Love & Sex Have Nothing To Do With Each Other

Do you have the capacity to love?

The concept of Love is daunting. Its current incarnation is flimsy and diluted, but its existence remains extremely, immeasurably potent. Love affects everyone at the most fundamental level yet is cringe to discuss as a concept, rightfully so. Being honest about that which immediately yields vulnerability is very uncomfortable. It’s also messy — love is an indefinable word which is both a noun and a verb.

Common modern ideas about love are simplistic and naive, like the folksy coping assumption “there’s someone for everyone out there.” Oftentimes there isn’t, because they themselves are either objectively unlovable, feel unlovable, or do not have the capacity to love someone else.

There are also misconceptions about the role of love in matters of sex, romance and passion. This is a fatal wrongdoing of Hollywood and industries who benefit by rotting the conception of Love into the ground.

In this series of essays I will define what Love is from my understanding and attempt to separate these very distinct and complex experiences, and how men and women are molded to them differently.

Did Your Parents Do Their Job?

To feel Loved is the closest replica of the safety you felt in your mother’s womb. A home made just for you where you had no obligations, other than to just be. You were provided for, not judged, had no expectations and were in a total state of warmth. You were being nurtured to become a person of the living, changing, breathing world. But you were ripped out of that naturally caring and safe place by Time itself and thrown into the world of chaos and unpredictability. Everyone, at their core, wants to go back.

How to go back? Well, if your parents did their job, which was to nurture you and protect you, then they replicated your experience in the womb the best that they could (hopefully). Were you fed regularly? Were they there for you when you truly needed them? Did they have your back? Could you trust them? If you answered yes to most of these, then you are very lucky. You are probably open to feeling love from people other than your parents, and are also highly likely to feel comfortable expressing love to someone you care for. Both inward and outward experiences may be second nature to you. 

What if that wasn’t your experience? What if your parents didn’t pay attention to you very much? What if you felt like you weren’t their favorite child? What if they discouraged you, were overbearing, suffocating, neglectful, or straight up mean to you? What if they only showed love to you based on arbitrary rules or conditions? What if one of them abandoned you? Then they weren’t doing their job. Because of that, you may find it hard to feel lovable and difficult to truly love.

All of these matters, of course, manifest into your “dating experience” and how you relate to the opposite sex. And both men and women experience and express the effects very differently.

Setting The Definitions

“Med, this word is starting to annoy me. What does ‘to show love’ even mean?”

To show love does not mean simply having the capacity to feel warm feelings toward someone else. That isn’t particularly hard to do. You can love your pet.

If we’re talking about Love with a capital L, in the most human sense, it’s something much stronger than that. It’s unbreakable. It means being there for someone when they need you, which is very different from allowing someone to take advantage of you, or enabling their behavior. It means supporting and encouraging. It means accepting someone for who they are. To cheer them on when they win and to root for them to pick their head up and improve when they lose. Looking at them and knowing that you cannot change them. Hoping they find their own unique path and admiring their journey, because it’s theirs, not yours, whether or not it involves you or whether or not you agree with it.

This is a lot to ask of someone, because it’s very rare and oftentimes very difficult. These are the big questions where few are willing to go. Talk therapy attempts to deal with these issues, with little to show for it. Psychiatry never wants you to go this far, it’s much easier to pop a pill. Most people aren’t willing to go there. Rightfully so, it’s scary stuff. Are you willing to ask yourself how you truly feel about your parents? Where do you fall short in relationships? What do you require from someone in a relationship? Are you needy? Are you prone to using someone as the father or mother you never had? To do what they were supposed to do? Are you willing to take the time and make the sacrifices to sort these questions out without burdening someone else? What would that require of you?

Women often complain about finding themselves acting as a mother in relationships. Men complain women won’t do the basic household duties women have traditionally done. A lot of these grievances are tied up with fundamental childhood experiences.

By the way, did you notice how my description of Love had nothing to do with sex?

Mistaking Passion for Love

People talk about “finding love.” Love is not a template someone either finds or doesn’t. It takes its own form for everyone. Each person requires their own flavor, it’s extremely particular since each person is extremely particular. Even normies and NPC’s, if you give them a chance and genuinely want to know who they actually are.

Love has absolutely nothing to do with sex. “Making love” is not a thing. You can have sex while feeling highly emotional, exposed and vulnerable. Gentle. You can have sex with someone that you love. You can have sex and pay close attention to what you’re doing to them and how they experience you. That’s called being a “good lover.” But after sex is over, are you be willing to be there for them at their absolute most insufferable state? Deal with them at their worst? Be there through cancer treatments? Would you wipe their ass? If not, that is not Love. That’s passion.

Love is not being intoxicated by someone, addicted to their scent and their skin and their moan. These are pheromones. Attraction based on pheromones is passion. These are undetectable biological forces that want us to clone ourselves with someone brought to us by the most mysterious force in the universe — chemistry. No one knows how human chemistry works, we barely know anything about human pheromones. Trying to control for it is absolutely useless, it requires stepping into the unknown. Passion is different from love. These are two very distinct things. Love is different from “True Love”, which is much different than the cringe, Hollywood-popularized “soulmate”, but that is not the type of Love I am discussing here. I will discuss it in future parts of this essay series.

You can love your son, you can love your friend, you can love your spouse. Love lasts way longer than any honeymoon period and can withstand the violent and destructive forces of life itself.

Did Hollywood Psyop You?

It’s important to ask yourself your intentions when entering the “dating world.” Human yearning for love is universal, but this is of course dictated by your own specific needs relative to what your childhood was like. You never know where things could go and it’s selfish to assume they have the same intentions as you.

Are you tired of jerking off at home and looking to get laid? Of course. You want skin-to-skin contact. You want to feel someone else’s breath on you. You may even want their nails digging into your back. You want to hear moaning. You want the real thing. Magic. Electricity. But why? Is it because you want someone to feel obsessed with you? It’s a great feeling. Do you want to feel obsessed with someone? Perhaps you feel a need to give. It feels great to have that kind of an impact on someone. What if the chemistry and sex is so good that it ruins your life? What if you can’t think about anything else and skip your obligations? You’re now addicted to each other. What if you end up spending hours upon hours in bed together and become inseparable? What if it turns into something much more?

Perhaps you’re set on becoming a parent. Have you asked yourself why? Well, you’re supposed to become one, right? You wouldn’t want your DNA to die with you. Perhaps you feel a strong need to have children. Do you have your life together? Can you say with confidence that you can parent yourself? Perhaps you want to simply become a father or a mother and think that raising children will be rewarding. Do you think you will parent your children the way your parents parented you? Would that be a good thing? It’s quite possible you will do as you have been taught, that’s typically the pattern. Do you have experience with handling children? Sitting through hours of screaming and crying, needing to leave where you are to wipe an ass multiple times a day, enforcing order onto chaotic little creatures. Do you have a support network? Doing this all day, every day can wear you down. Can you afford to have children? Are your finances in order? Do the next 3-5 years look predictably stable? Most don’t ask these questions, which is why so many end up becoming bad or mediocre parents. It’s easier than you realize to resent having children and check out, despite what you may have been told to believe.

Do you really want Love? Are you ready for its tremendous ups and downs? You will get into fights, sometimes you won’t talk to each other. Sometimes they’re going to say things that really hurt you. Are you going to be okay with someone possibly changing over time from the person you married years later? People change. What if they cheat on you? It may happen during a time when you’re no longer sexually relevant. Are you willing to stay with them? You will see them at their absolute worst, as the least lovable they could ever be. Are you willing to put up with it? Are they fun to be around day to day? People can be boring. The honeymoon period does not last forever. Perhaps you’re just looking for a companion. A buddy. Someone to go to the movies with you and walk around Whole Foods with. That could be fun, it might last a couple of years. But are you willing to do that for 10 years? 40 years? You might have let someone go who was better suited for you. Are you willing to watch them die?

I’m not suggesting to get stuck in analysis paralysis. You can’t know most of these things, but asking them will put your intentions in order and force you to face yourself. These are the important questions to ask, and most don’t, which is a reason why the divorce rate is so high, amongst the others I’ve discussed.

Love as an Intention

The need to feel loved exists in every human, regardless of what their childhood was like. Love means accepting they may not love you back. Love is looking out for someone’s best interests. Love is a bold step to take, and very few experience it for this reason. Why put yourself in a situation where you could be dropped from a helicopter, have the rug pulled out from underneath you, get your heart stomped on, sometimes intentionally. That’s scary. They could take everything you have.

This makes you extremely vulnerable. But nothing in life is worth it without vulnerability, without exposing yourself to the potentiality of hurt. Hurt you cannot even fathom and may feel irrecoverable. Hurt can mean seeing someone else hurt. It’s very messy business, but engaging with it means living a more meaningful life than those who don’t. Why? Because the hurt I describe is as close to death as one can experience while alive. When you get your hands dirty with life and death, you see both sides, and perhaps can become someone who understands the point of being alive. It’s worth taking such a tremendous risk.