Attraction Modes and Sex Styles
This is what I mean by the types of sex that go with
different attraction modes:
Lust leads to
hot, fast, rough sex. Arousal and desire happen essentially simultaneously. For
young men, in particular, they can be almost synonymous: to see a sexy woman in
a context that suggests availability is to want her and get physically aroused
in virtually the same instant.
In lust, desire goes all one way: you want sex, and you
don’t much care why the other person goes along as long as they do, so sex can
be quite impersonal. Lust is strongest when it involves strangers; familiarity
kills it rather quickly. Hard core porn is all about lust.
Romance involves
a longer, teasing, intermediate kind of sex, with a lot of buildup and
uncertainty and then a fairly urgent consummation. Desire in this case is
intensely reciprocal: you not only want the other person, you really want the
other person to want you. Also, desire can precede physical arousal by a wide
margin, as the couple go out to dinner, hold hands, walk in the park, and
head home. They are consumed by desire long before they become physically aroused.
Romantic desire is fueled by mystery. It is strongest when it involves a semi-stranger, someone
whom we are just getting to know and to whom we are carefully revealing
ourselves. It runs out of energy when there’s nothing left to discover. Soft core porn, rom-coms, and romance novels are all about this kind of sex.
Pair-bonding
leads to, and depends on, sex that is generally slower paced, much less urgent, and much more
focused on sensuality, pleasure, intimacy, physical and emotional satisfaction,
comfort, and safety. All of these things depend on trust, and the foundation of
trust is intimate knowledge of each other. Also, long-term partners can’t go
around being consumed by lust or desire for each other. It would get in the way
of too much else, which would undermine their ability to function well as a
team, which would undermine the trust in each other that is at the foundation
of the relationship. Instead,
pair-bonding sex reverses the sequence seen in romantic sex, in that physical
arousal usually comes first, followed by desire.
This confuses people whose upbringing and experience lead
them to think that you must experience desire first. Sexually successful
long-term couples don’t wait for desire. They initiate sex for mutual pleasure
and as a way to express their love for each other, and they know, from long
experience, that arousal and desire will follow. (Of course, it helps in
building these habits and expectations if the sex is normally really good sex!)
However, long-term couples who are mentally stuck in the
lust or romance modes can dwindle away to almost no sex at all, because they
are always waiting for both partners to get horny at the same time. We just
aren’t designed to be perpetually filled with lust or desire for someone we live with, sleep with, share chores and
mundane life with, day after day for years.
It’s a chicken-and-egg problem. Our desire for the person we
love comes back when the two of us are physically aroused, but if we wait for desire to happen first, we’ll never get physically
aroused, and if we never get physically aroused, we’ll never experience desire.
What Does Society Teach Us About Long-Term, Loving Relationships?
Unfortunately, our culture is full of images, movies,
novels, and other sources of information about lust and romance, but it has
almost nothing that teaches us what satisfying sex is like in a long-term,
loving relationship. In part, this is because novelists, playwrights,
moviemakers, and other storytellers all seem to think that happy couples are
incredibly boring. Even if you’ve never read Anna Karenina, you may still remember hearing Tolstoy’s famous
opening line:
Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its
own way.
The subtext, of course, is that happy families are boring,
and no writer wants to write about boring people. So we’re immersed in stories
about lust and romance, with all their pitfalls, and stories about
dysfunctional families in all their chaotic complexity and diversity, and we
hear little or nothing about the happy ones.
Our news media are obsessed with the cheating, the breakups,
and the misbehavior of celebrities and politicians, but what do we hear about
the private lives of the ones who stay happily married and faithful?
We’re barraged with stories and images of bad sex, rough
sex, violent sex, and (highly idealized) romantic sex, but we never hear about
long-term, loving couples who have good, passionate sex, decade after decade,
without getting bored or stale. Where are the novels, plays, and movies that
tell us their secrets?
When we look at even more explicit images and stories, we
find that porn is driven almost entirely by the first two systems: violent and
aggressively impersonal hard-core sex and wildly over-romanticized soft-core
sex. There is little or nothing that shows us how people who really love each
other and have great sex lives actually behave, in the bedroom or out of it.
Upbringing and Examples
When you talk to lifelong lovers, one thing you will notice
is that a lot of them had parents who were the same way. So some of it may be
genetic. Perhaps people with genes that tilt them a bit toward commitment and
away from the perpetual search for novelty are better marriage material.
Some of it may also be upbringing. The prefrontal cortex is
associated with people’s capacity for planning, commitment, and self-control.
It was the last part of the human brain to evolve, it takes a very long time –
until the early to mid-twenties – to fully mature, and it is exceptionally
vulnerable to stress in early life. High chronic stress in childhood and
adolescence is associated with thinner prefrontal cortexes. Growing up in a
loving and nurturing family is associated with thicker ones. Not surprisingly,
there’s evidence that people with thicker prefrontal cortexes are more likely
to be happily married, and that people who are happily married are more likely
to raise kids who are less stressed and end up with thicker prefrontal lobes, a
self-reinforcing cycle.
And some of the answer may just be the power of example.
Even if our culture doesn’t teach us how to have a happy long-term
relationship, we still may absorb the examples our parents (or grandparents, or
close neighbors or family friends) provide, even if they never formally discuss
it with us.
Of course the counterargument to all this is that there are
people from horrible family backgrounds who still
figure it out!
Whatever the reasons, there’s not a lot of information in
our culture about long-term loving relationships. Even science has almost
completely ignored the subject. Research psychologists, in particular, are
famous for neglecting normality and preferring to study abnormalities and
mental disorders. And practicing psychologists and therapists almost
exclusively see people with problems, which distorts their sense of what is
normal.
As a result, nearly all social scientists seem to believe
that couples who share intense love and good sex for decades are extremely
rare. It is the commonly expressed view in social science that love dwindles
and sexual attraction dies within a decade at most, and that all (or almost
all) long-term couples make the transition to what they call “companionate love,”
which means they are basically just good friends, housemates, co-parents, and
financial partners who stay together out of habit, duty, or religious
conviction.
So there is widespread agreement among social scientists
that long-term, deeply loving, intensely sexual relationships are rare
exceptions. However, there’s a serious problem with this unanimity: there’s no
evidence whatsoever in support of it. It was accepted so completely that no one
bothered to question it or test it until quite recently.
So How Rare IS Intense Long-Term Love?
One of the recent exceptions to this has been a series of
studies of people in long-term marriages, conducted by Bianca P. Acevedo,
Artur Aron, and various colleagues. The most interesting one so far, called “Is
Long-Term Love More Than A Rare Phenomenon? If So, What Are Its Correlates?” (O’Leary,
Acevedo, Aron, et al.) was published in Social
Psychological and Personality Science in 2012. Here’s an excerpt from the
introduction:
It is commonly assumed that intense romantic love
occurs in the early stages of a romantic relationship, but decreases
drastically across time. Some theorists have proposed that romantic love is
uncommon in marriage (e.g., Sternberg, 1986) or has little use after the
child-rearing years (e.g., Buss, 1989). Others suggest that given the right
circumstances it may evolve into companionate love—low in intensity and
generally devoid of attraction and sexual desire (e.g., Berscheid &
Hatfield, 1969). …
Despite arguments that intense love may exist in
some longterm relationships, there are
minimal data to address this issue. …
Although research … suggests romantic love can last
in long-term relationships, it remains
unknown if it is merely a rare phenomenon. As Hatfield, Pillemer, O’Brien,
and Le (2008) noted, we know little about love and gender differences in love
in long-term marriage. Thus, the present study assessed, for the first time, the
prevalence and theoretically predicted correlates of intense love in two representative
samples of long-term married individuals.
(Emphasis added, because it is so amazing to me that the
authors of a scientific paper can confidently assert, in 2012, that theirs is
the first study to investigate this question!)
The long-term married adults they studied were given a
survey that included the question “How in love are you with your partner?” and
asked to answer it on a seven point rating scale that ranged from 1. Very intensely in love to 7. Not at all in love.
The title of the study and the introduction (quoted above)
both make it clear that the researchers expected intense, long-term love to be
quite rare. Instead, and very much to their surprise, they discovered that the
most common single answer in both random samples was 1. Very intensely in love, and “even for the very longest marriages
(≥ 30 years), 40% of women and 35% of men reported being very intensely in
love”!
What Correlates with Intense Long-Term Love?
When the researchers looked into the other things that
correlated strongly with very intense love, they found what most people would
expect. Couples who assessed themselves as being most intensely in love also
said that they: hugged and kissed a lot; had sex often; enjoyed sex with their
partner; thought highly of their partner; thought about their partner often,
even when apart; were generally happy with their lives; and often engaged in
activities with their partner.
At the other extreme we have what you would also expect. Of
those who reported “no physical affection (hugging, kissing, holding hands)…not
a single individual reported being very intensely in love.”
One problem I see with this research is a linguistic one: we
just don’t have a good term for intense long-term sexual love. The researchers
framed the article in terms of long-term romantic
love, but it’s important to notice that that’s not what they actually asked their research subjects. The question was, “How in love are you with your partner?” The word "romantic" is conspicuously absent.
The assumptions they talk about in the preamble (“It is commonly assumed that intense romantic love occurs in the early stages of a romantic relationship, but decreases drastically across time. Some theorists have proposed that romantic love is uncommon in marriage…”) are almost certainly true about romantic love as I have defined it. But they’re clearly not true of the kind of love experienced by this group.
To me, what’s astounding about the primitive state of
psychological research is that the largest single group in this survey of
long-married adults is experiencing a kind of love for each other that the
psychologists don’t even have a name for! The only alternative to “romantic
love,” according to modern psychologists, is “companionate love—low in intensity and generally devoid of attraction
and sexual desire,” and that is definitely not what the researchers
discovered.
Instead, if you look at the pattern of answers, the people
who said they were “Very intensely in love” were clearly talking about neither “romantic” love nor “companionate” love, but something
else entirely. It’s what I have called long-term or pair-bonding love, but
clearly a better word is needed that includes the strong, sustained – and
sustainable! – physical, sexual, and emotional elements.
I was also disappointed that the researchers did not address
the question of trust, which I believe would also correlate highly with strong long-term love. I’d be willing to bet that trust correlates well with sexual
satisfaction and physical affection as well. If we had that data, we would have a
perfect profile of why our Tantric couples seem so much in love!
Sex, Arousal, Desire, and Love
Still unanswered is the question of why many couples still
have active and enjoyable sex lives long after many other couples are reporting
that the last embers of attraction have gone out. And I think the answer is the
one I alluded to earlier: they don’t wait for desire. They initiate sex for
love, for pleasure, out of habit, on a schedule, or however they do it, but
they begin their sexual activities, which gets them physically aroused, which
rekindles their desire for each other…in
that order!
And, of course, this explains why Tantra is ideal for maintaining
a loving and passionate relationship long after the thrill of “being head over
heels in love” is gone. If you make a time for sex that is special, if you take
enough time to get deeply relaxed and thoroughly aroused, and if you make sure
that both of you get great physical pleasure and emotional satisfaction from
your sexual activities, you are constantly reinforcing your feelings for each
other, including your deep desire for each other.
If caring and being cared for, trusting and being trusted, and desiring
and being desired are at the root of long-term love and sexual attraction, as I
believe they are, then Tantra is a wonderful way to reinforce every part of
that process.
I’ve seen relationships fall apart from years of bad sex. In
particular, if a woman has sex a thousand times with the same partner, and only
rarely, if ever, experiences a somewhat meager orgasm, she can and probably
will lose all desire, all capacity
for desire, for a man she once deeply desired and loved with all her heart. But
it can easily happen to a man too, particularly if the sex is quick and
routine, and he senses his partner’s lack of interest or response.
All too often, couples get no help and have no good examples
to emulate. They are led to expect simple lust and romantic desire to carry
them for a lifetime, and when those dwindle away, so does the relationship.
I’ve seen people who once adored each other become
indifferent because our culture doesn’t teach them that after the thrill of romantic love comes long-term love, and when you make the transition you have to
rebuild the relationship around new keys for passion and new ways of loving
that aren’t dependent on lust, novelty, or romance.
To put this in perspective: Tantra is certainly not the only way to have a long-term loving and
passionate relationship. But if you already have a pretty good relationship at
the personal and emotional level, incorporating Tantric sex into your lives may
just be the best way to both
strengthen that relationship and keep the passion alive. It has worked for my
partner and me. It has worked for many, many others. I hope you will join us
and get as much benefit from this ancient rite of love as we do.
Good luck, and the best of good loving!
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