides. I am saying that living in a society saturated with the projection of instant gratification, sex has become something else that we seek and satisfy, and not a component of love. Perhaps if we associated one with the other it would benefit us personally and in our relationships, making legendary love more accessible.
Sex and love co-exist together in the way we connect them in our own lives. If we keep sex for those we love and we keep those we love for sex, the dichotomy is resolved and there is no confusion. As for me, I think sex can make it difficult to find great love, so I’ll diet for months, or longer, to have that real, rich ice cream that’s so satisfying and forgo the lighter, less filling substitute. . In other words, I will fight to keep sex sacred, and with it, I will fight to give love its rightful place in the sexual arena. Besides, it’s the fight that makes love legendary.