Love of Sex without Love

There's a thing people say when they find out you enjoy sex freely and without any particular meaning or story attached to it. That you must be making up for something, a lack of intimacy probably, or an inability to connect, or some wound from childhood that turned you into a person who separates the physical from the emotional because you can't bear to hold them together. I've heard this spoken as concern, I've heard it offered as diagnosis, and I've heard it dressed up in clinical language by people with credentials who seemed very confident about something they had clearly never examined from within the perspective of someone actually living that experience.

I think it's wrong. And I grew up inside the machinery that produces that belief, so I know what it feels like from there.

I was raised in an intensely Christian household, which meant that sex arrived in my life already carrying a freight of shame before I had any real experience of it. The framework was total and it was installed early. For the first few decades of my life, desire was something I experienced as a problem to be managed rather than a fact about myself to be understood. The shame was not incidental to the religion, it was structural, it was the point. It shaped how I moved through the world in ways I couldn't fully see until I started moving away from the faith in my late twenties. What I found on the other side was not chaos or some kind of moral free fall but something that felt more honest than anything I had been handed, which was simply my own experience, examined without someone else telling me in advance what it meant.

I have a capacity for love that has never felt like it had a ceiling. I love people, I adore animals, I feel something close to reverence for the physical world in all its detail. I have loved individual women with a completeness that frightened me at times, because it left me so open, so willing to hand over the vulnerable parts of myself to someone who turned out to be not so careful with them. If anything has ever cost me in this life, it has been that willingness, not the appetite for pleasure that runs alongside it and has always been there.

I am also someone who finds certain women almost unbearably compelling. Physical beauty pulls me in, but what compounds it into something close to overwhelming is intelligence, a mind you can feel working within the first few minutes of conversation, quick and alive and reaching. And if there's genuine humor underneath that, a sensibility that finds the same things absurd or worth noticing that you do, then something ignites that I've never been fully able to account for. Add good taste in art and culture, plus progressive values, and she may as well be nuclear. None of which has anything to do with shallowness or the absence of love.

One of the many things I love all too much about sex is the way it strips away the version of yourself you maintain so carefully in ordinary life. The social animal disappears. What's left is more honest, more instinctive, more nakedly present than you ever manage to be in daylight. Two people saying things to each other they would never say in polite company, moving differently, completely unguarded, and then it ends and they're immediately themselves again, recognizable, slightly soft, maybe a little undone. I find that state genuinely beautiful. The body knows things the mind spends years trying to articulate, and in those moments it doesn't bother articulating anything, it just is. I've never wanted to be talked out of that. I've never understood why anyone would.

The idea that love is the only legitimate place for desire and its pleasurable bedfellows is a religious idea that has largely stopped arriving in holy garments. It now shows up wearing the language of psychology and attachment theory, which are flashier threads but with the same puritanical self-loathing underneath. I spent years inside that judgment before I understood it as such rather than a truth, and the distance I've traveled from it is not the distance of someone who abandoned their values but of someone who finally looked closely enough to see which ones were actually his.

What I need from a sexual encounter is not love or history, but something exhilaratingly erotic between two people who are both actually there. Seduction is the most flavorful ingredient for me. The slow build of it, the attention it requires, the way it makes the other person feel seen and wanted rather than convenient. When that quality is absent and someone is simply going through motions, I feel empty afterward in a way that is worse than loneliness. Eventually I understood what that was telling me, which is that I don't need to be in love — at least in any classic literary sense — I just very much want to revel in something real. Some actual electricity, some mutual aching. That is a completely different thing from love.

The cultural judgment around promiscuity lands almost entirely on women and barely registers when applied to men. That tells you everything about what's actually going on, which has never been ethics and has always been control. It's worth noting that this judgment is being passed by a culture in which the majority of people watch porn, secular and religious alike, which suggests the moral outrage is less a deeply held conviction than a performance people put on in public and quietly set aside in private. Everyone has needs and biology rarely loses its battles. What truly matters comes down to consent, honesty, and genuine care for the other person. A person who sleeps with a hundred people honestly and with real regard for each of them is behaving more ethically than a person who sleeps with one while lying and causing damage.

That capacity for love has never diminished, not once, regardless of context or circumstance or number of partners. Those two things have lived alongside each other without conflict because they were never actually competing. What has sometimes worn down my ability to actually be open with another person has not been appetite but the specific losses of trust that come from loving people who were reckless with it, and that is a different problem with a different origin.

There is something worth honoring in the willingness to be free and easy with physical pleasure between adults who want the same thing, something that represents a refusal to be ashamed of desire. Context matters, other people's feelings matter enormously, and there are real risks and responsibilities that come with that freedom. But the act itself, I've never been able to locate the harm in it. What I find instead is people who are present in their bodies and present with each other, who have set aside for a little while all the weight of what sex is supposed to mean, and who are just alive in it together, completely and shamelessly.

I spent too many years being told that was something to beg God's forgiveness of. And, thankfully, I haven't done that for many years now. I think he has much more pressing things to worry about, like who's thanking him for their Oscars and Superbowl rings.