How to Think More About Sex (The School of Life)

1.

Let’s posit the following scenario: Tomas from Hamburg is on a business trip to Portland, Oregon, when he meets Jen. Both of them are 28 and in the computer industry. Tomas likes Jen immediately. As he gets to know her a little better over the course of a few days, he laughs at her jokes about people they both work with, admires her wry political analyses and intelligent opinions about music and films. He feels rather touched, as well, by a certain tender quality he detects in her: he thought it sweet when she told him, over dinner, that she still calls her mother every day even if she’s travelling, and that her best friend is her little brother, who is eleven and loves to climb trees. When a friend asks Tomas about Jen, he confides that he finds her pretty cute.

She likes him too, but not in quite the same way. She wants to lie him down on the purple bedspread of her motel room (the Crown Court Inn) and straddle him. She wants to take him in her mouth and watch the look of pleasure on his face. Since they first met, she has fantasized repeatedly to the mental image of his semi-clad body arranged in various postures. Most recently, she imagined them doing it in one of the conference rooms they are using. But beyond his role in her sexual imagination, Jen – who is an honourable friend and a decent citizen and will one day be a good mother too – has no doubt whatsoever that Tomas would be an entirely inappropriate long-term partner for her. She can’t picture herself enduring a lifetime’s worth of his cheerfulness, fondness for animals and his enthusiasm for jogging. Last night, she had grave trouble concentrating on a long story he told about his grandmother, who is ailing in a care home with a disease which her doctors have been unable to put a name to. After sex, Jen would be more than happy never to see him again.

2.

The dilemma these two people face is endemic to our society, which even now offers us no easy way to articulate our frequently divergent desires for love and sex. We tend to tiptoe around what we want, cloaking our needs with evasions and in the process, we habitually lie, break others’ hearts and suffer through evenings filled with frustration and guilt.

We have not reached a stage of human development in which Jen could openly tell Tomas that she wants only to have sex with him, and nothing more. To most ears, such an admission would sound rude (perhaps even cruel), animalistic and vulgar.

But then again, Tomas can’t be honest about what he wants, either, because his longing to find love with Jen would seem soppy and weak. The taboo preventing him from announcing to her, ‘I want to love you and look after you tenderly for the rest of my life,’ is just as strong as the one that stops her saying to him, ‘I’d like to fuck you in my motel room and then say goodbye to you for ever.’

To stand any chance of success, both parties have to lie about their desires. Jen has to take care not to let on that her interest in Tomas is purely sexual and Tomas cannot give voice to his own ambition for love, for fear that Jen might just as speedily make for the exit. Both hope that they may somehow manage to get what they want without ever having explicitly to specify what it is. Such ambiguity typically occasions only betrayals and shattered expectations. The person who wants love but gets just sex feels used. The person who is really after sex but who must pretend to want love in order to get it feels, if forced into a relationship, trapped or, if able to flee one, corrupt and dishonourable.

3.

How might our society enable Tomas and Jen, and others like them, to advance towards a better outcome? First, by recognizing that neither need has the moral advantage: wanting love more than sex, or even instead of it, isn’t ‘better’ or ‘worse’ than the reverse. Both needs have their place in our human repertoire of feelings and desires. Second, as a society, we have to find ways to make sure that these two needs can be freely claimed, without fear of blame or moral condemnation. We have to mitigate the taboos surrounding both appetites, so as to minimize the necessity of dissimulation and thereby the heartbreak and guilt it causes.

So long as the only way to get sex is to feign being in love, some of us will lie and make a run for it. And so long as the only way to have a chance of finding long-term love is to hold ourselves out as devil-may-care adventurers ready to have no-strings-attached sex with near strangers in a motel, others of us are going to be at risk of feeling painfully abandoned the next morning.

It’s time for the need for sex and the need for love to be granted equal standing, without an added moral gloss. Both may be independently felt and are of comparable value and validity. Both shouldn’t require us to lie in order to claim them.