Helen Fisher, “Anatomy of Love and The Sex Contract.,” is required reading in many graduate programs for future Marriage and Family Therapists. Helen Fisher is a Biological Anthropologist who has studied the human brain in love. Some of her findings indicate that we are genetically predisposed in certain ways depending upon whether we were born female or male, and that chemistry does, in fact, play an important role. Not the chemistry we typically think of when it comes to attraction and lust, but the chemistry that results in mixing the bodily fluids of two individuals. Helen Fischer also happens to be the person behind match.com’s spin-off site: “Chemistry.com.” Though if you’ve ever tried that site, you’re probably thinking — yeah, right – that’s got to be about as unscientific as it gets, they might as well match you with a being from another planet, or a rare animal species from a distant land. But that’s for another discussion. Let’s just stick to the basics of sex and love for now.
Can You Have Sex Without Love?
Wouldn’t that depend upon what a person thought? Someone whose mother raised her to think that kissing boys creates babies and then you have to drop out of school and horrible, horrible things will then happen to you because you’ll be poor, living out on the street somewhere — would no doubt create one set of thoughts on the matter. While someone who was raised to think that the more offspring s/he spawned, the better chance of reaching heaven, nirvanah, fulfillment of a soul contract, or at the very least a multi-generational family business — would have a different set of thoughts.
We all have an amazing ability to be able to think anything we want to think and then think about if we want to believe it or not! Yet few people realize that. Most of us have fallen prey to some insidious belief we weren’t even aware of, it was so much a part of our fiber. Like a fish swimming in water; do you think they realize it? No, they just swim around like you and I walk — we’re not thinking about walking through space, we just do what we do naturally. Well, that’s what our ability to think is like; it’s what comprises our experience of life. Without the ability to think, and to be conscious of what we think, we would not experience life — that’s a fact; albeit a spiritual fact.
So, then we grow up and have this worldview of:
- How to behave in life
- What to expect in life
- What to value
- How to show what we value
But we don’t realize we have a worldview that is unique, but also borrowed.
The feeling of love is healthy and the only thing that gets in the way of that is our own thoughts!
- We’re born into a particular sex
- We’re given a last name
- We’re given a family, a tribe, a religion
- We’re taught to believe certain things from parents, relatives, teachers, coaches and clergy.
We garner opinions and beliefs from magazines, books and comic strips that we’ve read along the way.
We are each the sum total of how we think about things and ourselves amongst those things. It’s no one’s fault, it just is. We can’t help it…. But, we can understand that people think differently and so not take it personally. We can understand that we can decide if we agree with the things we’re told or taught. We have free will, whether we realize it or not. Therein lies our health, which provides the answer to the second part of the original question:
Is It Healthy To Have Sex Without Love?
Can you see, that it is if you think it is? Health is not a judgement, it is an experience. Since all of our experience comes to us via thought and consciousness, and we think what we think – we will get the experience of whatever we think. I know this seems convoluted, but if you’ve been following along up until now, you will no doubt see what I mean. Consciousness makes all of our thoughts seem real, or come to life.
What about the other person’s feelings, you might be asking yourself? Don’t they count? Yes, they count if you think they count, and only then. It’s your thoughts and so it’s your experience.
So, it may be perfectly healthy and acceptable amongst many cultures, domestically and internationally — but:
Is It Optimal?
Most people would say that the experience of sex with love is on a whole different plane than sex without love. The former seems to be connected to a spiritual side of life, that not everyone has been exposed to. I would say — lucky for you if you have and then you wouldn’t want to settle for something less.
Sex without love seems to be connected to the physical world alone, which is only a small part of what is available to us. Sex with love is experienced at the core of people, where their innate health resides – apart from the personal thoughts, insecurities and beliefs, we are all so capable of, which will only cover up, but can never obliterate our healthy core. Like the sun behind clouds – it’s always there, it just gets covered up at times; but it’s only temporary.
Now here’s an interesting point – when a person is operating from their core of health, we call it: “innate health,” before the contamination of egocentric thoughts, we automatically take the other person’s feelings into consideration; it’s the natural side effect of a healthy thought process. This is where we access an intelligence called wisdom that lets us know if we are being influenced by some unhealthy thinking or responding to life in a way that is healthy for us. People frequently say; “I knew I shouldn’t have had sex with that person” …We always know what to do. We just have to realize we have this wisdom and listen to it.
The hope is that those who have experienced sex with love will provide examples for those who have not. It seems to me that the more people in touch with their spiritual essence, the better the world will be.
