How do you define it?

iVillage Member
Registered: 01-07-2005
How do you define it?
21
Mon, 08-22-2005 - 1:36am
Do you think horniness, lust, physical cravings & desire are by-products of love? Or IYO can we experience those feelings without 'being in love'?
iVillage Member
Registered: 08-21-2005
Tue, 08-23-2005 - 1:06am

I am actually wondering how someone could not just naturally know the answer to that question? If you havent experienced attraction and arousal from a gorgeoues complete stranger at least once in your life, I feel badly for you, you are missing what is a normal part of the struggle between the animal and the spirit that makes us human.

Attraction is based partly on natural state of our brain, and on the nuturing years.
We are born with certain inclinations, and these can be broadened or narrowed by what we are exposed to in our youth. When some people reach adulthood, they may find themselves most attracted to the type of people they grew up with, others are attracted to the exoticness of the opposite types. I am in the first group, and find it definitely noticeable that I am attracted mostly to white and hispanic females.
Let me be very clear, I find women, and some men, from among all the races who I can see and intellectually choose to call "attractive" But attraction as an emotional response is INVOLUNTARY, when you see someone your animal brain finds attractive, the first hormones of arousal are realeased. Atrraction is a feeling not a choice. So although I find many black people to be incredibly beautiful, sone of God's handsomest children, I very rarely FEEL attraction... But a 17 year old blonde cheerleader? Even in 40s I cant seem to get over my teenage years and still feel a rush for the girls that teased me.
But I dont then fantasize about them, surf for internet porn, or stalk them. But some men do.. Our attractions are involuntary, our response to that initial chemical feeling IS. And people who let themselves take action out of horniness and lust are letting the primitive animal portion of their brain run their lives, instead of the higher, rational human brain, as well as the spirit for those of us who believe.

When I see so often in the news a story of some celebrity cheating on his spouse, I often wonder "what in the world he was thinking" and then realise he WASNT thinking, he was letting his penis do all the thinking. And I can't really make any value judgement( only God may Judge) because I am very fortunate to be 5' 3" 200lbs and hairy as a silver back gorilla, so I am not faced with the temptations that come of being too good looking for your own good..

But I can tell the questioner that men and women are quite not just capable, but its a perfectly natural reaction to be aroused, even to the level of completely ignoring your own values and honor, by someone you not only dont love, but might not even KNOW. If Angelina Jolie were to knock on the front door and tell me she wants me... I know I should just say "No Thanks" and close the door, but I think I'd at least have to ask my wife, there's a one in a billion chance shed say OK, well worth the consequences Id suffer for even thinking I could ask... And I use Angelina Jolie as an example because my wife, quite against her will, finds Angelina so attractive it overwhelms even her gender attraction.

Now for a simpler example:
A man meets a beautiful girl, makes up a whole bunch of lies to seduce her, nails her once and dumps her. LUST
A man and woman meet in a bar, have a few drinks and dance together, and looking for a little pleasure and companionship in life, but no commitment, have a one night stand which they both sought to give pleasure as well as recieve. SEX
The woman who has been my best friend for 10 years freed from a bad marriage sees the LOVE that has made our friendship so strong, and opens her heart, and mine to more. She can make love with a look, or with our fingertips just brushing together, more passionately than I ever imagined.

Sex can be the most spiritual union possible between two people while we are confined in the flesh. It can be fun, and a shared intimacy, it can be a competition, it can be a desparate attempt to grab intimacy for just a night, it can be a job loved, or a job hated and endured, it can be a degrading self destruction, it can be a violent crime.
Sex is not love, and love is not sex. You can have one without the other, Sex without love is fun while it lasts. Love with Sex can bond and build an intimacy that lasts even through those times when there is no sex, for Love endures even when the flesh fades.
And I am thoroughly longwinded because Love with Sex can also multiply, because I am typing this while the 5, 4 and 18 month old children climb all over the couch and me, and the wife helps the 13 and 10 year olds with homework. So I have nothing better to do except be Mt. Daddy and sit still and type awhile.
Wouldnt trade it for a million times a million bucks..

iVillage Member
Registered: 08-12-2002
Tue, 08-23-2005 - 8:34am

You can definitely have all that without love. About 3 1/2 years ago I slept with a guy that I met a couple of months before, and got to know. I didn't know what it was about him, but I just had to have him from the moment I met him. Wasn't interested in a relationship or anything. Just had to have him. hehe.

Janet

 


 


iVillage Member
Registered: 08-08-2005
Tue, 08-23-2005 - 10:34am


So what's your opinion on sex first, love later? Is tht possible. Because your making it sound like sex can only be just sex. And love you have to wait and then have sex.

I had sex with my bf 2 weeks into dating (which is fast for me,) and now I think I'm falling in love with him. Is that possible...or is that still just lust and desire?

I think that there is different levels of lust and love. I'm still working on this theory. But here's what I got so far:

There's "love" "big love" and "great love." "Love" is simple, not that complex. This is that love at first sight feeling. It can never be deep...it can even be just a lustful love. Nevertheless, it fades and you can be over it in a month or so. "Big love" is deep and meaningful. It's being with someone for a long time. Knowing that person, being comfortable, having lust and desire...but eventually that too will fade because curiousity, or just plain boredom will set in. This kind of love is hard to get over...but in a couple of years you can be over that too. "Great love" transcends everything. Lust, desire, comfort, boredom, security, and everything inbetween. The other is your best friend, lover, and soulmate. It's a once in a lifetime thing, that some people never find because they are too busy with lust they don't see deep enough into people that they may mistake a "great love" for just a "big love." I know this theory is kinda out there...but it makes sense to me.

Kayla

iVillage Member
Registered: 11-15-2003
Tue, 08-23-2005 - 11:59am

Kayla,

You and I would part ways on this belief a bit. I believe that soulmates are made not found. Granted, there is a certain number of things that you must share in common to find that "great" love, but there are literally thousands and thousands of people that can fit that bill.

Commitment and continuing curiousity about your partner and yourself allows for that freshness to continue for as long as you are both alive. It's when we stop being open to the newness of our partner and ourselves that we have a tendency to get bored. The truth is that we change constantly...boredom happens when you think you "know" another so completely that there are no surprises left within them. So many people split up because they believe that there is some "Great Love" out there. The reality is is that the "Great Love" is within you and you have to learn to give it to someone else...that's the secret. When you can do that the "Great Love" never goes away and all love is potentially Great.

Peace.
Scott.

iVillage Member
Registered: 08-08-2005
Tue, 08-23-2005 - 1:23pm


Scott-

By curiousity I meant curious about other people and if there is someone else out there besides their SO that (as you said) could be a great love. I also stated that a great love can be confused with a big love...and therefore never finding that great love because some people have a mentality that what they have is never enough.

I have yet to find that great love...but when I do, I hope I know and can hold on to that person. (Or maybe I did...I just don't know it.)

Kayla

iVillage Member
Registered: 08-12-2002
Tue, 08-23-2005 - 9:44pm

Every situation is different. I lusted after that guy, but I didn't want anything but sex from him. Yes, I believe sex can be just sex.

I spent over four years with my ex, whom I thought I loved. We didn't have sex until we had both said we had loved each other (three months into the relationship). However, in saying that, I walked away from a four year relationship like it didn't mean anything that we'd been together for so long. So maybe it wasn't really ever "love" after all. Or maybe I was over him a long time before I thought I was.

The guy I am currently seeing (been together nearly three months) I slept with only a few days after we got together, but we had known each other as friends for six months beforehand. I had known for a while that he liked me, and it it took a while for him to be sure that I felt the same. I don't love him, and I'm after my ex I am very wary of what "love" actually is. If I spend a lot of time with him, sometimes I feel very strongly about him, and can see how I could fall in love with him. But mostly it wouldn't bother me a great deal if things suddenly fell apart. We would still be friends. I got to know his personality a long time before we had sex, and now there is the strong sexual attraction there too. I lust and desire him on a daily basis, but I don't love him (yet).

 


 


iVillage Member
Registered: 08-21-2005
Wed, 08-24-2005 - 1:29am

Interesting how this discussion changed from whether sex and desire to love...

My 2cents worth: Like so much else in our society, we are raising whole generations of children with a media twisted view of Love. Just as emaciated models have led to ridiculous and unhealthy self images and unrealistic violence has immuned some childrn to the real horror and pain of violence, our media has generated a view of LOVE that is far to idealistic in one way, and far too easy to walk away from on the other hand. I hate to single out Soaps, but they are ridiculous.

The kind of passion you feel in the beginning years of a relationship will fade and mellow. If your passion was mostly physical, or infatuation, there wont be much left when the passion fades. But if you and your partner have made the commitment of the heart as lovers, youll find that even when passion fades you really like having the other around.
That without that person, somehow you are incomplete.
I know of far too many people who have the miscomception that when the passion fades, so has the love. But its when that passion abates that you find the real love. If you have loved passionately in those first years, not just made love passionatly, those moments when the sex seemed beyond physical and your souls touched.. that bond will remain long after the sex becomes secondary.
Not to put down the pleasure of sex, but if its simply the loss of the pleasure that is troubling you, then you probably never realized real lovemaking. Making love, not just having sex, is often more about the emotional connection, reaffirming your specialness, reassuring each other when things get difficult. But when that love bond has grown so secure its not in doubt, its a look, or holding hands as you walk, or your special way of sharing that is all it takes to share all thise feelings it used to take passionate sex to affirm.
Ive heard so many times the worry, oh, we hardly ever have sex anymore, what happened to our Love? Well, you got so comfortable with each other you no longer need the sex for emotional reassurance, you've made love so passionately thise first years that sometimes your sex now seems boring, and youve probably gotten bogged down in routine and roles that you are stagnating in your relationship rather than taking the next steps.
The next steps? When the passion of your first years fades into comfort and security, if you havent already, you become best friends. Lord, how many couples I know who clearly if they werent banging pleasurably would hate each other... Now, being friends first is often an obstacle to love. But if you dont somewhere along the way become best friends, then you will never know the real completeness of love. When your spouse is your best friend you have a way out of your most painful fights. It only takes one of you to step back a moment, swallow your pride, and say, " I am so upset with my lover, I really need my best friend to talk to..."
Its also a time when you can start to share with each other the things you hide as new lovers. Your quilty secrets, your past bad or embarrasing times, your most obscene but erotic fantasies. My wife, while very open minded to what others do, is very conservative and cautious herself. When she got comfortable enough to tell me she had been watching porn with her previous husband and a friend one night, and let it slip that she thought it was incredibly sexy to see an actress really enjoying being with two men at once, they went ahead and tried it. She talked about the initital guilt, old morals, and then the acceptance that it was a consenual adventure taken together. And so they did it again without the guilt..
She clearly was worried about my reaction, that Id think badly of her. When I tried to say it was OK, she wasnt really listening until I said, "Honey... Ive been the extra man with 3 different married couple friends, and once had 2 ex girlfriends who HATED each other compete to see which could please me the most, and in spite of hating each other they also did each other. The mistake you made in telling me isnt that I'd think badly of you, its that I have no doubt in our love and so no fear, and am going to be very disappointed if we dont go even farther together.."
Its been three years, and we havent so far, the sharing of our dirty secrets was enough to make any regret over the "loss of passion" seem ridiculous. We dont have quite as "passionate and spiritual" sex still, because we cna get that at a touch of our fingertips. Now we are free to have some really dirty and nasty sex on occasion. And when the right guy comes along... maybe we will, or maybe well let the past be its own and enjoy the idea that we "could have willingly" but chose not too.
People too easily let the passsing of passion be a sign its time to move on. Maybe it is, but MAYBE its a sign you are growing past the sexual bonding and ready to go much deeper. But if you dont try.... you can eventually drift apart. And if you DO become best friends, you still need to be sure to occasionally keep things spicy. You can risk some VERY spicy things when you know that if you nake a bad choice as lovers you can laugh at yourselves as friends..
We have done a "soft swing", sex in the same room with another couple, and when it got a little tense with desire BETWEEN the couples, my wife and I turned it into laughter by finding several different ways to have sex in and fall out of our recliner... And when we ALMOST had a threesome with a male friend, but he sort of chickened out, couldnt have sex with a friends wife, I offered up that I appreciated his honor, but that if that meant he was going to have to drive home 90 mins with a hard on, he could have sex with me then instead of my wife.
Youve gotta have a sense of humor to go with your sense of adventure, and when my wife asked me what I would have done if he had said ok, I told her I would have done anything she told me to and would have found it the sexiest thing ever if she asked me to do something totally out of character for her pleasure...

You cant get to that kind of trust and passion if you dont love each other, arent best friends, and have been able to share even your most guarded secrets. And you wont get those things until you get PAST the passionate sex years and get to know each other as something other than an incredible sex partner.

But hey, thats just my story.

iVillage Member
Registered: 01-07-2005
Wed, 08-24-2005 - 3:12am

I have thoroughly enjoyed everyone's post. In your original post you questioned "how someone could not just naturally know the answer to that question?", and I didn't post because I didn't know answer - I just wanted to know other's opinions. I thought Westridge's comments about men was great!

I have had sex without love - four times that I recall: my first time (just the way I wanted it); twice w/husband of 17 years (one year before we split; last one made me realize big difference between making love and having sex); and my 2nd one-nighter. Now the first three times, lust, desire, craving & horniness was not in any part of me. However, my 2nd one-nighter was the first time I actually had cravings, desire and lust/horniness with a stranger and without love, and that was an eye-opener (more so because I actually acted on those feelings rather than stifle 'em)

That event along with my current situation has made me question which really comes first: the egg or the chicken. IMHO, there is a huge difference in experiencing love @ 20 compared to love @40 (with or w/out lust, desire,cravings, horniness) and then when you add those four feelings along with love, it can make for an interesting mind set. I hope the thread continues, and I thank you all for your insight - it's very interesting!

iVillage Member
Registered: 12-20-2004
Wed, 08-24-2005 - 8:27am
How about this one ...love without sex......lol
iVillage Member
Registered: 01-07-2005
Wed, 08-24-2005 - 11:14am
Not a laughing matter in my book!!!!!!!! Married love without sex is not funny. I spent the last six years of marriage in that state and it was the lonliest, most painful period of my life. Much rather have sex without love than love without sex!!!! No words can describe the depth of pain/hurt/despair having another human repeat "i love you", but they won't touch you. Try to imagine how great you'd feel after being pushed away everytime you attempt physical contact for six years, AND that means kisses and hugs too!!!!! :(