Hey guys, it's Non here.
Coffee in hand. A warning before we start: this one is for adults, and I am not going to talk around it. Here is the question I want to put to you. You have been taught your whole life that love and sex belong together.
Where did you learn that, and have you ever once checked whether it is true?
Think about that for a second. If you can't find a reason why they are linked, then the way we live our lives starts to look like a script we didn't write. We just inherited the lines. I think about this when I walk into a shop in Akihabara.
It is a district in Tokyo, and there is a store there with more than fifty thousand pornographic DVDs. It is a massive industry, worth billions of dollars. When I stood there, I felt two things at once. I felt interested in the scale of it, but I also felt a sense of disgust.
To me, that shop isn't just a business. It is a symptom. It tells us something about what is happening in our social lives. It suggests a world where men are too socially awkward to talk to women, and women are left feeling lonely.
It is a place where the complex, messy reality of human connection gets swapped for a product that can be bought and consumed. We do this with love, too. We take the complicated reality of two people existing together and we shrink it down into a set of rules. We assume that if you love someone, you must own their body.
We assume that if you want their body, you must love their soul. This is the part worth stealing. We treat these two things as a single package deal because it is easier than looking at them separately. But if you get this wrong, you end up with a life built on a foundation of assumptions.
You might spend years feeling like a failure because you can't find a partner who fits the mold, or you might end up in a relationship that feels like a cage. We are going to look at why we feel this way. We are going to see if it is actually possible to love someone without wanting to have sex with them. And what happens when we realize those two things might have nothing to do with each other.
If you look at how we are taught to think about romance, it feels like an all-or-nothing deal. We are told that if you love someone, you want to be with them in every sense of the word. If you don't want to have sex with them, we assume the love isn't real. But I want to challenge that.
I want to look at the actual mechanics of these two feelings. I believe we need to separate them because they aren't actually the same thing. One is a spiritual or emotional bond, and the other is a biological drive. They are two different gears in the same machine, but they don't have to turn at the same time.
In fact, most of us get that feeling all the time (and that is why there's a phrase "sex sells," especially in advertisements, right?) Yet, first of all, although I believe that sex and love are not the same thing and one (namely love) does not necessary have to be the prerequisite of the other (namely sex), I nevertheless think it's useful to have a feeling for the person with whom you'd like to have sex. What I mean by that is that while they are separate, they aren't totally disconnected. It is a human preference to want to share our physical lives with people we actually care about.
But we have mistaken that preference for a universal law. We have turned a choice into a requirement. This brings up a massive problem with how we view other people. There was a philosopher named Jean-Paul Sartre who was deeply worried about how we turn people into things.
He watched how people often treat each other as tools or objects to satisfy a need. And it bothered him because it felt like a lie we told ourselves to avoid the truth of freedom. He called this bad faith, which is the act of lying to yourself about your own choices to make your life feel easier. If I follow that logic, when I say I "must" have sex with someone I love, I am acting in bad faith. I am pretending that I don't have a choice.
I am acting as if love is a contract that automatically includes my partner's body. But if you really love someone, you recognize they are a person, not a possession. To possess them is to reduce them to an object you can control. That is the opposite of love.
So, is it possible to love someone without wanting to have sex with them? Yes. It is entirely possible. You can have a profound intellectual and emotional bond with a person while recognizing that the physical spark isn't there.
Or, you can have a physical connection with someone without that deep, spiritual bond. We usually panic when these things don't align because we are trying to follow a script. We think we are failing at love, but really, we are just noticing that the two things are separate.
You might be right to push back on this. You could argue that by separating love and sex so cleanly, I am performing a sort of intellectual surgery that ignores how humans actually feel. You could say that for most people, the physical and the emotional aren't two different gears. They are the same engine.
If you love someone, you want to be close to them in every way possible. To say otherwise feels like a cold, academic abstraction that doesn't match the heat of a real relationship. You might say that if I tell you that sex and love are independent, I am stripping away the very thing that makes romance feel like romance. You are arguing that the "package deal" isn't a lie we tell ourselves; it is the actual truth of our biology and our hearts.
Fair enough. There is a very strong case to be made for that. For many, the physical desire is the proof of the emotional bond. When we are in the middle of a long-term relationship, the way we feel in our bodies is often the most honest barometer we have for how we feel in our souls.
If the desire vanishes, it feels like a tragedy because it feels like the love is dying. In that sense, my attempt to separate them can feel like I am trying to pull the wings off a bird to see how it flies. It feels like I am deconstructing something that is meant to be experienced, not analyzed. But here is where I have to push back again.
If we cannot acknowledge that these two things are different, we lose the ability to handle the moments when they don't align. Think about a person who loves their partner deeply, but for some reason, the physical spark has faded. If you believe they are one and the same, that person feels like a failure. They feel like their love is broken.
They feel like they are "wrong." But if you accept that they are separate, that person is free. They can see that the love is still there, even if the biological drive has changed. The danger of the "package deal" is that it creates a crisis out of a simple reality.
We have been conditioned to think that if we aren't experiencing both, we are failing at one. I want to offer a different way to see it. The separation doesn't mean the two things don't interact. It just means that one doesn't define the other.
"The only things you can possess are objects. So, when you're possessing anyone at all you are reducing that person into a mere object that you can have control over. I think it's utterly unfair for anyone to reduce someone with whom he or she believes to be in love to a mere object to be possessed in that way." What I mean by that is that the moment we say "if you love me, you must give me your body," we are making a demand for ownership.
We are treating a person like a piece of furniture we have a right to use. True love recognizes the other person's autonomy. It recognizes that they are a person, not a thing you can claim. That is the difference between a relationship and a possession.
Think about the way you handle a standard at your job. Maybe it is a specific way a report has to be formatted, or the exact tone you use with a difficult client. There is often a rule that everyone follows, and because everyone follows it, we forget to ask why the rule exists in the first place. We just assume that the rule is part of the job.
We think, "This is just how it is done." But if you take a second to look closely, you might find that the rule is actually a shortcut. It is a way to avoid the harder work of making a real, conscious choice in the moment. This happens in our personal lives, too, especially when it comes to the people we let into our inner circles.
We often adopt a standard for a partner based on a script we didn't write. You might find yourself looking for a specific "type" of person because that is what you were told a successful relationship looks like. You might feel like you are being "picky" if you don't settle for the first person who meets the basic requirements. But maybe you aren't being picky at all.
Maybe you are just refusing to settle for a script that doesn't actually fit your life. Think about the pressure to conform to a tradition, like marriage or a specific type of domestic life. You might have relatives who tell you to just "pick anyone" because you need someone to take care of you. They are looking at a social structure, a way of organizing people to keep things stable.
But when you stay silent, or when you hold out for someone who is intellectual and non-possessive, you are doing something different. You are looking for a person, not a role. You are looking for a soul that you can engage with in good faith. I think we can live in a "non-possessive world" -- and yes, I'd like that because that world sort of has my name in it (kidding).
Seriously. Non-possessive love is not necessary an orgy of casual love and irresponsible sex -- that's not what I meant by non-possessive love. What I mean is that we can choose to love people for who they are, not for what they can provide for us or how they can fit into our plans. We can choose to be with someone without needing to own them.
When you stop trying to fit a person into a pre-made box, you actually start to see them. You stop looking for a partner who fulfills a requirement and start looking for a human being who shares your world. It is a much harder way to live, because it requires you to be honest about what you want. But it is the only way to ensure that the person you are with is actually there, and not just a character you've cast in your own play.
"Instead, it's my own absurd criteria: the kind of person with whom I would like to spend my life has to be intellectual, non-possessive. And have good faith (as opposed to bad faith in Sartian term). Believe it or not, it's not that easy to find a person whose personality, being, and soul thick all the boxes." What I mean by that is that finding this kind of connection is a high bar. It is a deliberate choice to look for a specific quality of character rather than a specific set of traits.
But even as we strip away the scripts of "package deals" and "possessions," we are left with a massive, lingering problem. If we truly separate love from sex, and we refuse to own the people we care about, how do we actually build a life together? How do we create a shared world that feels solid and meaningful without falling back into the very traps of ownership and roles we just tried to escape? I don't have the answer to that yet.