Sex Versus Love

It's interesting to note how we use the words sex and love interchangeably. For example, instead of saying sex, we say making love. What is the difference, if any?

To me, love is total and absolute integration. Love has no space or time limits.

What happens when we make love, at the point of sexual orgasm? Total integration. For those seconds when you have the orgasm, you lose your sense of time, space, even who you are. You disappear. You mold into a totality, into something bigger than yourself. Orgasm is an experience of absolute integration. And during the act, in a loving relationship, you mold and disappear in the arms of the other party.

When we feel sexually attracted to someone, we exchange the word attraction with the word love. We say that we are falling in love, but it might not be love at all, only sexual attraction. In love we seek that sense of integration—that sense of losing ourselves in another person or with another person—of losing ourselves in an absolute totality, for which no description, no matter how poetic, can do justice. It is something that has to be experienced to be understood.

Love, as an (I) experience, distinguishes itself from sex. There are sexual relations which are (P) oriented. These are the sexual relations of teenagers who count how many orgasms they have had in one night. They look at sex as a conquest, how many have they won? There is no (I) in these sexual relations. They are the sexual relations of a bean counter. This is sex. Not love.

There is an (A) component in sex too. Dominance, control. Through sex, a person expresses his, or her dominance over the other person, whether it is a sexual dominance game or the psychopathic act of rape to show dominance through a sexual act.

There's also an (E) component, in which variety is the goal of sexual experience: through engaging with multiple partners, or by seeking taboo sexual experiences (with different species and now even with robots).

None of these variations are love. They are all just sex. The only sexual relation which is love is when it is (I) oriented, when you lose yourself in another person whom you love.

This distinction also identifies a good lover from a bad lover. A good lover, during sexual relations, thinks of his partner’s enjoyment and not just his own. That is a loving relationship of giving, of giving to the other person. When it's mutual, real (I) love is experienced.