Is There A Relationship Between Love And Sex? Essay, Research Paper

There are some things that people go through life never examining or more clearly phrased, having never taken heed too; rather they except them as the here and now, “the norm”, or never give them thought. And in the instances where they do think about them, are they doing so from the “correct perspective”. In other words, people don’t go through life, examining or even paying a second mind to the clothes they have on their skin, (maybe you feel them now, but you didn’t realize the clothes touching your body surfaces, or how they felt, until I mentioned this). Well feeling clothes on your skin isn’t exactly my point, but the point I am leading up to is that people go through life never paying attention to, or never understanding how, or if, the love style they express between their partnerships correlates with their sexual style.

This topic can be argued from many perspectives, such as from an evolutionary stance, a personal stance, and even from a psychological stance. For the sake of the piece, I will be discussing it from a psychological point of view. According to Kurt Frey, a former Yale University professor and his co-writer, Mahzad Hojjat, there is a definite relationship between the style of love versus the style of sex. Their argument is that even if the love is only needed to nurture a child conceived from a sexual encounter, there still is a need for some type of love. This isn’t the focus of their view, rather a mere example of the necessity of love in correlation to sex.

According to Frey and Hojjat, six styles of love and three styles of sexuality. The love styles they discussed were, agape, which is a selfless style of love where partners are all-giving, ludus, which is a non-commitment, or game-playing style of love, storge, which is the down-to-earth or friendship style of love, mania, which is a dependent/possessive style of love, eros, which is the passionate and/or lustful style of love, and pragma, which from its name tells you it the practical or logical style of love often called the “shopping list” style of love. And the three sexual styles are role enactment, which is when the script sexual partners engage in are comparable to being on stage where they include apparatus such as mirrors, sex toys, lingerie, etc. on the “set” of their sexual encounters. There is also the sexual trance, style of sex, where partners become totally absorbed in the act of attaining pleasurable sex, and also the sexual style of partner engagement, where there is a prerequisite of a loving relationship, and the emphasis of this sexual style is on closeness, full body contact, kissing, etc. including intimate conversation before, during, and/or after sexual intercourse.

After a thorough study, Frey and Hojjat concluded that the relationship between the various love styles and sexual styles varied by number of partners and also by gender. For example they found that eros, or passionate love was relative to role enactment in women, but not in men; while storge, or friendship love, was negatively related to role enactment for women, but not for men. And they also found that there was a negative relationship between partner engagement preferences and the number of sexual partners for men, but not for women. And after carefully correlating the coefficients found in the study, Frey and Hojjat revealed that none of the love styles were relative to role enactment or sexual trance. On the other hand, they found that mania, storge, agape, pragma, and eros were positively relative to partner engagement preferences, while ludus had a negative relationship to preferences for partner engagement. From this, they also gathered that mania, storge, and agape were psychological as opposed to that of the ludus, pragma, and eros sexual scripts, but that from and evolutionary perspective, they were all in existence to verify a certain degree of commitment within relationships.

From what I ascertain of the study conducted by Frey and Hojjat, is that any love style that has a positive relationship to the partner engagement sexual style after the gender and number of partners factors were entered, which were mania, storge, and agape, were the relationships that consisted of a special intimacy shared by partners, and therefore, were probably the most satisfying. However, from and experiential point of view, I personally feel that in each relationship, all six of the love styles are present at some point in the relationship. For example, ludus, which is the non-commitment love style, is existent in the commencing of relationships, and mania becomes present as feelings increase and ludus decreases, and the overall strive is to get pass all of these to positively reach the eros style of love where passion as well as lust is present and stays to maintain an level of sexual attractability to partners involved in relationships. And after this stage of love is present, partner engagement style of sex will be attainable.