05 May Love and Lust
Many years ago, Damon Wayans did a stand-up comedy routine where he described a conversation he had with his wife after watching a news report about a woman who lost both of her arms and legs in a car accident.
-By Caleb Jones
He turned to his wife and said, “Would you still be with me if I lost both my arms and my legs?”
Without hesitation she said yes.
His punchline was him thinking the reverse. Would he seriously stay with his wife if she lost both her arms and her legs? He was like, “Damn…I don’t know.”
He went on to make a joke about how it would make sex a hell of a lot of fun. He could put her on top of him and spin her around, dribble her like a basketball, etc.
I mean, hey, I’m pretty liberal about the physical conditions of a woman during sex. As long as she’s hot, I couldn’t give a shit. I’ve had sex with a woman who was wearing a cast on her leg, I’ve had sex with another woman in her hospital bed, and I’ve had sex with several women who were as much as eight or nine months pregnant. I’ve also had sex with women who had conditions like stage three endometriosis or who were recovering from cervical cancer. (Oh, I have so many stories…)
But a chick with no arms or legs? Damn. I think I’d have to pass on that one. Even if she did look like Candice Swanepoel.
Switching the genders, it’s a common thing for a woman to ask her husband/BF if he would leave her if she gained 200 pounds. “Would you still be with me?” “Would you still love me if I weighed 300 pounds?”
Love vs. Lust
A topic of huge confusion, one I address in my book a great deal, is the mashing of sexual attraction with love. These are two completely different things, even located within two completely different parts of the brain. They serve two completely different functions.
Love is one thing. Sexual attraction, or lust, is another.
Societal Programming will do its damnest to tell you these two things are one and the same. It’s one of the many ways society shoves monogamy down your throat. “If a man really loves me, he won’t ever want to have sex with any one else.”
It’s all B.S. They are two different things, and always will be, even if you truly love someone. Once NRE is over, even if you still love your special person, you’ll still want to have sex with other people. Even teenagers know this. Yet this reality is supposed to be either,
A) Denied
or
B) Relegated as “immature”
Love Is Not Selective
As Gene Simmons has pointed out, love is not selective. You cannot say, “I love her when her hair is up, but I don’t love her when her hair is down.” You either love her or you don’t, regardless of her hair. If you truly don’t love her when her hair is down, you really never loved her in the first place. It may have been lust, or infatuation, or even NRE, but it wasn’t love. Many men fall into the trap of supposedly falling “in love” with a pretty girl only to realize it wasn’t love at all.
On the flip side, I have read that if you took a randomly selected man and woman of around the same age, and placed them on a desert island together, they will eventually fall in love with each other…even if they are not physically attracted to each other initially. I know it sounds crazy, but I tend to believe this, and my evidence is the people in many Eastern cultures who marry via arranged marriages. Many, perhaps most of these couples do eventually fall in love. Love is not selective.
However, lust is selective. Very selective. I am not sexually attracted to skinny women with A-cup boobs and no hips. Period, end of story. I’m just not. If one of these women walk past me, I will barely even notice her, even if she has a perfect-10 face. But if a trim, short, dark-eyed, blonde woman with serious hips and big boobs walks by, even if her face is a just a 7 or so, a volcano goes off within me and I will very likely stop what I’m doing and go talk to her. My sexual attraction is very, very selective.
Most guys have a “type” that really turns them on. This has nothing whatsoever to do with love.
Once I start having sex with that blonde, I may fall in love with her, but more than likely I will not. She might just be a dumb bimbo. If that’s the case, I’ll enjoy her for many years (off and on, between LSNFTEs) as an FB. Or she may be a cool chick but not cool enough for me to fall in love with (MLTR category). Or she may be amazing and I will fall in love with her (OLTR category). Her looks simply opened the door to possible love, but they’re damn near irrelevant as to whether or not I end up actually loving her.
The Need For Sexual Attraction
Let’s say I do end up falling in love with Blondie, and her with me. It’s certainly happened before. Let’s say she becomes an OLTR and we move in together. We’re in love and have a great time.
Now let’s say that over the years she starts gaining weight. (I realize it’s extremely unrealistic for a Western woman to start gaining weight once she marries or moves in with a man and this almost never happens, but just go with me here.) After about three years, she goes from 105 pounds to 200 pounds. She used to be smoking hot, but now she’s a big, fat ball of lard.
Do I still love her?
Yes.
Am I still sexually attracted to her?
No.
Will I continue to stay with her?
Assuming she’s still a cool chick and assuming the relationship is an open one (which would be a requirement for me) and I could get my strong sexual needs met somewhere else, yes.
Will I keep having sex with her?
No.
Does that make me an asshole?
No. It makes me a human being. I shall explain.
Women often forget that unlike women, men need to be sexually aroused in order to have sex. Women do not. As long as some KY Jelly is available, a woman can be totally turned off and still have sex. Married women do this all the time.
Men cannot do this. A man needs to get hard. Barring things like Viagra, if he doesn’t get turned on, there is no sex. It doesn’t matter how much he loves her.
So will I still love my fat little wife? Assuming she’s still just as cool as when we met, yes, I will be. But will I have having sex with her? No. I can’t. She’s too unattractive for me to get sexually aroused. That means no sex. I’ll stay with her, and continue to love her, and we can cuddle, but I can no longer be sexually aroused by her.
If that makes women reading this go into hysterics, so be it. If you don’t like it, blame God, not me. I’m a man. I can’t have sex with a woman who is physically unattractive to me, even if I care for her emotionally. It’s how I’m designed.
Well if you really love her you can still make her feel good and do it for her you asshole!
Well, that depends. Assuming I could get hard, which would be very unlikely, then yeah, I could try. But if I couldn’t get hard, then no. I suppose I could go down on her, but she wouldn’t be getting my dick.
And just to anticipate the question, no, I am not going to pop medication like Viagra every time my fat wife wants to have sex. I don’t do drugs. Never have, never will. Just because she wants to live an unhealthy lifestyle doesn’t mean I have to. She’s more than welcome to lose weight so I can get aroused again. And remember, I still love her, and I would not leave her.
Also remember that I don’t do monogamy, and one of the many benefits of an open relationship or marriage is that I can get my sexual needs met elsewhere. In a monogamous marriage the man would almost have to leave his fat wife in order to get his sexual needs met. Or cheat on her. Men married to fat or ugly wives do that all the time. And we don’t want that, right?
Always remember that love and sexual attraction are two completely different things, and start your conversation and expectations from that reality.
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DaviT
Posted at 08:13 am, 5th May 2013This was very interesting…..but what do you think about the fact, very oftenly described in the community, that attraction is not actually a choice?
You don’t really choose to feel attracted by someone. You just do. It is very much the case with women, who feel attracted to certain personality traits. You don’t see a guy going up to a girl and trying to convince her to feel attracted to him and actually succeeding (although you do actually see the guys 100% of the time trying this method). And sure, if the woman has a pretty face and has a nice body I will definitely feel attracted physically to her, even if I don’t think she’s a nice person, I could totally imagine myself fucking her. But I think attraction, although perpetuated by the same general vague traits, it’s not that selective; considering the general traits are given, there’s a huge quantity of variants and characteristics, and a mixture of them, which may cause attraction in another person. I don’t feel strongly physically attracted to asian chicks, for example (lol guys are gonna hate my guts for this), but hey under certain circumstances I could totally see myself craving a nice petite asian chick. Maybe it’s because I can see right now other options where there’s girls who I do feel very attracted to, whereas if these options where absent, I would see asian chicks in another light, and start feeling incredibly attracted to them.
Love on the other side is selective in many ways, and certainly not unconditional. There’s plenty of psychological experiments proving the lack of altruism in human behavior and consequently, of unconditional love. If she does certain things or assumes certain behaviors, I will not love her for it. Period. I may feel compelled to stay with her, wait for her to see her mistakes, try to correct them and forgive her. But sometimes I can definitely just leave. As you clearly state, and I completely share, we just have a very VERY low tolerance for drama and a very low “fuck this” threshold. This means that I will not love someone who doesn’t give me the incentives to do so. I believe it has to do more with the fact that we value a lot more the things we invest more in. Easy chicks tend to be less valued in our minds than those we have to invest more in. Certainly a girl who sleeps with me on the 2nd date compared qualitatively objectively and unbiasedly with a girl who sleeps with me on the 5th date, are very much the same, although one DOES TEND TO VALUE MORE (at least a little bit) in one’s own mind, the girl who had me waiting (to a certain “fuck this” point, off course).
Therefore, Lust can very well be NOT SELECTIVE, and Love can very well be (and actually is) more SELECTIVE than it is NOT SELECTIVE.
I would love to hear your insight on this, man!
Great post by the way, you are a very smart guy indeed.
Cheers.
Greg
Posted at 08:58 am, 5th May 2013A man can get hard without being attracted to the woman he is going to fuck. There is an automatic reflex of the penis to get hard due to mechanical stimulation.
lifeofalovergirl
Posted at 09:56 am, 5th May 2013My ex husband claimed to not be sexually attracted to me, although I’ve never been fat. Anyhow, he never seemed to have any issue getting hard when the time came that we actually had sex. So I don’t know.
Anyhow, it makes sense to me that people would fall in love with someone unattractive on a desert island. They’d probably even have sex, eventually. Human beings crave physical touch and affection and sex and if there’s no one else there then yeah.
Plus spending a vast amount of time with someone facilitates love. I mean, why do you think we love our siblings through all the annoyances- those relationships tend to last for life and don’t include sex. It’s because we’ve bonded with them and that happens with TIME. So time spent with a person of the opposite sex eventually turns into love.
It’s the reason behind the advice not to talk too much/spend too much time with people you relegate to the position of “fuck buddy”. Still having sex IS time and bonding and eventually a lot of people (women especially) will still start to bond. Perhaps not as much if you really don’t see each other that often or talk much outside of sex, though I think those relationships sometimes wither out because without an emotional connection you eventually go your separate ways.
I started to write a blog post about a week ago about love. I deleted the whole thing because it was just too long, over 4000 words in and I had barely gotten to half the stories I wanted to tell. Anyway, in it I was talking about my own experiences and the people I’ve “loved” in the past.
Most of those people, NOW I feel like I “never really loved”. Sure, at one point I REALLY thought I did but the feelings have passed and it’s all questionable. Love only seems to endure for a time after you move on. Eventually after severing the bond it disappears though some people hold onto memories of love for a very long time. Usually its due to failure to create a new bond with someone else that compares.
I also used to write down not only the names of guys I had sex with, but I would try to keep track of how many TIMES we had sex. Looking back over that list (which is decidedly incomplete as I forgot to write down a lot of times and didn’t keep track at all with my ex husband), I came to a realization. All of the guys I had sex with over a dozen or so times, even if we never had a “relationship” per say, I had developed feelings for on some level.
No one I’d had sex with less than 12 times became someone I felt anything for, even guys that were at 11, lol. Now I could say the relationship came first in some cases, with some of the guys and then of course it followed that we had more sex, but even in cases where that wasn’t true, by the time we’d had sex 12 times I had feelings for the person and knock it up to like 18-20 times for the guys I “loved”.
Also, while you say you won’t be attracted to a woman if she lets herself go (and I understand that) what about if she takes care of herself but gets old and wrinkled? My grandmother is still quite beautiful for an 83 year old and in shape. A while back she was here and she made a comment about how she hates that her butt has gotten so flat. It had never occurred to me that my butt would get flat as I age but now I’m wondering how that could affect a man’s sexual attraction, lol.
I mean, some things people just have no control over and it seems cruel to deny someone you “love” sex because you find them “unattractive”. Seems if you “love” them you’d go out of your way to connect and bond in that manner. I get that a lot of old married couples really just subsist in platonic “love” though. I think MEN have to WORK to keep a woman attracted because we aren’t simply attracted just by looks alone.
A guy can look fantastic but that in itself is not enough. So because men get lazy after marriage they become unattractive. They are lazy about trying to turn her on and simply think she “owes” him sex just for being there and being her husband and that she should be attracted to him no matter what. They want HER to do the work of turning HIM on but she is turned on by his behavior, not his looks.
Caleb Jones
Posted at 07:07 pm, 5th May 2013DaviT – Attraction often isn’t a choice; very true. That’s why a chick with a 7 face can turn me on more than a chick with a 10 face if she has the right body for what I like. But just because it’s not a choice doesn’t mean it’s not selective. It still is. And you’re talking about love being conditional/unconditional; I’m talking about love not being selective. Different things.
Greg – You’re just stating medical technicality. I’m talking about how the real world works in real life.
Go try to have sex, without any Viagra or similar, with a super fat, super ugly, super stinky, super hairy 62 year-old Jabba The Hutt woman and tell me how hard you become and remain the entire time. Even if she “helps” you.
Greg
Posted at 01:53 am, 6th May 2013Your example is pretty extreme, but I can think of conditions under which I would be able to perform.
My point is bodies work differently in this regard. You seem to forget that when you assume yours works the way it does because you are human. Then again, I may be part of a very small minority, so your theories may be largely correct.
dennis
Posted at 10:37 am, 7th May 2013@LG A woman does owe a man sex for just for being there and being her husband. That’s called sex on demand. Without sex on demand, or withholding sex for any dumb reason what’s the purpose of the LTR?
@BD When you stay with a woman whether a OLTR or LTR there is an unspoken agreement that each will take care of themselves and try and remain attractive to there partner. When one partner breaks that agreement(with the exception of illness) by getting fat or smoking or whatever then the basis of the original love is broken. It’s time to pack your bags and get the fuck out because things will only get worse.
lifeofalovergirl
Posted at 11:17 am, 7th May 2013@ Dennis- SMFH… sex on demand, sure you can have it without the other person being turned on (which means you owe your fat, let herself go, bad hygiene, wife, sex too whenever she wants it) but they are going to get pretty sick and tired of it that way. No one wants to have sex out of obligation, men or women.
Wils
Posted at 04:47 pm, 8th May 2013@Greg I can agree with you on that when we’re talking about just a few times. But in the case of a woman you are married to? We’re talking repeated sex for a life time. Even if you manage to get hard forcibly this time, what about the next time? How long is it gonna be until the next time… would you even want to have a next time? Stretch that question out into a life time.
The point is: Sex with an unattractive women isn’t fun. Even if you CAN do it, chances are you don’t want to. Plenty of other activities you’d be more interested in doing instead.
Are you just nitpicking on technicalities?
Greg
Posted at 05:46 am, 9th May 2013@Wils I see the point now, I guess I lost the big picture when confronted with an argument that contradicted my experience. Thanks!
dennis
Posted at 07:20 pm, 9th May 2013@LG speak for yourself. Many women are thrilled to fuck on demand. That’s part of that excitement being with and being taken by an alpha man. In contrast to a beta man waiting around for permission to use his cock. And yes sex on demand is a two way street. I’m always up for sex on demand from my woman. It is never refused. You are the shining example of a woman Alpha men avoid other than a fuck buddy.
lifeofalovergirl
Posted at 08:05 pm, 9th May 2013@Dennis- say what? If you are trying to say I am someone that denies my man sex you’ve got me all fucked up…lmao
Alexander
Posted at 01:58 am, 11th May 2013@Dennis
I strongly disagree with you.
Man can be beta, and a loser, and still think highly of himself, and thus DEMAND sex from women, while women – seeing other things in his/their life going down and him being deadbeat – will even get angry for he demanded sex.
How wouldn’t she if she sees him as a loser.
She can’t view him as a winner just because he has “the balls” to demand sex.
She saw that he didn’t “had the balls” in other areas of life and is being a tyrant by demanding sex now. What he is basically demanding is a reward for being a loser.
Sorry but that what you’ve written reeks to me of keyboard jockeying.