Difficult Conversations About Sex And Love | Yoga 15

A few months ago, I read Alain de Botton’s book, How To Think More About Sex, and one line stuck with me. He says, “Sex refuses to sit neatly on top of love, as it should.”

Several examples came to mind easily. We can imagine loving one person and wanting to have sex with someone else. Or wanting to have sex with somebody we don’t even like, let alone love. We may no longer want to have sex with the person we love. And perhaps most crushingly, the person we love stops wanting to have sex with us.

Looking back, I think that my naive belief in a more straightforward relationship between love and sex was the cause of a lot of unnecessary suffering. During my marriage (and 13-year relationship), on one side or the other, I experienced all the mismatches I listed above. Yet I was so ashamed of my failure to keep love and sex stacked up nice and neat that I never told a soul. I looked around at my friends and assumed that they had it all figured out.

In recent years, as I started to open up about this unhappy time, I discovered that we were all messed up in some way or another. Almost everyone had a story about infidelity or the desire for sex outside the marriage. Time and again I heard that sex was either withdrawn or no longer desired. Friends were left for partners who were 10 years younger, 10 years…