Q: My girlfriend and I have always had what I’ve considered a healthy (albeit “plain”) sexual dynamic—we fuck regularly, make each other come in various ways, and are generally comfortable talking about what we want and need from each other. Recently, she mentioned that she was feeling insecure that I didn’t initiate sex as often as I had earlier in our relationship. Her libido has always been higher than mine, and four years into dating I’ve gotten used to mostly having sex when she wants to. I felt guilty and embarrassed and ultimately reassured her that it had nothing to do with her or how I felt and that I’d be more mindful to restore the balance moving forward. I compared having sex to going on a hike—something I love to do (especially with someone I love) but not something I think about often (especially when I hike all the time).  

At the time I thought this was a harmless comparison. We both knew she “liked to hike” more than I do. I understood how it might feel to always be the one suggesting hiking and agreed that I could do more to put her mind at ease. For her, however, my silly analogy was proof of a much deeper sexual incompatibility—it was not just our libidos that mismatched, but the way we viewed sex itself. As we dug deeper, I worried she was right. Sex for me really isn’t all that different from other activities I enjoy. I can imagine being partnered with someone who isn’t able or doesn’t want to have sex, exactly the way I can imagine being partnered with someone who can’t or won’t go hiking. For her though, sex is an essential part of what separates a romantic relationship from a platonic one. I get where she’s coming from, but I’m also hurt that my deeply felt desires (sexual, romantic, platonic) are somehow “not enough” for her. Are we doomed? Am I doomed? It wasn’t until I started discussing with other partnered friends that I learned how atypical my view of sex seems to be.
 
Q: I hate the use that people make of the word “fun” when it comes to sex and relationship models. I can love or like or tolerate the vast majority of arrangements; but even after a couple of years of casual and semi-casual dating, the idea that one is looking for “fun” through sex and encounters remains completely alien to me. 

Why do I find the concept of “fun” so problematic? I think it’s because, for me, when it’s good, sex brings you deep inside yourself, and at the same time deep outside yourself, but in no case can I consider it a distraction. In my primary language, which is Italian, “fun” is called “divertimento,” the etymology coming from di-vertere, to change path from something, like a diversion. For me sex is the opposite of that, and it feels offensive to consider it something that distracts us from ourselves and from the other person. 

In which way do you think the word “fun” is used in dating? Do you think mine is just an ick, and I should dismiss it as such? Or do I have an inability to experience a lighter version of sex that comes without some level of attachment? 

A: At first, I tried writing about these two questions separately, but as I came to the end of the column, it seemed clear to me that in some way they invert and answer each other. To the second writer, the fun-hater, might not the question from the first, the hiking-lover, describe a version of the more casual perspective on sex that they find so alienating? And for the hiking-lover, might not the question from the fun-hater describe the opposite of their form of desire, fleshing out what they perceive as their girlfriends’ dismissal? Both questions, at their core, are about how we define sex, and the trouble we encounter when other people don’t share our definition. What is sex? And what are we doing when we have sex with someone for whom sex isn’t what it is for us? 

Part of the way we discover what we like in sex is by encountering what doesn’t make sense to us. One of my childhood friends discovered that she was gay in the most archetypal way: the first time she slept with her boyfriend, the absolute clarity that this was not what she wanted from sex illuminated for her what she in fact did want but had never felt able to consider. It’s sometimes more tolerable to experience a moment of repulsion and differentiation than an unexpected and intense desire. Many of us learn to identify what we like by first articulating what we don’t like.  

My friend Piper, for example, sometimes attends sex parties with her husband. They have a happy, vanilla sex life together, but their kinks are incompatible, and they both enjoy entering an environment where they can entertain their kink interests with other people. When we talked about her experience at these parties, Piper told me though she often had fun, she sometimes encountered a lot of “sex nerds,” as she called them: people for whom sex was a personal hobby, who delighted in the various tools and scenarios they could acquire and invent, the particular qualities of their ropes, for example. For her, this was innately unerotic; it was as if what was being enjoyed was a kind of engineering, the testing of the materials. In this environment Piper realized that in order to enjoy her kinks, she wanted the necessary tools or situational mechanisms to quietly serve their purpose and become almost superfluous, much the same way that our general awareness of our environment often fades when we’re in the midst of sex. (Of course, what registered to Piper as an emphasis on engineering rather than eroticism resonates to others in the community as a form of exacting care.) 

When Piper described to me the carefully planned experiments of the rope engineers, I said aloud, unthinkingly: “That isn’t sex.” A moment later I was ashamed. After all, it’s axiomatic for social progressives that sex encompasses many different activities and orientations, even those that seem incomprehensible to those who don’t partake in them. I don’t need to describe why it’s useless or even dangerous to go around pointing at other people’s sex lives and dismissing them as not-sex. Yet it does us no good to let that get in the way of acknowledging that in our own bedrooms we do immediately recognize what sex is for us—and what isn’t. These questions reminded me of a recent experience of my own, with a woman I was dating last year. After we’d been seeing each other for a few months, I mused to her that I’d noticed she usually only wanted sex spontaneously: desire came over her suddenly, at moments I couldn’t predict. “Of course it’s spontaneous,” she replied. “Sometimes I just suddenly feel like it, the same way I suddenly feel hungry or tired.” I was surprised; I had never conceived of the sex I was having in this way. Personally, I thought of sex as a form of consistent communication, a way I expected us to relate almost every time we saw each other. I knew in theory that arousal can be private and spontaneous, unprovoked by a direct desire or even a fantasy, but I suppose, because I seldom felt it that way, I forgot about this possibility. She was also surprised. For her, this spontaneous desire was not only normal but presumably universal, just the way that the hiking-lover had once presumed that other people enjoyed sex in the same way they enjoyed hiking or other shared pastimes. I felt so destabilized when she described this orientation toward sex that I had trouble making sense of my own reaction. Though I knew it was unfair, part of me protested her version of sex as impersonal; by instinct I worried that what she proposed wasn’t really sex for me.  

To me, this is the essential conflict at the heart of your relationship, hiking-lover. You and your girlfriend have two very different conceptions of what sex means. You’re a hobbyist: sex is one of many forms through which you and your girlfriend can establish intimacy and enjoy each other’s company. Although you might not want to talk explicitly about sex, you feel that it’s a part of the same language of the rest of the relationship: you could happily go without it if some other shared activity took its place. Your girlfriend, by contrast, is a mystic. She feels that sex is a singular element, foundational to romance, which is degraded by the comparison to a more general activity. For people like her, sex is not a shared activity like any other but an exclusive language. She feels sex has a specific and sacred quality, innately, without reference to convention or religion.  

We see this division about whether sex is singular or one form among many surface in myriad ways: it’s the source of your girlfriend’s despair when you suggest that sex isn’t so different from a hike; it’s the source of the frustration of the fun-hater, for whom sex is too serious to ever be called “fun”; it’s the source of Piper’s distaste for the rope engineers. Most of us, I think, don’t know exactly where we fall on the hobbyist-mystic spectrum. Mainstream cultural hypocrisy is at its finest with regard to sex, where we are encouraged constantly to consider sex as sacred when it comes to love, merely liberating outside of love, and something toward which we should have a petite and manageable appetite, despite being inundated with overtly sexual material and expected to find it constantly appealing. To discover and describe, without great shame and confusion, in what way sex is important to us seems nearly impossible. I don’t think you’re alone in having discovered it only in the midst of an argument with a person whose personal definition baffles you. When we’re faced with this conundrum we often find ourselves loyal, if we really investigate, toward either the idea that sex can be interacted with like other activities, that we can impose rules and languages onto it, or that sex is either immune to or polluted by the imposition of external tools, a zone of exception.  

A second, closely related, sexual dichotomy is no less complicated: I might describe it as sex as centered on physical pleasure versus sex as centered on emotional connection. We are usually looking for both, or at least cognizant, as we pursue either pleasure or intimacy, that we are likely to encounter the other as well. Yet it still seems that we frequently come into conflict over which element seems more important, which element sex seems primarily about. In the relationship I was in last year, sex seemed, to my girlfriend, to be more about physical pleasure—or at the very least more governed by her physical impulses—while for me, sex was more about relating to each other—at the very least my desire was produced by wanting to connect rather than wanting to get off. It seems to me as if the fun-hater is dealing with this problem too. In their condemnation of the concept of sex as “fun,” they’re in some way refusing the version of sex which is primarily about pleasure rather than intimacy.  

Of course, it’s impossible to cleanly divide pleasure and intimacy: our physiological desires are inextricable from the emotional dynamics at play. And though we often know what we mean when we say we want to fall in love or to have a serious relationship, we often don’t really know what we mean when we say we’re looking for “fun.” To the writer of the second letter, fun is mere “diversion,” but I think this is a bit ungenerous. Fun is important; we need a sense of freedom and adventure, we need lightness, we need dynamism. (Doesn’t that description remind you a little of a hike?) Certainly, we can sometimes get that from sex, especially sex with new partners. But in our sexual culture, in general, by saying we’re looking for “fun” in dating we don’t usually mean “fun” like going on a hike; we often use it to stand in for “intimacy with no long-term implications.” Using the word “fun” is a means by which we diffuse the heaviness of need and vulnerable desire—and by which we indicate to others that we don’t wish to receive that heaviness. I imagine from your letter, fun-hater, that you have no trouble expressing need, or desire, or responding to emotional demands. You needn’t allow more “fun” into your sex life; merely take note that when someone describes their motivation for sex as “fun,” it may indicate a neutral incompatibility with your own drive for a mutually deep and transformative experience. 

You may be on to something, fun-hater, when you separate pastimes into which we find ourselves veering lightly, out of habit or encouragement, from the kinds of pursuits for which we ache. When the hiking-lover describes sex as “like a hike,” they clarify that this means “something I love to do (especially with someone I love) but not something I think about often.” To what extent is sex about desire? Is that part of its innate definition? However this writer might feel about sex as it takes place, the not-thinking-about-it-often implies a low level of desire. When sex comes around, they enjoy it, perhaps the experience itself even resonates as more than simply “fun”; but it isn’t something they anticipate, wish for, reach for. This is plenty common, especially in long-term relationships. We often call it responsive desire. Yet for their girlfriend, this view of sex makes little sense. For some of us—presumably for her—powerful desire is the foundation of sex. Perhaps in a long-term relationship, powerful desire is not the foundation of sex every time, but the overall foundation of the relationship is the sense of a mutually circulating desire that remains alive and surfaces in waves. We can have sex without all-consuming desire, but it may also lack the essential resonance that allows sex to thrill, to bring us, as the fun-hater puts it, both in- and outside ourselves. The satisfaction of real desire has a level of impact that few of us would describe as “fun”; this word is too small. Even when we sleep with people with whom we’re not in love, or in any kind of committed relationship, if the desire is mutual and powerful, the sex (as a thousand rom-coms can attest) feels climactic. Everyone feels desire for all sorts of things beyond sex—other varieties of closeness, or personal ambitions—and almost always, when that kind of desire is gratified, it’s accompanied by a sense of depth and transformation. Real desire fundamentally distinguishes what is “fun”—freeing, adventurous, passing—from what is deeper. 

An advantage that the fun-hater has over most of us is an active awareness of the multitude of ways people conceive of and relate to sex—even if the prevailing mode offends them. Some of us are plagued with the terror that we are alone and doomed in our sexualities from the moment we uncover them, as I was, and some of us careen along comfortably until someone else’s testimony gives us cause to worry, as the hiking-lover did. Nothing is quite so alienating as imagining that we are outside the realm of what is normal, and, even worse, that the person we love doesn’t feel about sex the way we do. How can we tolerate realizing that what we had imagined was shared we had in fact been experiencing alone?  

Personally, I have a polarizing theory about sexual compatibility, which not everyone wants to hear. This divide between the hobbyists and the mystics is also a divide, I think, between those for whom sexual compatibility is one among many hoped-for synergies in a relationship and those for whom it’s essential. We are meant to accept that we will never have total compatibility with the people we love, and to rely on respect, generosity and communication to bridge those spaces where we differ. That’s all well and good in most respects. But for those I’m calling mystics, sex can’t be an area of compromise, of bargaining, of hoping and attempting. It’s very unfashionable to admit it, but there do exist mysteries that are useless to discuss. If I were to give one prescriptive piece of advice—which I myself have often needed—I would encourage you to sleep with people for whom sex is as important as it is to you. You do, as they say, know it when you see it. 

Photo credit: Kate Williams (Flickr / CC BY)