Sex? Sex.

I was talking to my roommate Hunter about sex the other day.  He said “Sex, too early, will ruin a relationship with someone.”  It sounded exactly like something my youth minister said when I was in the ninth grade.  I was a little surprised to hear it coming from Hunter, but really, it meant a lot a more coming from him because I know he’s been there.

I was also talking about sex with a co-worker, who said that in her next relationship she’s going to try to wait things out sexually, until she knows that she really wants to commit and try to make things work with whoever it is she finds.  At first, her sentiments didn’t really make any sense to me.  She’s already been laid before; obviously she isn’t “saving herself until marriage,” so why would she want to try to wait with whoever the next guy is?

Then I started thinking about what Hunter said, again.  It seems that without a firm foundation of love, and trust in a relationship, if sex gets entered into the equation too early, it will often move center stage and begin to dominate.  It will take over.  Slowly, a couple might stop caring so much about how each other’s day was, whether the other enjoyed hanging out with their other friends, etc, and just caring more and more about creating an orgasm.  My co-worker’s desire to try to wait until she knows she really wants to be with someone before having sex, even in the face of her own previous sexual experience, makes sense in the light of sex-too-early’s tendency to completely wreck a relationship. 

How many times have you heard stories of guys seeming incredibly sweet, incredibly charming, only to change completely after they get the sex they want from whoever?  Or of relationships that have been doomed from the start, couples that make each other absolutely miserable but feel stuck, feel compelled together by the chemical bonds they’ve created, sexually?  Here it’s, of course, the allure of immediate gratification versus the good of the being in the long term…

But waiting is not something people should do, absent-mindedly and without mental probing, for the sake of fulfilling some arbitrary Biblical commandment, but something that just makes sense if you really care about making a relationship work.  If you start sex too early, and you aren’t ready to accept it mentally and emotionally in all that it is, things could fall apart with that person.

Obviously, a lot of people don’t care about making relationships work, they just want to get laid.  That’s something else entirely.  But personally, I want to start a family someday.  And I don’t want to be like another co-worker of mine who has kids with at least three different women in different parts of town.  I want to have one wife, I want to love and to cherish her, I want things to last with her, and I don’t want us to have problems with jealousy.  

I’ve been told sex is really great by a lot of people who are still struggling to make sense of why relationships with their previous lovers, whom they gave themselves to early on, broke down so completely. 

But on the other hand, as far as I’ve read, when sex happens, planets don’t align, ghosts don’t materialize, color schemes don’t invert, and Earth’s center of gravity doesn’t shoot up into some part of the crust in China and send you flying into the ceiling of your dorm room.  It seems, at first glance, to depend only on the precise positioning of a couple of key organs.  But the succeeding chemical wash that occurs in the brain can create some lasting effects that are difficult to regulate after they’ve been released.  I don’t claim to fully understand the chemical reactions that occur – I’m sure there are people who are a lot closer to understanding them than I am, but does anyone really, fully grasp what happens, chemically, to bind a person to another person through sex?

I was having a pretty interesting conversation with a guy in the computer lab the other night.  He was talking about how his girlfriend is a Christian, how he is a skeptic, and how they argue about spirituality and religion all the time.  He asked, in half-jest, about how when he’s having sex with his girlfriend, sometimes she’ll start shouting out “Oh God, oh God, oh God!!” or something alone those lines.  Is everyone familiar with this expression, and it’s implications?  It means what’s happening is enjoyable.  But he asked me if, when she says that, she’s saying it to the same God she goes to church to worship.  If this is the same God to whom she kneels in prayer.

I was struck.  And I wasn’t about to just dismiss this question as a joke.  Why do people say that when they’re having sex?  What are they really talking about?  Does any thought go into it at all?  Surely there must be something going on on the subconscious level. 

But what would that be?

As far as I can tell, it could be one of several things.  It could be a subconscious desire to throw yourself, your actions and your behaviors directly into God’s face.  In this case, the sayers, subconsciously at least, have no desire to try to hide their actions from the deity.  Being up front about their actions – i.e. summoning him by chanting his name in the midst of their escalating sexual tension – might serve to increase sexual arousal, as the sayer might feel even more strong and powerful in his or her sexually defiant self. 

Or, it could be the allottal of a small amount of regression, or submission – “Yeah, okay God, here we are.  Yeah, I know, we’re doing it…”

Or, it could just be a grand scale compartmentalization of the concept of God.  There could be quite literally no respect for the concept of God in this usage of the phrase – here, “God” is reduced to mere exclamation.  The same idea applies to the usage of “Jesus Christ” as an exclamation, you know, when someone gets angry, scared or surprised. 

But I digress.

And then there’s the whole STD-thing.  You think you could be smart about it, and just not have sex with the carriers, but if you’re really so hell-bent on getting some, in the heat of the moment, stopping the momentum to say something unflattering and un-arousing like “So, you don’t have syphilis, do you?” is probably going to seem counterproductive.  So you might just jump in and take the risk, unknowingly sapping some bugs or viruses into your pubic hairs and crotch.  And then there you are.

Anyway, what I’ve been slowly piecing together over the past few years, is that if you’re really looking for something long-term, you’re going to want it to be, well, long-term.  You’ll want it to last.  And the introduction of something you’re unable to handle together because it’s too early, and you don’t know each other well enough – there’s a high chance it could sabotage your chances at making things last. 

I’m not going to try to use this to force religion down anyone’s throat.  I’m just talking about human interaction, and commenting on trends that I’ve noticed.  I’ve seen so many of my sexually-active friends confused and miserable, feeling like all their love has been wasted and lost – and yet sex is not a bad thing in and of itself, so it’s hard to point to it and blame it for when a relationship falls apart. 

But seeing as how your perception of your sexual lovers alters after sex, it seems safe to say that sex is designed for much more than just physical gratification.  It affects much more than just a person’s sexual organs.  It affects the way we think. 

This is what I’ve got to say.  I’d love to hear anyone’s thoughts, rebuttals, comments, questions, or anything.  This is my quest to find ultimate truth - I'd love it if you'd join me, or contribute.