Connection between love and sex?

[NewsTheMan]

What is the philosophy behind this? I cannot see any philosophical way of connecting these two. I obviously do think that there is a connection. But I don’t know what to make of it. This of course relates to why sex outside of marriage is wrong, why hook ups are wrong. etc.

Any papers on this topic or threads or new thoughts?

 

[tonyrey]

A man and a woman complement each other physically, psychologically and spiritually. Their love unites them and enables them to bring a child into the world. In our experience it is the closest parallel to the perfect unity of the three divine Persons which stems from Love - the greatest creative power that exists…

 

[tonyrey]

A man and a woman complement each other physically, psychologically and spiritually. Their love unites them and enables them to bring a child into the world. In our experience it is the closest parallel to the perfect unity of the three divine Persons which stems from Love - the greatest creative power that exists…

I should add that sex outside marriage is a distortion of a gift intended to unite a man and a woman because it reveals an unwillingness to commit oneself for good!

 

[jschutzm]

What is the philosophy behind this? I cannot see any philosophical way of connecting these two. I obviously do think that there is a connection. But I don’t know what to make of it. This of course relates to why sex outside of marriage is wrong, why hook ups are wrong. etc.

Any papers on this topic or threads or new thoughts?

Check out Chastity.com for some insight. Check out the Papal Encyclical “Humane Vita”
Also, if you are really interested on this topic. Get a copy of Pope John Paul’s book “Theology of the Body”

There are also some books or MP3 topics on this at catholic.com

This is how I see it. if you can follow my logic.

God is completely capable of creating life on his own, by himself. He does not need us to do this.
Yet, he shared what is arguably one of his greatest powers… the power to create new life, with us… his lowly creations. WHY? - he doesn’t need us, why then?

It is with this first question and realization that you start to see a divine connection between Love and Sex. Because other then answering “love” - it is hard pressed to understand WHY God shared creation with us humans. Especially given how much of a mess we often make of it. children out of wedlock, abortion, children addicted to drugs, custody battles, etc. etc. etc.

If we accept a connection between Creation and sex, then the connection between Love and Sex is much more obvious.

Only by denying the connection between sex and procreation, is it easy for us to justify casual hook-ups, contraception, abortion, single parent families, etc.

But one can also argue that when you treat the natural result of an action separate from the action itself, you create a dysfunctional and perhaps schizophrenic, fractured understanding of the thing itself, in this case, sex.

 

[Sair]

I’m certainly not in the business of denying what to many is a very obvious connection between love and sex, and I personally do believe it is a debasement of the sex act to perform it in the absence of love, trust and respect for one’s partner.

However, I’m not certain that this philosophically points to the necessity of marriage as it is understood in a Western and particularly in a Christian context. There’s plenty of contemporary, historical and prehistoric anthropological evidence to suggest that what is and was in fact natural for humans, prior to the advent of agriculture, settled living and extensive personal property, is multiple sexual partners and communal raising of children. Some communities even believe that a child results from an accumulation in the woman’s womb of the semen of several men - consequently, the best that a mother-to-be can do for her child is to couple with all of those men in whom she sees qualities that will give her progeny the best chance in life. There is also little doubt that communities in which sexual bonds are communal experience less aggression and internal conflict than communities based upon monogamous unions. Biologically speaking, sexual intercourse serves to not only pass on one’s genes, but to create and strengthen emotional bonds between partners. What do we make of this in a philosophical sense?

And what of other animals that reproduce sexually? Are they to be considered participants in God’s creation?

 

[inocente]

Love is divided into various forms in some languages. For instance it could be attraction (need for beauty in general, including sexual desire), romance (bond between partners), affection (as in familial), friendship (as in John 15:13) and selfless (for its own sake). The ideal marriage might then be a combination of these.

One-sided attraction would always be wrong (stalking or worse), some see mutual attraction as OK, others as mere gratification dressed up as love.

 

[puzzleannie]

What is the philosophy behind this? I cannot see any philosophical way of connecting these two. I obviously do think that there is a connection. But I don’t know what to make of it. This of course relates to why sex outside of marriage is wrong, why hook ups are wrong. etc.

Any papers on this topic or threads or new thoughts?

hope you find your answer before you decide to get married

 

[Sair]

I suppose another way to look at it, also, is that sex is a powerful expression of trust and acceptance, a sharing of onesself with another - all of which are aspects of love; it serves as a means of both establishing and fortifying these feelings between partners. I think that for the same reason Catholics believe it is holding back to separate sex from procreation, it is also holding back to separate sex from love, trust, openness, friendship, respect, and so on. It’s pretty much the closest one can physically get to another person, so it seems very odd - to me, at least - to separate such physical closeness from emotional closeness.

 

[NewsTheMan]

hope you find your answer before you decide to get married

I already know the answer and I believe it, but there is no philosophical exploration of this topic.

 

[jschutzm]

I already know the answer and I believe it, but there is no philosophical exploration of this topic.

Hmm… not sure what you are looking for, exactly, but I feel there have been philosophical explorations of this.

Maybe I have a different definition of philosophy then you, but I feel that Pope John Paul the 2nd’s book “Theology of the Body” DID touch quite a bit on the philosophy of this very topic.
Obviously the focus was more Theology… but Theology often times touches on Philosophy and philosophy can often times relate very directly to Theology.

I’d argue that no where else, outside of the Catholic faith, will you find such a close link between philosophy and its theology. At least not any of the denominations or religions that I’m familiar with. Not Islam, not Buddhism (which is nearly all philosophy and no theology)

So again… if you are looking for some papers on this – please at the very least look for a summary of “Theology of the Body”

 

[NewsTheMan]

Hmm… not sure what you are looking for, exactly, but I feel there have been philosophical explorations of this.

Maybe I have a different definition of philosophy then you, but I feel that Pope John Paul the 2nd’s book “Theology of the Body” DID touch quite a bit on the philosophy of this very topic.
Obviously the focus was more Theology… but Theology often times touches on Philosophy and philosophy can often times relate very directly to Theology.

I’d argue that no where else, outside of the Catholic faith, will you find such a close link between philosophy and its theology. At least not any of the denominations or religions that I’m familiar with. Not Islam, not Buddhism (which is nearly all philosophy and no theology)

So again… if you are looking for some papers on this – please at the very least look for a summary of “Theology of the Body”

Sure! I appreciate it and I agree with you.

However, Theology of the Body is just that! Theology.

I am trying to find a way to connect love and sex without reference to God. Surely there must be a way to do it. All that I have read so far is Aquinas, Pope Paul VI and parts of JPII Theology of the Body. But these are all catholic religious sources!

 

[Captain_America]

Sair, thanks for your points here. Thoughtful stuff.

I’m male, and I went through the Playboy phase of believing sex was for fun and pleasure, but I’ve come to find that EVEN MEN generate emotional attachment via sex. . . of course, women have been pretty open about the emotional aspect. But I think men generate something, too.

The argument for monogamy is more intellectual than physical. It has to do with maturity; being with a partner of the other gender broadens the mind and adds to one’s experience of life. Many people feel sad to see individuals who keep flipping from relationship to relationship, seeing that these do not develop great depth over time. In fact, my best friends are my oldest friends; that’s the idea I’d chuck out here to you.

Also, realistically, the “Argument from What Animals Do” and the “Argument from What Prehistoric Peoples Used to Do” just leave me cold; they seem irrelevant to life in 2011. These sometimes get tossed out to give a scientific sound to one’s biases.

 

[tonyrey]

I suppose another way to look at it, also, is that sex is a powerful expression of trust and acceptance, a sharing of oneself with another - all of which are aspects of love; it serves as a means of both establishing and fortifying these feelings between partners. I think that for the same reason Catholics believe it is holding back to separate sex from procreation, it is also holding back to separate sex from love, trust, openness, friendship, respect, and so on. It’s pretty much the closest one can physically get to another person, so it seems very odd - to me, at least - to separate such physical closeness from emotional closeness.

Sometimes holding back from sex is the best and the only way to express your love for the other person. I am sure you can think of reasons for doing so.

 

[jschutzm]

Sair, thanks for your points here. Thoughtful stuff.

I’m male, and I went through the Playboy phase of believing sex was for fun and pleasure, but I’ve come to find that EVEN MEN generate emotional attachment via sex. . . of course, women have been pretty open about the emotional aspect. But I think men generate something, too.

The argument for monogamy is more intellectual than physical. It has to do with maturity; being with a partner of the other gender broadens the mind and adds to one’s experience of life. Many people feel sad to see individuals who keep flipping from relationship to relationship, seeing that these do not develop great depth over time. In fact, my best friends are my oldest friends; that’s the idea I’d chuck out here to you.

Also, realistically, the “Argument from What Animals Do” and the “Argument from What Prehistoric Peoples Used to Do” just leave me cold; they seem irrelevant to life in 2011. These sometimes get tossed out to give a scientific sound to one’s biases.

There is a lot of research which shows that

A) powerful hormones are released during sex, who’s primary purpose is to facilitate bonding, familiarity, trust and a sense of close intimate connection.

B) Relationship experts have found that breaking up from a sexual relationship, in many ways mimicks the type of emotional turmoil caused by divorce. You could say that each failed sexual encounter is like a mini divorce as far as depression, self esteem, etc.

Many people believe that it is morally wrong to toy with people’s emotions, even risk that sort of emotional turmoil with someone you are not totally and completely committed to.

Some believe it cheapens love to reduce it to merely about bonding and pleasure.

There are people who are studying how the hormones released during sex could be used to manipulate people, such as in business negotations, etc.

We have to be EXTREMELY leery of anyone who points to how animals behave as a justification for how we should act or what we consider “natural” for our own actions.

 

[Joel_PF]

We seek in others something that affirms our own identity; we have a need to be noticed and to be valued as individuals. There is no more personal way of valuing someone than romantic love, because it is essentially free, nontransferable and non-shareable. Ever notice how people become more confident and carefree after their first sexual experience (presuming it is even slightly positive)? They feel affirmed by someone else; worthy of love.

It is in the context of romantic love that sex finds its truly human venue. It is a sharing in each other’s most intimate, precious and inviolable sphere, in which both parties show each other how much they mutually value one another and themselves. The concepts of egoism and altruism break down (giving and receiving become the same) and the two are fused in an unity of mind, will and pleasure (ideally, of course).

I like the analogy of sex to a party. A party, say a birthday party, is the celebration of one’s life. Sex is the celebration of the love between two people. What would happen to the joy of a party if you threw one every day and invited anyone, with no selectivity? It would lose its value, becoming at best a moment of diversion from life’s chores, but ultimately unsatisfying.

The same regarding sex and partners. If it is taken out of the context of love, it degenerates in mere physical pleasure seeking, which is itself less pleasurable than the real deal. In sex, you partake of your partner’s most intimate and vulnerable core; meaning that your partner values you and trusts you enough to give it to you (and vice-versa). I speak here merely from personal experience (I’m married, by the way), but there is something so precious - almost sacred - about sex with the one you love that if someone were willing to share that experience, to share that particular possession of one’s wife, with anyone else, they would be committing a sacrilege against their very self, would be degrading their own human dignity. Anyway, this hardly needs much argument: the greatest majority of people abhor the idea of being cheated on, and the ones who don’t are probably so worn out from valueless sex (threw too many pointless parties) that they are no longer capable of accessing its deeper significance.- Nothing that can’t be fixed, though!

So the relation between sex and love is the most profound there is. Can there be one without the other? Kinda. Romantic love without sex is common friendship (by no means a little thing, but not quite the same as romantic love) and sex without love is just animality (nothing against our animal side; I just think it finds its true fulfillment when the properly human side is taken into account too). It is almost impossible to have one without the other: people who are romantically attached can’t help but see each other in a - human, exalted - sexual way, and even two strangers who have sex form emotional bonds that cannot be untied without pain.

And all this connects with another form of love. You see, love has a generous, overflowing quality to it. It is always enriching to meet a friend’s friend, adding to our circle of acquaintances and friends. Now, romantic love is exclusive, but it does overflow in its particular way: when two people come together and a new human being is formed.

 

[Sair]

I’m male, and I went through the Playboy phase of believing sex was for fun and pleasure, but I’ve come to find that EVEN MEN generate emotional attachment via sex. . . of course, women have been pretty open about the emotional aspect. But I think men generate something, too.

My experience suggests that this is most definitely true. It may not be considered ‘cool’ in some contemporary social circles for a man to express his emotions (although this does seem to be changing, thankfully) but that sure doesn’t mean they’re not present or not powerful.

The argument for monogamy is more intellectual than physical. It has to do with maturity; being with a partner of the other gender broadens the mind and adds to one’s experience of life. Many people feel sad to see individuals who keep flipping from relationship to relationship, seeing that these do not develop great depth over time. In fact, my best friends are my oldest friends; that’s the idea I’d chuck out here to you.

Actually, I think the argument for monogamy is largely a matter of practicality, rather than any universal human emotional, physical or intellectual yearning. Dress it up as we may in the language of romantic love and emotional commitment, the cold, calculating foundations of monogamous culture are the idea that a man should only invest his resources in offspring he knows to be his, and that a woman essentially trades exclusive access to her body and her sexual favours for a man’s material support.

One is tempted to ask, if being with one partner broadens the mind and adds to one’s life experience, how much more should this be true of being with several partners? I take your point, however, about what has come to be called “serial monogamy” - it’s almost like a “try-before-you-buy” scenario, and I agree that it is a sad thing to see people hopping from relationship to relationship without ever developing the deep emotional ties that we, as human beings, want - and need - in order to feel fulfilled. I do wonder how much the culture of monogamy is to blame for this state of affairs - a great many people are conditioned to believe that there is just one person out there for them (or at least that they are only permitted to be with one person) and this attaches a lot of pressure to their choice of partner, and makes them more likely to seek what may be an impossible ideal - the one, perfect relationship with someone who seems to be one’s “perfect match” - and hence to get cold feet the minute their relationship begins to look like hard work.

Also, realistically, the “Argument from What Animals Do” and the “Argument from What Prehistoric Peoples Used to Do” just leave me cold; they seem irrelevant to life in 2011. These sometimes get tossed out to give a scientific sound to one’s biases.

There are, in fact, very few animals that have been observed to practise monogamy, at least in the sense of a lifelong, exclusive sexual partnership. This doesn’t stop some researchers from pouncing on fleeting examples of pair-bonding in the wild and proclaiming that monogamy is ‘natural’. At the risk of succumbing to the naturalistic fallacy, though, there is plenty of evidence - not just from prehistory, but from contemporary human communities - that sexual monogamy just isn’t as natural for humans as we’d like to think in modern Western civilisation. We espouse the ideals of sexual exclusivity, but very, very few people live up to them. In present-day foraging societies, everything is shared amongst the community, including sexual relations. Throughout the world, there are cultures whose concept of marriage is far from the exclusive, lifelong commitment enshrined in the laws of Western nations. And even here in the West, there is a grassroots movement in favour of polyamory - what is often called, by those who practise it, ethical nonmonogamy. Personally, I don’t see these things as lessening the value of sexual intimacy between people, but as broadening its scope - enlarging the circle of those accepted as intimate friends. It isn’t, after all, obvious that sexual love can only be given to one other person - friendship and parental love, for example, may be shared without being diminished. Why is sexual love the one area in which our culture doggedly insists upon exclusivity?

 

[Warrenton]

There’s plenty of contemporary, historical and prehistoric anthropological evidence to suggest that what is and was in fact natural for humans, prior to the advent of agriculture, settled living and extensive personal property, is multiple sexual partners and communal raising of children.

I had to chuckle when I read this!

You can walk the length and breadth of any Catholic country of your choosing and never be told that sexuality is unnatural.

I was particularly amused by the suggestion that this was also the case “prior to the advent of agriculture” (whenever that was). Coming from Australia, do you imagine that humans invented monogamy by observing sheep? Or was it the other way round?

Some communities even believe that a child results from an accumulation in the woman’s womb of the semen of several men - consequently, the best that a mother-to-be can do for her child is to couple with all of those men in whom she sees qualities that will give her progeny the best chance in life

.

Well, this just goes to show the gulf between belief and reality; always a dear topic to the old Catholic mind.

Interestingly, we’ve been trying to re-apply this notion of late in the Estados Unidos. Strangely, the result seems to be the kids are getting the worst attributes of the multiple men partners. Evidently, the rise of agriculture has spoilt whatever magic used to take place…

There is also little doubt that communities in which sexual bonds are communal experience less aggression and internal conflict than communities based upon monogamous unions.

Like in Saudi Arabia? I always suspected the old Mormons were on to something.

Biologically speaking, sexual intercourse serves to not only pass on one’s genes, but to create and strengthen emotional bonds between partners.

This is an interesting hypothosis. May I ask if the scientists have discerned whether the bonds are of a postitive or a negative nature? If the latter, then at least I will know I have been on the right track all these years.

And what of other animals that reproduce sexually? Are they to be considered participants in God’s creation

Why restrict it to animals? It seems we are leaving out the venerable species, cannabis, which if I recall, reproduces at least semi-sexually?

 

[Joel_PF]

Throughout the world, there are cultures whose concept of marriage is far from the exclusive, lifelong commitment enshrined in the laws of Western nations.

Two points: there were and are many monogamic exclusivist non-Western cultures as well. It is by no means a purely Western phenomenon. In fact, the great majority of the world practices either monogamy or restricted (rule-bound) polygamy, and even then there is usually a wife that is the more important and official one, usually the first.

Sure, there might be some odd tribe out there with wildly different sexual mores; but why should we take the customs of a minority of the most undeveloped human groupings and call that natural for mankind?

In the 20th century in the West there were many experiences of different kinds of marital association. Open-marriages, group marriages, free love communes, etc. How did they turn out?

 

[Warrenton]

One is tempted to ask, if being with one partner broadens the mind and adds to one’s life experience, how much more should this be true of being with several partners?

This was suggestive. I wonder if the reasoning could be applied to alcoholic beverages as well? If one pint broadens the mind, how much more broad with several?

In present-day foraging societies, everything is shared amongst the community, including sexual relations.

Do you mean like welfare recipients?

Throughout the world, there are cultures whose concept of marriage is far from the exclusive, lifelong commitment enshrined in the laws of Western nations

.

I was not aware that lifelong marriage was enshrined in Western laws. Don’t you all have divorce yet in the antipodes? Your lawyers need to get busy!

And even here in the West, there is a grassroots movement in favour of polyamory - what is often called, by those who practise it, ethical nonmonogamy.

That certainly seems to be a cumbersome way of saying “three dissatisfied people instead of two.” There must be a more, well, sexy way of putting it.

Personally, I don’t see these things as lessening the value of sexual intimacy between people, but as broadening its scope - enlarging the circle of those accepted as intimate friends. It isn’t, after all, obvious that sexual love can only be given to one other person - friendship and parental love, for example, may be shared without being diminished.

I find myself in sympathy with this bit. However, the economists (all of whom, judging by the way they typically speak, must be monogamous) will tell us that as supply increases, demand decreases, and hence the price falls. They don’t call it the dismal science for nothing.

Why is sexual love the one area in which our culture doggedly insists upon exclusivity

This hit me like a thunderbolt!

Not meaning to shock anyone (you must recall, this is a Catholic website, so the readers are a pretty earthy lot), but it is with great regret that I say that things north of the equator are worse than deplorable in this regard. I am gratified to learn that they are better in your latitudes, and that the bulwarks of decency have not been breached. I am sorry that Australian immigration laws have been tightened so severely, however. Catholics the world over would love a refuge such as the veritable eden you describe.

But there is one thing I would like to know (sorry if its a little beside the thread): what is it really like living your whole life upside down?

Cheers!

 

[Sair]

Don’t worry, Warrenton - we have our fair share of jaded cynics here in the Antipodes as well. I’m sure you’d feel right at home.