Excerpt From The Relationship Handbook: How to Understand and Improve Every Relationship in Your Life by Kevin B. Burk
We no longer feel the social pressure to confine sex to committed relationships. In fact, we’re complimentary to explore our sexuality with just about anybody we like. Sex is now an accepted recreational activity. What we frequently do not recognize, however, is that even casual, leisure sex still involves intimacy. We might have overcome our worry and pity about sex, but many of us still have concerns regarding intimacy. If we experience more intimacy than we can deal with, we will feel threatened; our safety checklist will be set off. No matter how “safe” we make sex, sex may not be safe to us.
When we experience an orgasm, we expose ourselves better and more truthfully than at any other time. We let our egos crave a minute, and we have the chance to experience a real connection with another person. Then the ego comes back into the picture, and we’re hit with the worry of separation, and all of our old patterns. If we do not have adequate trust or adequate safety, we will feel threatened, guilty, and typically risky. No matter how much society’s beliefs about sex have developed in our life time, our core conditioning tells us that there’s no such thing as no-strings sex. We still correspond sex with love, and love with commitment. And we equate love and commitment with vulnerability, duty, and the worry that our requirements will not be fulfilled.
Sex is extremely simple to come by in today’s society. What most of us long for, however, is not sex, but intimacy. The obstacle is that the only model the majority of us have for revealing or experiencing intimacy is sex. Intimacy requires trust, and trust takes some time. It’s really hard to experience real intimacy through one-night stand.
The level of intimacy we experience through sex can be threatening to much of us, especially if the sex happens early in the relationship. Safety is important in the early stages of a relationship– even the tiniest safety offense can mark completion of a budding romance. As we learn more about our partners over time, we create a foundation of trust and familiarity. We can keep minor safety offenses in viewpoint. This is not the case when we have genuinely one-night stand with someone.
When we end up being sexual with a person we’ve just fulfilled, even the tiniest security offense will suffice to stop our getting to know each other. Among the challenges is that it’s not usually appropriate or possible to have a Relationship Definition Talk with an individual we’ve understood less than 6 hours. There is no genuine relationship to go over. While we both might have wished to pursue a romantic relationship before we made love, we frequently discover we’re less interested the next early morning, because we feel risky. We experienced excessive intimacy too rapidly, and we require to create some range, some area, and to put up some walls so that we can recuperate. These walls, nevertheless, obstruct the psychological and spiritual connections we experienced that made us wish to be familiar with each other in the first place. Because we do not truly know our partner, we wonder if there was ever a genuine connection between us. We typically end up with the awkward “morning after” where one of us guarantees to call the other, and neither people think the phone will actually sound.
2 popular television shows demonstrate our current techniques to sex without intimacy and intimacy without sex.
SEX WITHOUT INTIMACY: “SEX AND THE CITY”
HBO’s television series, “Sex and the City,” follows the likes and lives of four single women residing in New York City. The show has become a cultural touchstone due to the fact that it checks out sexuality from the woman’s perspective in frank, funny, and honest ways. The four main characters are wise, independent, decent, professional, attractive women. They each have a various method to sex, love and relationships, and between them they cover a broad spectrum of expectations and attitudes towards sex. The primary characters have become a lot a part of popular culture that numerous women use them as reference indicate describe their own patterns and feelings about sex. So do numerous gay guys.
For those of you not familiar with the series (and even for those people who are), I’ll supply a quick description of each of the primary characters to show their attitudes towards sex.
SAMANTHA
Samantha Jones takes the most stereotypically male approach to sex. She truly takes pleasure in sex, and for the most part, she’s content to have a healthy sex life with numerous partners. She has no guilt or embarassment connected with sex. Sex for Samantha does not need any sort of emotional dedication, nor does it indicate any type of relationship. She takes pleasure in sex for the sake of sex. Samantha is mainly self-sufficient, and has the ability to meet her validation requires through her close relationships. Although Samantha had three significant romantic relationships throughout the run of the show (including a lesbian relationship), she has actually never ever set out to find a relationship.
CARRIE
Carrie Bradshaw has a healthy appreciation for one-night stand as well. Carrie, nevertheless, is trying to find something more than simply sex– she is trying to find a relationship. While Carrie is less likely than Samantha to just hook up with an appealing stranger, she does not need to seem like she’s in a dedicated relationship prior to she will have sex. Sex belongs of casual dating for Carrie.
MIRANDA
Miranda Hobbes is more thinking about finding a romantic relationship than she confesses. For Miranda, sex is more than just sex– it suggests some type of commitment, and requires some kind of psychological connection. The few times Miranda has enjoyed strictly casual sex, she’s been disappointed. Miranda requires to feel that sex is a part of a relationship– and she has, in the past, utilized sex as a way to try to start a relationship. Once she makes love with somebody, she immediately begins to see him as a prospective long-term romantic partner.
CHARLOTTE
If Samantha is the most stereotypically manly in her method to sex, Charlotte York is the most stereotypically feminine. Although she does not like to confess, Charlotte is uneasy with the idea of casual sex. For Charlotte, sex ought to just be part of a committed relationship. Charlotte sets the most boundaries with respect to her sex life– how far she’s prepared to go sexually has a direct relation to how strong a commitment she gets from her partner. Of course this did backfire on her– she made her first husband wait until they were married prior to she would make love with him, and after that discovered that he couldn’t.
INTIMACY WITHOUT SEX: “WILL & GRACE”
“Sex and the City” generally concentrates on sex. If we want to discover a design for an intimate relationship, we need to aim to another popular television program: “Will & Grace.” Will Truman and Grace Adler share a remarkable amount of love, trust and intimacy in their relationship. They confirm and support each other, and they share the sort of psychological connections that most of us truly crave in our lives. Paradoxically, the only factor that they handle to do this is that sex can never be a part of their relationship, since Will is gay. Ladies and gay males have actually always shared an unique bond. In lots of methods, relationships between females and gay men are the only ones where we can experience real intimacy without including sex.
However sex and intimacy are still connected. The more intimate we become with someone, the more important it will be that we are able to reveal that intimacy through sex. Our goal in our romantic relationships is to feel liked. Eventually, love includes a balance of sex and intimacy. But for a number of us, the choice appears to be either having intimacy without sex, or sex without intimacy. We’ve all but forgotten how to combine the two.