Love, Sex, Affection, and Trading Off
I have a great deal of love and affection for my friends, and that’s come to occupy a significant portion of my emotional life. Enjoying and appreciating the personalities and spiritual qualities of my dear friends has taken on an enormous significance for me.
I believe that every human being has a constant want and a constant need to give and exchange love on many levels. I believe that this is as basic as hunger or thirst or the desire for physical safety.
Unfortunately, most people deny and deny this need daily. It breaks my heart, but love doesn’t seem to be given freely in the world in which most young people live.
I watch men and women take love, complicate it needlessly, mangle it with their own confused intentions, politicize it, and make it part of a quasi-commercial sexual negotiation. What is the reason for this? Why can’t we all give and receive love freely, as simple, genuine gifts of the heart exchanged between friends?
The relationship between love and sex is especially disheartening. Women are particularly guilty of bartering for love by using sex as a currency (I know men are guilty of it, too; but men’s motivations are a little obfuscated to me at the moment, so I’ll save my speculations for what I know to be true).
Women will often offer penetration in exchange for something as simple as an embrace, a clasped hand, affection in any form, any kind of tenderness at all. I’m guilty of it, too.
Do we as a sexually identified class truly believe that men will reject our love unless it is included in a predominantly sexual package? We’re treating it like the fries in a value meal, just something that’s thrown in for a lower price.
Love is so, so much more valuable that that; and I don’t think it needs to be sexual or even romantic to be mutually satisfying.
I asked a friend this morning how he would feel if a woman in his acquaintance wanted to know him; love him as a brother and a friend, but deeply and unconditionally; wanted to hold him, lie with him, have him touch her hair; wanted to kiss him and sleep next to him; wanted to simply give and receive pure love on many levels – but without the stipulation of sex.
His answer indicated to me that men are so socially conditioned to obsess over penetration that many may not be able to understand love in any other than the basest, most simplistic terms.
For many men, love means they get to stick it in you.
Before you react, ask yourself if that’s really such a drastic oversimplification as it seems. Sure, a man can say he loves you. He can come home to you every night, wake up with you every morning, hold you, talk to you, and care for you. But what happens when you stop getting him off? With striking consistency, men lose interest and grow impatient when penetration is not part of the deal.
I’m sure that most of you are familiar with the term “lesbian bed death,” that phenomenon wherein sexual passion in lesbian relationships tapers off as the relationship progresses through the months and years.
Are we perhaps defining that phenomenon in essentially masculine terms? When there is pure love, empathy, compassion, and affection, who can mourn the loss of mere sex?
The soul-perforating exchange of sex for love contradicts everything my nature tells me about human relationships. Why fear love when you can embrace it and feel yourself enriched for doing so? Why entangle a soul-to-soul love with a phallus-to-vagina, repetitive, mechanical act?
Months ago, I came across the Cuddle Party group in Los Angeles.
This group encourages men and women to enjoy physical expressions of affection outside the realm of per-se sexual interaction. One person noted on the Cuddle Party website that the times when we feel disconnected from sex or willingly subject ourselves to a period of sexual reevaluation are the times when we most need to feel unconditional love and non-sexual physical affection from others.
I’d like to be a tourist at one of these parties. I’d like to further explore the possibilities of love without sexual bargaining. I’d like to learn how better to express my honest and unconditional love to my friends.
Mostly, however, I’d like to be able to remove the implicit negotiation from both the sex and the love in my life. One hears so much about so-called no-strings-attached sex these days.
Can we learn to ascribe as much or more value to no-strings-attached love?
