Definitely sexless love. Don’t get me wrong, sex is awesome and all, but if I had to choose one over the other, I would choose love any day. I guess I’m just a hopeless romantic like that. My boyfriend would say the same thing so we could just have our sexless loving relationship and be cool with that.
But I’ll never have to choose something like that so I’ll just keep my sexy-lovey relationship, thank you very much!
I’ve had loveless sex–within my marriage, no less. To hell with that. I suppose it could work if you’re only interesting in er, plumbing–pressure and release and all that.
Then again, sexless love doesn’t appeal at present (there was a time when this would have been perfect for me).
Why the black and white choice? couldn’t loveless sex become more intimate over time (one would hope) and the sexless love find ways to physical satisfaction.
Call me a spoiled bitch, but I want both!
To me, there’s nothing more fulfilling than being in love. I like having that best friend who I can talk to and confide in. I crave emotional security. Basically I see it as choosing between having 20 minutes (or a couple hours, what have you) of fulfillment a day, or having 24 hours of fulfillment a day.
Love is the one thing that pulls my life together, that gives me comfort. I feel truly blessed to have my husband and can’t imagine life without him. I would choose living the rest of my life with him without sex, than to lose him to be with someone I won’t be attracted to for very long anyways.
YMMV of course.
But what would it do to you to feel that way about him and have it not be recipocated? No sex becasue of an accident or something, OK, but if he were just like “look, I love you as much as ever but I don’t ever want to have sex again”, could you stand that? I couldn’t. I couldn’t take the rejection, I couldn’t take the constant unfufilled yearning. It would drive me away, even if I didn’t want it to.
On the other hand, before my husband came along, I was emotionally pretty self-sufficient. I suspect that I could learn to be again, and it would be easier if I was getting laid on a regular basis. I would never be HAPPY with loveless sex, but I think I could reach a point of fuctional misery/near contentment. Sexless love, however, would drive me crazy with the rejection and the wanting.
Right now, I would be happy with either.
Oh, all right . If I HAVE to choose, I woud rather have sexless love. Just as long as we can cuddle and snuggle, and genuinely love one another.
If I were with someone who wasn’t physically able to have sex, I hope that I would be okay with it. There are many things available on the market to make up for the lack of sex. However, part of the wonder that is having sex with a person rather than a battery operated device is the closeness that goes along with it. It isn’t just having an orgasm, it is about letting someone else inside of me (or I guess for men it would be about being inside someone else) and sharing the experience together. I am going to be selfish and say that I don’t want one or the other, I want both love and sex.
As much of a nympho as I am, I would choose sexless love in the end.
I will not go for the obvious joke.
Freud would have *adored * me.
Love not being reciprocated is not the question. You cannot have love without both giving to the relationship. One-sided love is obsession . . . not love.
If my husband told me he had no interest in sex, I’d be okay with it as long as he still showed me he loved me. If there was an accident, I’d still be okay with it. I guess I’ve just reached a point where I don’t see sex as the only thing that keeps us together. I also have a hormone deficiency that has caused my sex drive to go into a major slump, so I’m used to not having rabbit-sex every day.
We’re best friends, buddies, family. We spend enormous amounts of time together (when our schedules permit), and we love every minute of it. After our wedding, we had a falling out with his family and our closest friends. We were virtually alone for 6 months and we learned how to depend on each other for everything. Seriously, if everyone on earth dropped dead, it would not even compare to how horrible I would feel if I lost him. When I think about not being with him (divorce, death, etc.), I don’t think about missing sex; I think about missing the one person who knows me better than anyone else, the person I’m happy to see every single day, the person I love to look at and hear his voice.
Love is beyond sex, way beyond. I understand it has an intimacy factor, but how intimate can you be with someone you’re just using for physical enjoyment alone? Before I started dating him, I had my choice of men. But it was the lonliest I’ve ever been. It’s so sad (for me) to come home to an empty house, have no one to talk to, no one to share dreams with, no one to help you through this nasty world with.
A lot of people don’t experience true love and are miserable for it. Some people think what they have is love and realize it’s not. Then there are us lucky ones, who will go to their graves knowing they have felt the greatest feeling on earth, a far greater feeling than sex: love.
Sexless love.
Efficient *and * convenient!
I guess it’s just that I express love through sexual affection: I’m not just talking about coitus, I am talking about stoping for a steamy kiss as we pass in the hall, casual groping as we watch TV on the couch, double entendres in our conversations,naughty games of footsy that aren’t going anywhere because we are too tired. All these things are part of our sex life. If he pulled back from all that, I would be devastated. I would feel like I’d been kicked in the face. And that would would be reopened every day. I’ve been lonely. I know how to handle lonely. This would be worse than that.
Oh, I agree that loveless sex would not provide intimacy, but it wouldn’t be as bad as craving intimacy from a specific person and having that forever rejected. Day after day after month after year of that would drive me mad.
For me, part of loving my partner is lusting after him, and it has nothing to do with physical attractivness: neither of us are attractive people in the physical sense. I react to his wit, his kindness, his humor, his intelligence with lust. If I couldn’t express that lust, if all the sex stuff were gone, I’d have this huge aching pile of emotion with nowhere to put it, no one to share it with. I’d rather just not feel anything much at all–a banal, dreary existance of loveless sex–than suffer through that.
WOW!
Well, first off I agreed with you wholeheartedly, then waivered a little having read others points of view - but after this last post Im definitely WITH you all the way!
In public and in a stranger to stranger situation, I can appear a bit aloof and perhaps even a little stand offish, but when Im with someone I am attracted to - be it their wit, their humour, their kindness (all of which I TOO consider IMMENSELY attractive) I ALSO react with lust! I WANT to be near to someone who attracts me and who makes me feel warm inside - not to be able to express that, not to be able to reach out and touch his face, stroke his cheek, smooch up and kiss him, WRAP my arms around him? hurts more than I could say. Youre right - more than lonely…much more…
That’s where we’re different. My relationship with my husband doesn’t depend that much on sex, not that it’s a bad thing between you and yours, just ours is in a different stage. We have our moments, but we don’t spend an immense amount of time playing like you two do. And there’s nothing wrong with either, it’s just how it works.
Just because you don’t have sex, doesn’t mean you don’t find other ways to connect with your SO. I could go months without sex and not feel the slightest bit like my husband didn’t love me or wasn’t attracted to me.
But I think you and I have different interpretations of the question at hand. As you’ve stated, you express love through sex. But the questions asks love OR sex - not both. Could you have sex with your husband knowing he didn’t care if you dropped dead tomorrow? Or knowing he had no feelings for you whatsoever and never would? I’m sure that would crush you more than not having sex. Unrequited love hurts, no love at all is a business deal.
Fair point, but when, earlier, you said “Love is beyond sex, way beyond”, which implies that a relationship where affection is expressed in a sexual context is somehow less profound or real than a relationship that is less sexual. I don’t think the lust I feel for my husband in any way suggests that my love for him is anything other than strong and deep and true. For me, and the way my brain seems to work, it’s a sign that it’s strong and deep and true: love and lust are intertwined for me.
I’d leave if I couldn’t have BOTH love and sex–I’d rather be lonely than only have one or the other, and I do sort of think loveless sex would make the lonliness more bearable, provided no one was feeling love.
Well, I have to say that sexless love is, well, preferable to loveless sex. Having said that, I recognize that I have neither.
I need a divorce.
Well, I’m currently in a long distance relationship which I suppose technically comes under the heading of sexless love. Although it depends on how you define “sexless” since we do sleep cuddled together, and generally at some point before we fall asleep there is a certain amount of physical intimacy. Neither of us has a particularly high sex drive which, combined with some personal issues resulting from her marriage, has made sex a low-priority item.
In fact, we recently had a talk about this issue, and both agreed that even if this does lead to a long-term/permanent relationship (which is highly likely, considering how we feel about each other) we’d both be perfectly satisfied with our current level of intimacy.
Thanks for the link. Although I’m not asexual myself, that’s some fascinating stuff.
ZJ
Love? Don’t believe in love…I’ll take the sex, thankyewverymuch.
See, the trick here is that while loveless sex is possible, sexless love isn’t, really. If two people with sex drives of similar levels love each other, there will be sex to whatever extent their physical selves allow. I’ve had lovers who weren’t physically capable of erections or coitus and we had very successful sex we were both happy with. It just took a little accomodation and a rather flexible definition of “sex.” The only physical impairment which would prevent me from having sex with my SO would be complete, 100% paralysis on both our parts, and even then we’d probably figure SOMETHING out! Telepathic mutual masturbation or something…
When a couple is separated by distance for months or years, and they talk dirty on the phone, does that count as sex? How about jerking off together without actually touching, does that count as sex? Frottage, does that count? If physical contact of any kind is allowed in the “sexless love” category, who exactly determines where the cuddling ends and sex begins? I’ve had orgasms while thinking about someone–did it count as having sex for the person I was fantasizing about when I came, or was I the only one actually engaged in sex? What if he was fantasizing about me at the same time and messed his pants–did we have sex? Since I don’t think it’s possible to love someone and live with them without any physical contact at all, then it seems ruling out “sex” to define the parameters of this discussion relies pretty heavily on a narrow and specific definition of what constitutes “having sex” as opposed to “all the other touching that’s going on all the time in this supposedly ‘sexless’ relationship.” Didn’t Spider Robinson write a passage once in which a character described his marriage as one long act of lovemaking during which there were passages of time when they weren’t actually touching?
So yeah, gimme that “sexless love” category and don’t effin’ ask what those funny noises are when the doors close… We’re CUDDLING!