You hear people all the time talking about people (in particular, women) who have a lot, or even a little bit, of casual sex, as being “used up”. A lot of people have this idea in their head that anyone who is able to have casual, meaningless sex is incapable of having truly meaningful sex, because they don’t view it as something significant and emotionally intimate.
(The last guy I called my boyfriend before the wonderful gem I’m with now used to pick fights with me over that all the time. It drove me NUTS because, while he was still willing to have sex with me, he thought it was OK to ask me about my sexual past and then bring it up all the time as a way of making me feel bad about myself and “lucky” that he’s with me at all. Needless to say, that relationship did not last long.)
Anyways, while I can sort of understand the perspective, it’s also long boggled my mind that people think of sex as something that permanently damages a person. It’s not. It’s a perfectly natural human thing to do and any significance attached to it comes not from the act itself, but from the relationship you have with the person you’re doing it with.
Think about it like this: it’s like hugs. Some people are huggy people – they hug everyone. They hug their colleagues. They hug old high school acquaintances who they happen to run into. They hug their kids’ friends. They hug their friends’ spouses. They hug, hug, hug all day long. Most of those hugs are completely meaningless and hold no more emotional significance than a firm handshake. Yet, no one would EVER claim that a person who gives lots of hugs to lots of people is “used up” and incapable of giving a truly meaningful, emotionally intimate hug.
Just because you hug 6 people a day as a way of saying “hello”, doesn’t mean something more when you give a real deep, encompassing hug to your spouse, your best friend or your mother. Even if you hug everyone you meet, when you hug your spouse it means something more. Maybe not every time. Maybe sometimes you hug your spouse just for the sake of it, but sometimes when you hug that person it’s a deeper, more meaningful, highly emotional act.
So why do we pretend sex is so different?? It’s not. Just because I’ve had casual sex with other people in the past, doesn’t mean that I’m incapable of having meaningful sex with my boyfriend now. When I have sex with my boyfriend, sometimes it is just a fun little romp, but a lot of the time it’s a very deep, very meaningful and highly emotional act. I feel close to him. I look him deep in the eyes and bare my soul to him. I feel like two bodies coming together as one. I can feel ALL of these things with my boyfriend, and having had meaningless romps with other people in the past doesn’t change any of that. It doesn’t impact our connection or the meaning or the emotional bond that my boyfriend and I form during sex. The way I feel during sex with my boyfriend is something completely different than anything I’ve ever felt during sex with anyone else. To me, that almost makes it MORE special. If every sexual partner I’d had in the past was someone I was once “in love” with, wouldn’t that make this relationship feel less significant than it is? I don’t know. But just because my history of casual sex makes the sex I feel with my boyfriend feel more meaningful to me, doesn’t mean I’m gonna go around and judge other people who have had “meaningful” sex with 2 or 3 different people and say that their current relationships mean any less.
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