Casual sex; The psychology and function

[Leonard]

I have an extract I would like people to read and perhaps discuss. I find it very compelling and it helped me articulate why I dislike casual sex and made me better understand the reasoning for my views. I had always thought my personal conduct seemed illogical considering that I discriminate against people who have casual sex, even though I believed that casual sex was a very harmless activity, discounting STDs.

 

I've turned down many women in the past because of my beliefs that having a fling with someone you've barely know for a month is fundamentally wrong. My values are not shaped by religion or society, but more of my personality or upbringing. I am a firm athiest, have a very liberal attitude, and I come from an environment with very stable friends and family who shower me with unconditional love. With that being said, please enjoy the read and I would like to hear your thoughts on this;

 

 

 

Intimacy in Relationships: Casual Sex

 

Drawing inspiration from both contemporary psychology and ancient spiritual traditions, Dr. Catherine M. Wallace presents her vision of marriage as an art and a spiritual exercise. The rewards are limitless: properly nurtured, our sexual needs and vulnerabilities turn out not to be liabilities but powerful, generative gifts.

 

 

 

At a time when emotional commitments are increasingly fragile and short-lived, Wallace makes a direct and eloquent plea on behalf of sexual fidelity-its blessings, its demands, its moral and emotional necessity.

 

 

I argued throughout the preceding chapter, in various ways, that sexual desire is far more than a simple physiological need. Sexual desire is powerfully and intricately interwoven with the deepest levels of human identity and with the most difficult questions we have about who we are or what it means to be human. Sexual desire can be repressed, or it can be heedlessly indulged, or it can become a calculated part of a marketplace exchange. Or, I will propose in this chapter, sexual desire can be integrated into the whole of who we are. The question, of course, is how. How or where does sexual desire "belong" in the whole that we are?

 

 

The answer demands a return to my initial observation about sexual desire: It cannot be genuinely satisfied on the cheap or by the solitary individual. At its most potent, most vital, most delightful levels, sexual desire must be reciprocated to be sated. That's why we cannot "locate" an appropriate sexuality without considering the human relationship in which it is realized or enacted. We need to know the basis of the interaction in which sexual intercourse participates. Is it really mutual, for instance? Are both partners offering and seeking the same things? Consider rape, or prostitution, or the sexual abuse of a child. Consider how sexual access has been demanded as a condition of employment, promotion, business contracts, or social acceptance. The disparities are self-evident. It's easy to see what's wrong, which is a first step toward articulating an appropriate sexual relationship.

 

 

It may not be as easy to see what is wrong with what I have called "marketplace" sexual ethics. Consider this scenario, for instance: Two adults meet at one of those exhausting and tedious professional meetings held in banal hotels near the airports of cold, bleak cities. After three days of grueling seminars predicting the imminent collapse of the industry that employs them, they decide to join a few friends in skipping the Annual Self-Congratulatory Dinner. They pile themselves into a couple of cabs and head off for real food somewhere remote from the peculiar antiseptic smell of big hotels. They share a meal and a few drinks, grousing and joking and telling stories in the usual friendly way of bored and lonely strangers at meetings. En route back to the hotel, the two people we are watching find themselves distinctly enjoying the physical attraction that has buzzed about the edges of their interactions over the last few hours and days. They linger in the lobby as the group disperses, quite aware that they are very attracted to each other.

 

 

There is the possibility here of a free, independent sexual exchange between mature adults who are equal to each other in age, status, and so forth: just tonight, no strings, no phone calls later, no promises, and no regrets. Good contraception, let us suppose. Safe sex. Privacy assured. Suppose both are single and neither is willing to consider a permanent relationship. Or suppose they are, both of them, actively looking for life partners; or suppose one is. Or suppose one or both are married. Under any of these circumstances, is a casual sexual encounter OK?

 

 

My short answer in any of these situations is no, and my long answer is the burden of this chapter. Casual sexual encounters are morally wrong because the exchange is partial even when it is entirely equal or open or honest. Sex in these situations is not genuinely reciprocal but rather mutually exploitative and, ultimately, mutually self-denigrating. In such an exchange, each regards his or her own sexual desire as a primarily physiological need essentially separable from the deeper psychological and emotional union that is physically enacted in sexual intercourse. I contend that we cannot split ourselves into parts like that.

 

 

Body and heart or soul are one. Any attempt to dissociate them is both doomed and dangerous, and that is how casual sex injures even free and willing participants. It severs vital connections within the self, thereby silencing or at least muting one of the most powerful and literally vital foundations of our richest and most creative relationships with other people. Casual sex easily devastates the capacity for serious sex.

 

 

This risk remains inescapable even if the sex is much less casual than this imaginary encounter between people who have known each other only briefly. I contend that we are not wise to regard sexual intercourse as an essentially ordinary and acceptable expression of affection between men and women who have made no permanent commitment to each other. Of course, many people will disagree with me, in effect arguing that sexual desire can be merely an appetite or a friendly gesture in some relationships and yet still retain its role as the symbolic embodiment of commitment when they are ready to make that sort of commitment. The disagreement has less to do with sex, I believe, than with the philosophy of symbol and the psychology of symbolic expression and perception—which leads quickly into complex theories of imagination and creativity.

 

 

Those woods are lovely, dark and deep; let me but steal a twig and then keep going. I said at the beginning that sexual fidelity is an art, and like all arts it is dependent upon disciplines and practices learned and sustained over time and within communities. Let me take that idea one step further. These disciplines and practices—and especially the most embodied or material and "technical" of them—provide the crucial foundation for symbolic perception and expression. The glorious coherence and lucidity and passion of a fine musical performance are not possible except through years of excruciating discipline, both in the exact actions of fingers or other parts of the body and in the detailed material and technical aspects of music and musical composition. Literature too involves an array of word choices and technical strategies that critics spend lifetimes trying to understand and to appreciate. The art that is sexual fidelity also depends upon a deeply complex, not fully conscious array of spiritual and material aesthetic practices and disciplines. Casual sex, even between good friends, threatens to inhibit or unduly complicate the practice of faithful sex just as, in any artistic practice, it is difficult to overcome "careless" techniques learned early in one's career.

 

 

One does not need to be an artist or art critic to know how this reality works. Mistype a word once, and of course you are apt to keep mistyping it that way for the rest of the day. In the era before spell-checkers, I copied the list of words I persistently misspelled onto the inside cover of the dictionary I still keep next to my keyboard: I gave up hope of getting them straight in my mind. It's and its; to, too, two; that and which: Get them confused for too long early in life, and you will be doomed to keeping them taped to your monitor for the rest of your days. That's not a matter of intelligence. It's the power of embodiment, eyes and fingers together establishing neuron pathways.

 

 

As recent reports about the brain document, we are all the creatures of past experience, the more powerfully so in the less conscious and more highly embodied aspects of our lives. Erotic responsiveness is extraordinarily complex and subtle, so we are wise indeed to approach its depths with great care for what we understand to be its ultimate significance in our lives. To the extent that sexual fidelity is understood to be a central virtue, casual sex of any kind is, at the very least, an unwise risk. Plenty of folks come through apparently unscathed, I realize. But I still think it is a significant risk, particularly for people who might be sexually active for ten or fifteen years prior to marriage. For a vocalist or a violinist, that much "bad practice" would be devastating.

 

 

We teach our kids to be honest in all things, even in small things, because life's most important moments of costly integrity depend upon exactly the same consistent spiritual discipline and practice across time. We correct their lapses not in high moral outrage but with the quiet persistence of piano teachers reproving a stiff flat finger or baseball coaches correcting batting stance: "Not like that, like this." "Here's how," taught with care and learned with care, involves the transmission of many "habits" whose meaning and value become clear only after a long time. People achieve full or mature integrity only by internalizing it so that they know for themselves and in themselves exactly what is at stake in any particular situation they face as adults. The same is true of sexual fidelity: It can't be reduced to a simple list of "do" and "don't" that will obviate the need to develop mature judgment and self-knowledge. The best guide to sexual fidelity is a life of fidelity—to self and to other—in all of our social encounters.

[Scottdmw]

I agree with the author of this article.

 

I think that our brains are prewired in a way for sexual patterning-- that is, when we start out we have some flexibility in what we find attractive. As we have sexual experiences, there is a tendency to develop a taste for whatever early good experiences we have. We develop a type. We also become very attached to early partners.

 

If we break up with early partners, there are a couple of problems. First, the heartbreak is real and serious. It can affect us for years even. Then, possibly we have used up some of our ability to pattern for a new person. We literally can't bond as strongly with the second person as we could with the first person. We can't find them as attractive as we did the first person.

 

Everyone can handle one or two of these, but the more it continues the more difficult it is to bond at all with a new person. Past heartbreaks make it hard to trust. You keep comparing the new person to the old people. You get more and more picky in what you want. All this just makes it that much more difficult if you finally do meet someone that you want to spend the rest of your life with to actually do that. It's never impossible, but I feel like it's kind of like we add a little bit of weight to our burden every time we abuse our sexual nature.

 

Some people get to the point where they just don't care anymore. They can have sex with whoever and it doesn’t matter. This may seem like a gift, until the person finds someone they really want to commit to, if that ever happens. Now they are with this person that they want to commit to, but their emotions can no longer help them do it. Where sex was supposed to help them bond with that person, help round out the rough edges of the relationship and keep them together through the hard times, it is no longer able to do that. The person doesn't really bond that way anymore. They know they can take it or leave it. The only thing keeping them in the relationship is the power of their will, without the natural assistance it is supposed to have from the sexual bonding.

 

It doesn't even have to involve another person--consider pornography addiction. A person uses their sexual gifts with pornography early on in life. They tell themselves that it's just for now until they find a partner, and then they'll stop. But, the brain learns to recognize that pornography is their “partner”. Later when they find a real partner that doesn't look like the pornography, they find it difficult to fully bond with that person. There are a number of threads on this site about married people with huge problems from this.

 

Or, there is another thread on this site about a married couple who was having a problem due to the fact that one partner really wants anal sex, while the other partner is not willing to. How did the first partner come to this desire? Most likely, it was part of an earlier relationship that was really good. The person “learned” to like this particular thing. Now with a new partner is more difficult to bond with that person, because they aren't like the first partner.

 

In short, I think there is an awful lot to be said for being really careful about sexual relationships, and the ideal of waiting for marriage as much as possible.

 

Scott

[A O]

Body and heart or soul are one. Any attempt to dissociate them is both doomed and dangerous, and that is how casual sex injures even free and willing participants. It severs vital connections within the self, thereby silencing or at least muting one of the most powerful and literally vital foundations of our richest and most creative relationships with other people. Casual sex easily devastates the capacity for serious sex.

Who we are dictates our approach to sex not the other way around. Sex, like so many other aspects of our lives is simply an outlet for who we are. In other words, its ourselves, not the act that matters.

 

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