Can Women Separate Love and Sex?

By Jennifer Armstrong, Sirens Magazine. Posted July 11, 2007.

Canvas my works in the SirensMag archives, and you will discover a theme: I enjoy the male form, and I have a healthy sex drive. I also live in New York City, which has a notorious-yet-accurate reputation for wringing the romance right out of life. (Normal-people life, not Nora Ephron-scripted life.) Happily, New York also has a lot of people in it, many of whom are attractive and sex-starved. Do the math, and there you have it: I exist in a world where sex is easy, love is hard, and either way, I still crave sex.

So yes, it's true: I have had sex minus the love, or the promise thereof. And here's the kicker: I am absolutely fine with that. Not "fine" like passive-aggressively not-really-fine. Not "fine" like totally-defensive-about-it fine. Just totally okay with the situation. Not over the moon, naturally, more like caught between the moon and New York City, as it were. I mean, who wouldn't prefer to be having mind-blowing sex regularly with their soulmate? (And if all I've done here is make some kind of sense of that lyric, I'm pretty satisfied.)

I'm a crazy hopeless lunatic romantic, I swear to you. I am, no exaggeration, always in some form of love -- coming out of it, going into it, somewhere in the middle of it. I will swear under interrogation that that's not true, of course; I will not tell you, for instance, whom I could currently claim to be in any stage of love with. But I am. Don't let me tell you otherwise. The point being that I loooove love. And despite reams of missteps in the name of romance, I'm willing to go at it again and again, quite like the trusty definition of insanity about trying the same thing over and over and expecting a different result.

However, often I'm busy. Other times I'm exhausted. Most of the time there simply aren't any soulmates in the offing. (Which is to say that whomever I claim to love at the moment has a girlfriend or lives in another state or is busy touring the country to promote his smash album "FutureSex/LoveSounds.") So I find myself with a potential partner I like well enough, but do not and will not ever love. Maybe we had an instant connection over our love of books, or maybe he was just too freaking yummy to pass up. A real, live man is just better than a vibrator. I don't care what kind of technological advances are coming out of Toys in Babeland.

Many of my girlfriends gasp in wonder at my apparently superhuman ability to transcend the sex-love connection. "I just can't do it," one single one says. "I don't think I could handle that if I were still out there," the married one says. What I say is I don't see any choice. If we're going to do this putting-off-marriage thing we're now officially doing, according to last year's breathlessly reported census results, and we're going to focus on careers instead of kids, and we're going to wait until we find the Big Love before settling down, well, how is it that we're not going to act like nut jobs in the meantime? How are we going to quell that desperate look in our eyes when we meet a prospect? And how are we going to stop ourselves from being blinded by lush lips or a six pack? Girls, there's only one answer: We have to break the ironclad love-sex bond. It's simply the only way to survive all this without going mad.

Heck, one of my friends goes as far as saying she wishes she could have gotten around to a little recreational sex as an adult -- but life had other plans, and she spent all of her 20s in love with the man she's now about to marry. "I did have that kind of sex when I was too young to enjoy it," she says. She learned most of the ropes from her current beau -- who also happens to be The One. Which some of us might say is lucky -- but "I don't see it as luck," she says. "I love him, of course, but I feel like I missed out on an experience."

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Jennifer Armstrong is the co-founder/editorial director of SirensMag.com.

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