Sex and Love – updated 2018
People will often state there is a difference between sex and love. But they don’t often recognize when they ask one be the other. When you are ‘in love’ it’s easy to have the sex so intertwined with the love that you don’t know the difference. But when the ‘in love’ phase settles down and you have to decide to love someone on a daily basis it might be tempting to use the easiest thing available, sex, to be the ‘proof’ of love. You basically ask sex to be love and expect your partner to accept it as such.
But the truth is sex can’t be love. It can, at best, be an expression of love the same way clothing can be an expression of you, but it can’t be you. This is important to help your children understand if you are a parent. It is so easy for teenagers to think the expression of something is the same as the real thing. That is why you hear the cliche line of the teenage boy ‘If you ‘LOVED’ me, you would do this with me.’ They are trying to persuade the girl that they are one and the same.
Sex is a physical act, love is an emotional act. They overlap and they are intertwined, but they are not the same and understanding it ourselves and helping our children understand it helps avoid much heartache.
Drawing and commentary © Marty Coleman
“You mustn’t force sex to do the work of love or love to do the work of sex.” – Mary McCarthy, 1912-1989, American author. Wrote ‘The Group’ which was on the NYT best seller list for 2 years (1963-65)