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 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 a devoutly 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 attraction naturally 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 real 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 beautiful. I've never wanted to be talked out of it. 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 with the same puritanical self-loathing underneath. I spent years inside that judgment before I understood it as judgment rather than 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 his.
Making Up for Something
That's a glib way to wave off a whole field, though, so let me do better, because the objection deserves a real answer rather than a costume change.
Attachment research is not nothing. There are findings, at the population level, connecting early experience to adult relational patterns, and pretending otherwise would be its own kind of faith. For some people, casual sex is avoidance. That is true. I've met them. I've probably been them, in certain stretches.
Here is the problem with it as applied. A population-level correlation cannot diagnose a person, and this one gets deployed as though it can. Worse, it's unfalsifiable in exactly the way religious certainty is. If you're miserable, the appetite explains the misery. If you're happy, the happiness is denial. There is no version of your life that could count as evidence against the theory, which means it isn't functioning as a theory. It's functioning as a verdict looking for a defendant.
And notice where it never gets pointed. Nobody asks the person who has slept with two people what happened to them. Nobody wonders which childhood wound produced the monogamy. The diagnostic curiosity runs in one direction only, which is a fairly reliable sign that something other than curiosity is driving it.
What I can say is that I've looked. Not defensively, and not once. The examination is the whole reason I left the last framework that told me what my desires meant, and I didn't leave it in order to hand the job to a different one.
What It Requires
What I need from a sexual encounter is not always love or history, though those are ideal, but something magnetic between two people who are both present. The slow build of seduction, intentional or inherent, 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.
That reaction took me a while to read correctly. It isn't the appetite reporting a problem. It's the appetite being specific. I don't need to be in love, at least in any classic literary sense. I want to revel in something real, some electricity, some mutual yearning. That is a different thing from love without being its opposite.
Who Gets Judged
The cultural judgment around promiscuity lands almost entirely on women and barely registers when applied to men. That tells you what is driving it, which has never been ethics and has always been control.
It also gets handed down by a culture in which most people watch pornography, secular and religious alike, which suggests the outrage is less a 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 matters comes down to consent, honesty, and care for the other person. Someone who sleeps with a hundred people honestly and with regard for each of them is behaving better than someone who sleeps with one while lying and causing damage. That standard is not permissive. It's harder than the one it replaces, because it asks about conduct rather than counting.
Where the Damage Comes From
The capacity and the appetite have lived alongside each other without conflict because they were never competing. What has sometimes worn down my ability to be open with another person has not been appetite. It has been the specific losses of trust that come from loving people who were careless with it, which is a different problem with a different origin, and one that monogamy offers no protection against.
There is something worth honoring in the willingness to be free and easy with physical pleasure between adults who want the same thing, a refusal to be ashamed of desire. Context matters. Other people's feelings matter enormously. There are real risks and responsibilities that come with that freedom and I'm not interested in pretending there aren't. But in the act itself I have never been able to locate the harm. What I find instead is two people 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 begging God's forgiveness for that. I haven't in a long time. He has much more pressing things to worry about, like who's thanking him for their Oscars and Super Bowl rings.