As I commented in last week’s Love Bytes blog [18 Reasons People Have Sex (Part 1)], each semester I ask the students in my Psychology of Marriage and Family class to come up with a variety of reasons why people have sex. Each semester we end up generating about 18 reasons. In last week’s blog we got halfway through the list. Here are the remaining nine.
- Status [some people keep a running record of who, when, where, and (sometimes) just how many]
- Anger [when you have sex out of anger, you may screw your partner but you probably aren’t making love to them]
- Health [did you know that sex serves to: (a) strengthen bones, (b) improve muscle tone, (c) increase good cholesterol, (d) enhance cognitive capacity, (e) vitalize the immune system, (f) facilitate prostate health in men, and (g) relieve headaches? (Yes, sex aids in the relief of headache pain --- but I would not recommend that you suggest this as a treatment when your partner says, “Not tonight, dear, I have a headache.”)]
- Relief / Solace [this is different from sexual release; this is using sex in an effort to gain solace in the face of life’s emotional pain and psychological struggles --- essentially it is using sex to cope with life (this, by the way, is a key symptom of sexual addiction)]
- Unity [sex can be a way to become more unified with your partner --- “two Me’s becoming a We”]
- To Get Someone To Love You [this one can take the form of “trying to win someone over in the first place” or “not wanting to lose the person” or “trying to keep your partner from straying”]
- Power [some men will use force to get sex; some women will wield sex as a way to let you know “whether you’re man enough;” some people will use sex as “a power chip to get a special favor;” some people will withhold sex “until you comply with their wishes”]
- Revenge [what better way to get even with a partner who has hurt you?]
- “The Rush” / “To Feel Alive” [sex can trigger a bio-chemical love cocktail in the brain --- dopamine, phenylethylamine, endorphins, norepinephrine --- that is nothing short of a rush]
[Let me quickly add here that I suspect there may be other reasons why some readers have had sex. For example, a study published in 2007 (that is quickly becoming “a classic”) reported 237 reasons why people have sex, including wanting to gain access to that person’s friend, out of rebellion, to win a bet, and to give someone a sexually transmitted disease.]
I realize that some people are inclined to think that sex for humans is not a whole lot different than sex for other mammals. And personally, I am intrigued by animal examples in which sex seems to be more than a matter of mere copulation.
For example, prairie voles (voles are rodents resembling field mice) appear to form monogamous relationships. After mating, prairie voles bond for life, nesting together, grooming each other for hours, protecting and nurturing their young together, and avoiding other potential mates (for life!). And I will never forget the goose that spent two days in front of the hotel I was staying at “mourning the death of its partner” that had been run over by a car.
But to suggest that any such examples come close to matching the complexity of sex for Homo sapiens would be an error in judgment, and it is exactly this type of error that has resulted in a tremendous amount of pain, heartache, and formation of scar tissue on the heart.
In next week’s Love Bytes blog we will take a look at some of this pain and heartache (although I suspect there are lots of readers who already have scar-tissue-on-the-heart stories of their own to tell).
