We no longer feel the social pressure to confine sex to
committed relationships. In fact, we’re free to explore our
sexuality with just about anyone we like. Sex is now an
accepted recreational activity. What we often don’t realize,
however, is that even casual, recreational sex still
involves intimacy. We may have overcome our fear and shame
about sex, but many of us still have issues regarding
intimacy. If we experience more intimacy than we can handle,
we will feel threatened; our safety checklist will be
triggered. No matter how “safe” we make sex, sex may not be
safe to us.
When we experience an orgasm, we reveal ourselves more
completely and more honestly than at any other time. We let
our egos die for a moment, and we have the chance to
experience a true connection with another person. Then the
ego comes back into the picture, and we’re hit with the fear
of separation, and all of our old patterns. If we don’t have
enough trust or enough safety, we will feel threatened,
guilty, and generally unsafe. No matter how much society’s
beliefs about sex have evolved in our lifetime, our core
conditioning tells us that there’s no such thing as
no-strings sex. We still equate sex with love, and love with
commitment. And we equate love and commitment with
vulnerability, responsibility, and the fear that our needs
will not be met.
Sex is very easy to come by in today’s society. What most of
us crave, however, is not sex, but intimacy. The challenge
is that the only model most of us have for expressing or
experiencing intimacy is sex. Intimacy requires trust, and
trust takes time. It’s very difficult to experience true
intimacy through casual sex.
The level of intimacy we experience through sex can be
threatening to many of us, particularly if the sex occurs
early in the relationship. Safety is essential in the early
stages of a relationship–even the smallest safety violation
can mark the end of a budding romance. As we get to know our
partners over time, we create a foundation of trust and
familiarity. We can keep minor safety violations in
perspective. This is not the case when we have truly casual
sex with someone.
When we become sexual with a person we’ve just met, even the
smallest safety violation will be enough to stop our getting
to know each other. One of the challenges is that it’s not
usually appropriate or possible to have a Relationship
Definition Talk with a person we’ve known less than six
hours. There is no real relationship to discuss. While we
both may have wanted to pursue a romantic relationship
before we had sex dragon ball anal beads , we often find we’re less interested the
next morning, because we feel unsafe. We experienced too
much intimacy too quickly, and we need to create some
distance, some space, and to put up some walls so that we
can recover. These walls, however, block the emotional and
spiritual connections we experienced that made us want to
get to know each other in the first place. Since we don’t
really know our partner, we wonder if there was ever a
genuine connection between us. We often end up with the
awkward “morning after” where one of us promises to call the
other, and neither of us believes the phone will actually
ring.
Two popular television shows demonstrate our current
approaches to sex without intimacy and intimacy without sex.
