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The following questions came up during a conversation (are lj-posts considered conversation?) with ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
theazureman. In case anyone else would like to express their opinions on any of them, I'm posting them here.
1. Does a marriage/close partnership-type relationship need some form of regular intimate physical contact, whether sexual or otherwise, to survive?
2. If your significant other rarely, or never, wanted to have sex with you, would this make you to feel that they didn't really care about you anymore?
3. Is there such a thing as love without sex? (Excluding parent-child type love, I suppose... but that gets into the whole issue of what love really is.) Perhaps I should rephrase that. Is there such a thing as romantic love without sex? (which probably depends on what "romantic" really means...)
4. Is a relationship without sex really just a friendship, and not love?
5a. Is it possible to have an enjoyable marriage/relationship where one person wants sex but the other doesn't? (between a given 2 people, either in a monogamous or poly situation)
5b. If both people were to agree that the person who wanted sex could have sexual relations with other people, could the non-sexual relationship between the initial 2 people still survive without diminishing in quality?
5c. Would such sexual relationships with other people feel more satisfying and/or important to the person having them, than their non-sexual relationship with the initial person?
6. All other aspects being equal, is a relationship with sex always better than one without it?
Bah. I feel so stupid sometimes. Some of the answers to these questions seem obvious. But it all depends on... a lot of factors, I suppose.
theazureman. In case anyone else would like to express their opinions on any of them, I'm posting them here.1. Does a marriage/close partnership-type relationship need some form of regular intimate physical contact, whether sexual or otherwise, to survive?
2. If your significant other rarely, or never, wanted to have sex with you, would this make you to feel that they didn't really care about you anymore?
3. Is there such a thing as love without sex? (Excluding parent-child type love, I suppose... but that gets into the whole issue of what love really is.) Perhaps I should rephrase that. Is there such a thing as romantic love without sex? (which probably depends on what "romantic" really means...)
4. Is a relationship without sex really just a friendship, and not love?
5a. Is it possible to have an enjoyable marriage/relationship where one person wants sex but the other doesn't? (between a given 2 people, either in a monogamous or poly situation)
5b. If both people were to agree that the person who wanted sex could have sexual relations with other people, could the non-sexual relationship between the initial 2 people still survive without diminishing in quality?
5c. Would such sexual relationships with other people feel more satisfying and/or important to the person having them, than their non-sexual relationship with the initial person?
6. All other aspects being equal, is a relationship with sex always better than one without it?
Bah. I feel so stupid sometimes. Some of the answers to these questions seem obvious. But it all depends on... a lot of factors, I suppose.
Re: Completely off topic... (part 2)
Date: 2003-07-14 07:25 pm (UTC)From:I agree that we are all have feminine and masculine parts. I don't want to exclude my femininity nor my masculinity. But I consider true "femininity" to be different than those things that culture has often defined as feminine, and it is mostly the latter that I am biased against, as well as assumptions that females (and therefore me) are mostly feminine and that males are mostly masculine.
Because part of intimacy, of desire, of sexuality, is submission (again, not in a BDSM way). It's simply surrendering control of your desire to its object, in the hope that something good will come of it.
Scary. Risky. "Weak," in the sense that it demands the surrendering of power, control. It's feminine, in the most archetypal, yin / water / yielding way, whether a man or a woman is the one doing it (& from my view on this side of the fence, the boys give it up more than the girls).
I haven't had any real-life objects of desire to surrender to... There might be reasons for that beyond just not having come across any. It's something for me to think about.
And I don't think I have a problem with the general idea of submitting or surrendering control, if it is to the right person (that's the difficult part though, which might be the double-bind you speak of). In fact, my fantasies have made it quite clear to me that I yearn to surrender. And as long as I don't think of myself submitting from a female submissive perspective, it doesn't bother me. I usually view myself as non-female (non-male / androgyne / whatever) anyway, so any situation I would get in wouldn't be as a female submissive... But I would also need to feel that my friend/lover didn't view me as a (typical) female. Which is a serious issue in my head, I think. But I am realizing/discovering that there are other genderqueer individuals out there, who hopefully wouldn't necessarily see me as "female", so... there are possibilities even without totally rearranging my mind.
But then there's the perhaps even greater issue of my non-sociability/fear? of people in general, which I would need to get over in order to actually meet anyone, before I could even consider love and surrender. As long as I don't get over that, it does make all my other considerations rather academical in nature.
Yet without me believing that there are possibilities out there for me, there wouldn't be any reason to get over my shyness. So the issues are sort of connected.