Sex and Love: Where's the Connection
Men, it turns out are right. You can have great sex without falling in love. Because, it seems, that’s the way we are programmed. So is the romantic ideal of love all its cracked up to be?
Anne Sexton, 15 May 2009
Sex, they say, really happens in your head; and as it turns out, the same is true for love. In the last few years scientists have proved what men have long known and women have tried to deny – sex and love are quite separate things.
If you’re a romantic sort, who likes to believe in the transformative power of love and the magical mysteriousness of sex, you better skip this week’s column. It’s interesting, but not exactly cheerful – kind of like the Six One News.
For many years social scientists have argued that romantic love, at least in the way we understand it these days, is a modern invention. Some even go so far as to say that its importance to us is partly a response to that most unromantic of topics – capitalism. Essentially the argument is that as more and more of us left the rural areas where our families had lived for generations, and as the old certainties of religion and class melted away, we felt adrift in the world and needed something to cling to, sometime that made life seem worthwhile.
Romance filled the gap admirably – you might be slaving away in a factory or at a call centre, but as long as you believed that someday your existence would be made meaningful by a deep connection with another person it seemed to be worth all the trouble. Which is a nice idea, I’ll admit, although it does result in way too many movies starring the bouffanted nonentity known as Matthew McConaughey – and if that’s not enough to make anarchy seem an attractive alternative, I don’t know what is.
Love has always existed, of course, but it’s only in the last few hundred years that lifelong romance, fidelity and sexual excitement have been seen as a prerequisite for marriage.
The ancient Greeks and Romans were a lot more pragmatic about these things. They believed in the idea of erotic constancy, which was understood as long-term sexual attraction and love. But this certainly didn’t involve the onerous burden of monogamy, and what’s more it was seen as the proper way to feel about your mistress – wives got the house and the family name, lovers had to make do with the more ephemeral gift of romance.
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