Love’s Fast-Forward Button
“I am neither virgin nor whore, and I choose to hold that space proudly, which is not easy to do. I’ve always felt pressured to be one or the other to suit some man’s fantasy. But now, at 36, I can admit that, while I love to screw, I don’t want to be degraded like a porn star, objectified like a whore . . . . And at 36 I can also admit that I can’t do casual sex. If I sleep with someone, I start feeling an emotional bond, even though some sex workers and sex writers tell me that attachment is a myth propagated by the patriarchy to keep me sexually disempowered. It doesn’t matter—I can’t do it. Maybe that makes me uncool, unhip and undesirable, but I just don’t care anymore.”—Tracy Chabala, “The Orgy Prude: How I Finally Admitted I Don’t Like Meaningless Porn-Star Sex,” Salon (March 23, 2015)
Sex is love’s fast-forward button. If you’re normal, sooner or later, you’re going to fall in love with the person you’re sleeping with, or they’re going to fall in love with you, whether you like it or not. “Passionate love,” as Jonathan Haidt rightly observes in The Happiness Hypothesis (2006), “is a drug. Its symptoms overlap with those of heroin . . . and cocaine . . . . Passionate love alters the activity of several parts of the brain, including parts that are involved in the release of dopamine. Any experience that feels intensely good releases dopamine, and the dopamine link is crucial here because drugs that artificially raise dopamine levels, as do heroin and cocaine, put you at risk of addiction.”
My guess is that it takes, on average, about a year for genuine intimacy and closeness to develop between new friends, unless the two of you share some sort of extreme experience (e.g., getting kidnapped together at gun-point by terrorists, getting trapped in an elevator for hours during an earthquake, fighting side-by-side in the trenches of a faraway war, talking on ecstasy for ten hours straight at a Baltimore rave, etc.). But if you’re sleeping with the same person, you can attain the same level of intimacy in less than two weeks.
The feelings we develop for someone we’re sleeping with are real and powerful and intense, as is the attachment, the craving, and the newfound neediness. This is largely a function of oxytocin, a hormone normally associated with mother-infant bonding in the animal kingdom. In most mammals, oxytocin is released solely during breastfeeding, where it helps to forge a powerful bond between mother and child. But in certain species, such as our own, large quantities of oxytocin are also released during sex, where it helps to forge a powerful bond between lovers. In Blueprint (2020), Nicholas A. Christakis maintains that these modifications of the oxytocin reflex are nothing short of astounding: “a set of physiological experiences that originally evolved to facilitate mother-child bonding” have, in Homo sapiens, evolved to facilitate and support pair-bonding. “The neural circuits that light up in a woman’s brain are similar whether she looks at her baby or her partner.”
There’s strength in numbers but peace in solitude. Hence the paradox of social life Freud ably described in Civilization and Its Discontents (1930): we need the strength in numbers that comes with social life, but, at one and the same time, social life makes demands upon us that often make us miserable.
A species composed of rugged individualists who really didn’t need each other would have gone extinct long ago. We’re not particularly strong or fast. Like bees and ants, our strength is derived primarily from our preternatural ability to work together. But why bother when people can be so annoying? Because we need them. Indeed, evolution seems to have selected for human neediness. Among other things, this explains the voracious nature of human sexuality. Unlike tigers, bears, and salamanders, who only have sex during the mating season, human beings have sex all year round. What’s more, we have a great deal of sex that’s clearly not going to result in pregnancy (e.g., gay sex, straight sex after menopause, etc.). This suggests that sex’s primary purpose has long since transcended procreation.
Montreal was in the middle of an HIV epidemic when I was a kid. AIDS was no longer an exclusively gay problem. What’s more, teen pregnancy was on the rise in the province, and sexually transmitted infections like gonorrhea, syphilis, and chlamydiae were growing resistant to the antibiotics used to treat them. It was a public health disaster and the Quebec government treated it as such. They embarked upon a remarkably ambitious program of sexual education aimed, not at high schools, but at elementary schools. The idea was to get to the kids in Grade Five and Grade Six: well before they hit puberty, and well before they became sexually active.
My friends and I were in Grade Five when they implemented the new Sex Ed curriculum. The sixth graders got a cool young teacher from NDG, a sexually liberated extrovert who seemed to genuinely enjoy covering the material. We got Mr. Hogg, an uptight WASP who blushed through many of the first lessons. Poor guy. Those first couple of weeks must have been hell. We giggled incessantly like idiots, even after he politely asked us to stop, even after he threatened us with detention—indeed, even after he threatened us with suspension. Like shivering uncontrollably when you’re running a high fever, there’s something eerily involuntary about nervous laughter. I remember marveling at how utterly helpless I felt. We knew we were being disruptive, and we didn’t want to waste another afternoon in detention, but we simply could not stop laughing.
If I was shocked at ten by what was included in the Sex Ed curriculum, I’m shocked at 45 by what's excluded. We learned that sex is risky, and we learned that sex has consequences; but they failed to mention that some of those risks and consequences are emotional. They taught us how to deal with a broken condom, but they didn’t teach us how to deal with a broken heart. We learned a great deal about sex but practically nothing about love.
Sexual desire renders us needy. It takes us out of ourselves and into the world, making hunters of us all. If the greatest friendships fall into our laps serendipitously, like the treasure you find buried in your own backyard, the greatest loves of our lives are like spoils we bring home from the field of battle.
—John Faithful Hamer, Love Is Not a Liquid Asset (2020)
