Sex is love’s fast-forward button. If you’re normal, you’re going to fall in love with the person you’re sleeping with, sooner or later, whether you like it or not.
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“We’re just fuckbuddies, John; it’s casual. You know, friends with benefits.”—that’s what my 19-year-old student said to me, with the endearing confidence of a kid who’s just gone to the corner store by himself for the first time. Two weeks later he was crying in my office. Heartbroken. Devastated. I’ve seen the same thing a thousand times. And there’s a simple reason for it: sex is love’s fast-forward button. If you’re normal, you’re going to fall in love with the person you’re sleeping with—or they’re going to fall in love with you—sooner or later, whether you like it or not.
As Aristotle well knew, it takes awhile to get close to a new friend, even if the two of you hit it off like crazy the first time you meet. 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.). By contrast, if you’re sleeping with the same person, you can attain the same level of intimacy in less than two weeks! That’s why I tell students in my “Love and Friendship” class that sex is love’s fast-forward button. Whether you like it or not, the two of you are going to get very close, very fast: it’s inevitable and irresistible (if you’re normal)—only the sociopathic seem capable of resisting its siren song. 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. One day you wake up and realize—perhaps to your horror—that your connection to this person has—seemingly overnight—come to constitute a kind of natural fact, like gravity, climate change, tropical hurricanes, and the Montreal winter. And, like all natural facts, it can’t be explained away by simplistic Sex-and-the-City sophistry. We forget this at our peril.
—John Faithful Hamer, From Here (2015)
Photos courtesy of the author.
“If you’re normal”? Nope. If you’re too SENSIBLE and start building expectatives about your f-buddy and both of you start to experience a lot together. That’s why I never see a f-buddy more than once per week and almost never hang out with them if sex won’t be involved (unless it’s a very especial case like her birthday or something), because she or I might fall in love. Truste me, I’m very sensible and normal. By following this simple rule, a formar sex buddy never fell un LOVE with me and viceversa for a period of two years.
I now have a new title for my as-yet-unwritten memoir: I’m in Love With a Sociopath, and He’s in Love With Me: A Story of Two Not Normal People. Heck, I could make it an anthology. Of course plenty of people believe that sex leads to love. We’ve been trained that the two are tied together, just like we’ve been trained that there is value tied to a woman’s virginity, much more than to a man’s. An ongoing sexual relationship with someone you aren’t emotionally tied to is still frowned upon. It contradicts expectations and makes people uncomfortable, and yes,… Read more »
Breastfeeding women don’t have to be brainwashed by society into falling in love with their newborn babies. It happens quite naturally. Why? Because mammals like us release a nonapeptide hormone called oxytocin during breastfeeding. Likewise, normal people who are sleeping together on a regular basis don’t have to be brainwashed by society into falling in love with each other. It happens quite naturally. Why? Because large amounts of oxytocin are released during orgasm. That being said, researchers have found that some people are “oxytocin-resistant”. By which they mean that some people seem to be exceptionally good at resisting the impulse… Read more »
what about women who don’t breastfeed? and couples who dont orgasm? is this text for real and you are really a college teacher? – questions from an apparently “sociopath”
There’s a huge distance between a person not falling in love with someone and not giving a shit about the people closest to them. If I’ve f-kd someone, I guarantee I gave something of a shit about them, else I wouldn’t have wasted my time. I do have hands and locking doors. But some of the people closest to me I never f-kd, and some people I did were not particularly close. Sure, some people fall in love with everyone they have sex with. And some people don’t. And most, I suspect, are in the middle. And plenty fall in… Read more »
This review would seem to indicate that Robin Rinaldi’s new book, The Open Marriage Experiment, corroborates my claims about inherent difficulties associated with open relationships: http://www.theglobeandmail.com/life/relationships/sowing-her-wild-oats-robin-rinaldi-details-her-year-of-open-marriage/article23541628/
p.s. I used to think that it was possible to do the friends with benefits thing indefinitely without complication, without falling love. But I was proven wrong on numerous occasions—viz., I had to learn this lesson the hard way.