Sex and Love

Sex and love are two fundamental aspects of being human. Love has many meanings but is restricted in this entry to romantic, passionate love. Sex refers to the thoughts, desires, emotions, and behaviors associated with sexual expression.

Love and sex; the words fit together naturally. This apparent truth was not always so, and even today relationship researchers do not necessarily agree on how sex and love fit together in people's lives. Love and marriage is another pairing that seems natural. However, for most of human history, marriages were arranged, and romantic love between partners was of minor concern. Today most people seem to link love and sex rather naturally. But questions such as how love and sex are linked and which of the two may be more important have generated much research and discussion, which is the primary focus of this entry.

One conceptual way to think about the link between love and sex, proposed by Arthur and Elaine Aron, is to imagine a continuum. One end of the continuum is labeled love is really sex, meaning that sex is the more important of the two. The other end is labeled sex is really love, meaning that love is more important than sex. People can place various combinations of love and sex at different points on the continuum.

The idea that love is really sex is most congenial to approaches that study the evolution of sex and love. Sexual drive in humans ensures procreation, [Page 1439]necessary for survival of the human species. In addition, theorists have argued that beyond sexual mating and reproduction, emotional bonding between mating pairs of early protohumans helped promote survival of offspring. Such bonding would involve each parent's concerns about the welfare of the other parent as well as of the offspring and would give a selective survival advantage for the offspring, as compared to mating pairs without such an emotional bond. In this way, passionate, romantic love slowly evolved as a part of sexual mating.

Considerable research has explored love and sex at other points on the continuum, where sex is less dominant and the two are more balanced in importance. For example, romantic love has been shown to be one motive for sexual activity, and in turn, sexual desire is intertwined with romantic love. Research has shown that college students clearly subscribe to the view that love and sex are both important and that whereas love may be more important initially in a relationship, sex provides a powerful way in which to express that love. In fact, other research found that people interviewed about their intimate relationships reported that sexual activity was one of their predominant ways of communicating their love to their partner. Indeed, considerable scholarly work has shown that passionate, romantic love and sexual activity are consistently linked together.

This balancing of love and sex is important not only for young people in relationships but also for people throughout the life span. Although sexual intercourse may decline with both the age of the partners and the length of a relationship, some type of physical expression of love typically continues to be present in most partnered relationships.

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