Love and Sex
How our sex life affects our love life, social life and the culture at large. Is there a healthy balance between love and sex?
Sigmund Freud in his book Civilizations and its discontents he mentioned how monogamy was established in the tribes so the men because of his frequent need for sex could keep a woman close to he can have sex when he need it to. Imagine living in tribes and worrying about survival that your sex drive would force you to chase woman all the time instead of searching for food, building huts or fighting animals.
Yuval Harari in his book Sapiens he describes monogamy as a consequence of the agricultural revolution, or the invention of private property. Many agree with this theory.
But also, many have talked about how our social and sexual behaviour has shaped the world we live in today. How is possible what we do in bed, and how we do it to change the entire world? Well it does. Even if I don’t agree with some of these theories, what is undeniably true is the way we manage our sex life has great impact in our life, our families and therefore our social structure.
My point here is how much time and energy we dedicate to choose a mate, a partner or even a one-night stand? How much time you spend watching reviews and read articles about the latest phone before you purchase it? We take more time to choose our new phone then we take to choose a partner.
Peter Lynch said this about investment. How can you make money in investment if you take less time to search for information about the new washing machine you want to by then to investigate the company you want to buy shares from?
How sex has become the least of our concerns? And yet is the one activity we all want to do the most.
I believe because we have separated sex from intimacy. And we forgot about the second almost completely.
So incredibly forgotten that I feel the need to explain what intimacy really is. The definition is “a cosy and private or relaxed atmosphere”, and its synonyms are closeness, togetherness, affinity, attachment, confidentiality and companionship.
They say there are a few types of intimacy: physical intimacy, emotional intimacy, intellectual intimacy and experiential intimacy.
Maybe you think sex is just the physical intimacy. But the way I see it that sex is a small part of this one type. Being physically intimate and present it doesn’t mean you are just touching each other’s bodies. Or the sexual intercourse itself. Touching someone is not having sex, the sole act of intercourse it’s not having sex.
Alain de Button talked about sex and attractiveness and he explains how the physical part is a very small piece of what we look at. We are able to read people with our mind their character, their personality and even they’re past with just looking at them. He also mentioned that we choose to be with someone base on how our mother or father where. This is highly accurate and very Freudian. But nonetheless true.
Another aspect of sex is the obsession some have with it. In my understanding is when sex completely separates from any physical, spiritual, emotional or experiential type of intimacy. And it becomes just psychological.
It becomes the escape route to any fears, traumas or blockages in our cognitive and psychological behaviour. We escape in sex when we don’t want to be with ourselves, with our baggage.
So ask yourself, when you have sex do you just touch someone without any other parts of you being involved whatsoever? Or do you try to escape yourself?
As a society we only accept Sex with Love. But as we can see this is a very diluted idea of what really sex is. We can combine in a healthy way sex and commitment, sex and intimacy, sex and spirituality, sex and experience, sex and connection. But we don’t. Whether is sex and love, and we become bored of it. Or is sex and release, and is becomes psychologically damaging.
READ MORE ABOUT
“How to love yourself” or watch the video HERE.
“What is Love” or watch the video HERE.
“Romantic Love” or watch the video HERE.
“Money and Love”, or watch the video HERE
