What You Really Really Want (18 page)

These may not all be valid reasons for
you
to have sex. That's okay. The reality is, most of us don't have sex for all of these reasons, and often we prefer to have sex for a combination of these or other reasons. So maybe it's not enough that it feels really good, but in connection with an emotional bond, you can really get behind the pure physical pleasure as well.

Of course, in order to really figure out what you believe about the relationship between love and sex, you must first sort out what love means to you. (For the purposes of this chapter, we're talking about what's often called “romantic” love, to the exclusion of the kind of love you may have for your family, or your friends, or your pet, or for hot chocolate with fresh whipped
cream.) Definitions of love vary widely across religions, cultures, and individuals, so once again, there's no “right” answer here. Just the one that makes sense for you.

Personally, I couldn't agree more with bell hooks when she writes, “The word ‘love' is most often defined as a noun, yet all the most astute theorists of love acknowledge that we would all love better if we used it as a verb.”

Sure, love has all kinds of ephemeral, emotional qualities, from the bordering-on-obsessive butterflies that come with new love to the deeply gratifying sense of peace that comes from forming a profound and stable long-term bond with a partner. For me, what really defines love is the consistent impulse to be loving to someone else in return. To actively support them, do my best to empathize with and understand them, and work toward their happiness, pleasure, and health. And that's also how I know if someone is loving me the way I deserve to be loved. Because we can't ever really know what someone is feeling. We can listen to what they're telling us—and believe me, I like to hear pretty words from my beloved—but in the end, if those words don't match up with consistently loving behavior toward me, it's not what I consider “real love.”

Which gets to one of the trickiest parts of love—it's not always a two-way street. Love can be confusing and sometimes even scary. Because feelings aren't always voluntary, sometimes we fall in love with people who aren't safe or healthy for us to interact with sexually. And what do I mean by that? Well, these are people who consistently make us feel bad about ourselves. People who don't care about what we want—sexually or emotionally—or whether we're satisfied in bed. People who
are careless with our safety, doing things like telling us they're monogamous in order to get us to forgo safe-sex barriers, while they're actually out sleeping with other people, potentially transmitting disease to us. People who will pressure us to do sexual things with them that we don't want to do at all, or don't want to do yet, or don't want to do with
them.
Even people who will ignore us when we set a clear boundary and force us to do things we've already said no to.

My friend Lila, thirty-five, learned this the hard way. “I was in a long-distance relationship and my boyfriend would expect that I would be available for phone calls whenever he was free, and I also had to be available completely whenever he was in town,” she told me.

Unfortunately, some people will also use love as a weapon against you. They may say some version of, “If you loved me, you would do it.” When you try to leave them because they're
treating you badly, they'll tell you how much they love you, and how no one will ever love you as much as they do. Or they'll tell you they need your love, that your love is the only thing keeping them going, or the best thing that's ever happened to them, and therefore you just
can't
leave them.

The thing is, it may be absolutely true that you feel love for someone and are driven to act lovingly toward them, and yet they can also be bad for you. Loving someone—and even having that person say they love you back—doesn't mean the relationship is healthy or good for you, or that you “owe” them anything, sexually or otherwise. Contrary to the myth you get sold by Hollywood and the music business, love doesn't conquer all, and it's not going to protect you if the person you love is treating you badly or hurting you. Don't ever let your love for someone else be more important than your love for yourself. You can love someone and still need to stay away from them, or leave them. It happens all the time. If you're at all confused about whether someone you love or who claims to love you is treating you badly, here are a list of signs to watch for (adapted from Heather Corinna's book,
S.E.X.
):
¹

Ultimately, if sex feels too intimate or sacred to share with a relative stranger, that's a great reason to reserve sex for people you love. Believing that love will keep you safe from violence or heartbreak is not. The reality is, love is no guarantee against either possibility.

Getting clear about your own beliefs about love may help you get clear about which love is good for you and which love isn't. It can also help you understand what's best for you when it comes to love and sex.

You may have heard about oxytocin. It's a chemical that is often released during sexual stimulation. Some studies have shown that when we release oxytocin, it can intensify the feelings (both positive and negative) we have about the person we're having sex with. Unfortunately, this chemical response has been warped into an argument by abstinence-until-marriage advocates and other social conservatives, who claim that because of this bond, women get hurt by casual sex more than men.
²
And the argument goes further, claiming that if women form an oxytocin bond with too many people, the effect will wear off and they'll find themselves unable to bond properly with anyone.
³

The truth is, there is still a lot to understand about the role oxytocin plays in our lives. Like any hormone, it's one ingredient in the stew we call our emotional behaviors—it's pretty hard to separate it out once it's mixed in. But I'll leave it to the professionals, like the American Psychological Association, to clarify this. They spotlight a study of prairie voles, in which researchers compared the stress reactions of female prairie voles living for four weeks either in isolation or with a female sibling and found greater levels of stress, behavioral anxiety, and depression in those separated from their siblings. The team then gave the animals either oxytocin or saline every day during the last two weeks of the four-week period. The isolated animals treated with oxytocin no longer showed signs of depression, anxiety, or cardiac stress. By contrast, oxytocin had no measurable effects on those paired with siblings, suggesting that “the effects of oxytocin are most apparent under stressful conditions.”
⁴

In other words? Too
little
oxytocin early on can be damaging, but too much? No such effect has been found.

What's more, oxytocin is produced in a wide array of situations, many of which have nothing to do with sex. Heather Corinna, writing at
Scarleteen.com
, summarizes these conditions below. And her facts check out.

If our ability to bond with others wore down every time we engaged in one of these activities, the whole human race would be pretty antisocial by now, wouldn't we?

So don't worry: Even if you have multiple sex partners, you'll never become like an unsticky piece of tape. Bond away, however and with whomever you like.

One of the major questions to ask yourself about how you want love and sex to interact is a question that I suspect most people never consider: Do I prefer monogamy or polyamory?