Spontaneity is to Courage? Joy is to Contentment? Fire is to Hell? Mystery is to Myth?
I'm not really sure how exactly sex and love are best related, but I think it's safe to say that they are related to each other in deep and tangled ways. I figured I'd bring up the olde sex v love scenario that I heard first through my college Human Sex class (great teacher, really made you think and always wanted to give you a thorough understanding - perhaps sometimes absurdly thorough - the "fuck-saw" in that article could have it's own blog post I'm sure; and his statement on the matter).
The situation (and sorry if you've already heard this, but it seems like prime material for this month):
You are in a deep and intimate relationship with someone that you love. Everything is going wonderfully with this person and you believe that they could be the one. But then:
Scenario 1: You come upon your significant other having wild and incredible sex with someone else, doing things that you haven't ever done with your partner, and what's more is that they are expressing joy greater than you've ever seen them experience while having sex with you.
Scenario 2: You come upon your significant other sharing a deeply romantic spot with someone else; not just any spot, but the place where you and your partner have shared your most intimate secrets and dreams. You listen in and hear your significant other confessing their love with undeniable sincerity for this other person and the other person returning your partner's feelings. They embrace and kiss deeply.
Which scenario is worse and why?
Of course, there are thousands of variables here that could be changed and altered (such as whether this "someone else" is someone you know or not, and how well if you do know them). But the point is to assess how seeing your ultimate love have sex with someone else would affect you, how seeing your ultimate love confess their love for someone else would affect you, and how both of these effects compare to each other.
I will grant as a small asterisk that for the second scenario it would be different to witness your significant other confessing their love for someone else versus witnessing them falling in love with someone else over an extended period of time.
Finally, and this may be asking too much for this post (since it already did include the fucksaw), but it may be worthwhile to discuss what ultimately defines "cheating" for you? Also, is it black and white, or is there a gray scale? What if it there is not one single "act" of cheating but an attitude or behavior in general? How does distance and coldness factor in and how often are they related to one partner having feelings for someone else? All right, too many questions, I know.
I'll have to bring up the good parts of sex and love in my next post.
First off, I saw the fucksaw at work the other day on a Netflix Stream movie about the "Oscars of Porn" weekend in Vegas. Mike actually saw it too, haha.
ReplyDeleteI'm not sure I can answer your scenario question unless it happened to me, honestly. Both are pretty rough. I'm still gonna have to go with Scenario 1, though, if pushed. Why that is makes no sense, but it shows the physical power that sex has, the visceral impact of it. I don't think very many feelings have quite the gut impact of sexual jealousy (not even romantic jealousy, if it can be separated, as in your examples). But again, it's hard to say unless this happened to me, and it has not.
Cheating, just like almost everything else, is gray and not black and white. You could try to make it black and white, but that would be a futile attempt to narrow the rainbow of human emotions into a worldview that is uniquely your own and not necessarily shared by everyone, much less your partner. As Jesus said, "If you look with lust, you have already committed adultery in your heart." So some view lust towards another as cheating. I see some truth to this, honestly. But clearly most of us would not say that is considered "cheating."
If you were to ask me for a clear definition, I'd say anything starting with kissing and moving on would be defined as cheating. But really, there are dangerous things that can happen both before and after that. Distance and coldness I'm sure can lead one to cheat. Really, the problem is not the cheating, but the emotional distance between the two partners.
See, now this scenario truly interests me because I believe it boils down to gender differences. As soon as I read this, I felt we should turn it into a poll question... I'm fairly certain that the majority of women would have a harder time with Scenario 2 than Scenario 1, and vice versa. Again, I surely cannot speak for all women, but I think the female sex in general is more apt to champion romance and also more likely to feel romantic jealousy. There was a great quote once that said something like, "All men want to be every woman's first lover, and all women want to be every man's last romance."
ReplyDeleteThough I definitely don't prescribe to typically feminine needs in terms of romantic validation, I do think that every woman, in essence, is seeking some sort of connection with their objects of interest (no, I'm not talking about the fucksaw, here) that goes beyond anything sexual intercourse can offer. If pushed, I'd rather see Scenario 1 because I'd be less threatened by my partner's sexual dalliances-- this we can always chalk up to hormones, that which is primal, the innate need for men to spread their seed, or simply a slip-up in judgment. Seeing your partner professing their love, deeply and meaningfully, to another human being cannot be justified... there would be no slip-up there to excuse.
I completely agree Bethany. Number 2 would bother me more for sure. That is because people have sex for a million reasons but being in love with someone is just that. If your partner loves someone else more there is no going back really. However, if they have sex with someone else, if you want to, you are able to fix whatever went wrong. People have sex out of boredom, lust, even just being drunk, either way it's terrible but most of the time it is not because they have an attachment to that person.
ReplyDeleteBethany's quote is somewhat accurate, yes. Why I mentioned the comment earlier about male possessiveness of females is that Scenario 1 might be worse for a lot of guys because it's like another male degrading their own "pure object," and that makes one nauseated I think even more than heartbroken. Females don't have quite that same level of physical attachment/ownership as males do, probably because of thousands of years of cultural history that puts women as objects of sexual desire/completely innocent purity (this is a contradiction if I've ever seen one). I think every guy wants a girl who is a "slut" in bed with them, but a perfectly pure girl with everyone else in the world. Is that fair? No. But that's the way it's viewed. I'm sure that will grind some feminist gears in people.
ReplyDelete"Sex without love is as hollow and ridiculous as love without sex."
ReplyDelete— Hunter S. Thompson