Maybe the problem of zipless-fuck culture is not that we don't value love enough but that we value it too highly. Love is like enlightenment, this far-off ethereal thing that must never be pretended to. We fuck without love not because we don't want to be in love, but because we don't expect it any time soon--it's too precious.
My friends and I have an instant reaction to anyone with less than a year of dating saying they're in love and anyone with less than five years getting married: "They're crazy." Love at first sight? Fucknuts. How can you make any kind of commitment without a lifetime of deliberation and field-playing? It's too important!
And so we fuck pretty much whoever's handy and doesn't smell funny. I'm not the kind of person who could call this a bad thing--I never really made the emotional connection that being in love has any relation to sexual monogamy anyway--but I think it's perhaps a reaction to the divorces or bad marriages of our parents who married young. How big of a faux pas is it to say "love" to someone you're dating? My young, pervy, mostly-liberal, free-wheeling peer group may be sluts but we're secretly romantics. Because we lost our virginities young and casually, we're not saving ourselves? Nonsense. When we jealously guard our hearts against any but the truest and most tested love, we're saving ourselves.
Incisive point.
ReplyDeleteI find myself wondering if the fact that the whole verboten nature of love in this postmodern loveland doesn't give it all the same level of visceral thrill that cheap backalley sex used to maintain.
You know... the forbidden fruit that just tastes so, so sweet?
Very interesting post.
Yup.
ReplyDeleteFor my part, though, sex has a lot to do with trust -- and I don't readily trust people.
This week's Savage Lovecast parallels this post in some interesting ways -- couples staying together because of love where there is no sex. That seems a 180 from past generations' insistence on staying together (or marrying) because of sex.
ReplyDeleteWait . . . past generations stayed married because of sex? I think that's the first time I've heard that.
ReplyDeleteI know a little about love vs. sex. I love my wife very much, and I believe she loves me, but sex once per month is about all she can manage.
(Don't suggest I lose weight, gain weight, change my appearance, work out, write love poetry, take her on a date, get kinky, or whatever else. I've done it. It's not happening.)
Oops, got cut off. Anyway, I trust her. I love her. I wish I could have sex with her, and it IS maddening, but the love is there.
ReplyDeleteLove at first sight - I agree. No such animal. Or, anyway, it's not the stuff I mean by "love".
ReplyDeleteLove after two months of frequent, long, and content-packed emails, OTOH - okay, call me crazy if you want.
So what I'm wondering is, are you and your friends doing this because you're afraid to be vulnerable until you're sure you won't get hurt (as your last sentence suggests), or because you're expecting "the real thing" to be a major mystical experience (as per vast amounts of pop-cultural romanticism)?
Sunflower