Why is it assumed that love and sexual desire should have the same object?

Question

Why is it assumed in many cultures that we should love and be sexually attracted to the same person? Marriage is still the social norm in many countries and implies that you should be exclusive with your husband/wife in both love and sexual desire and thus forfeit the right to pursue a sexual life outside of your marriage. Love and sexual desire seem to be two totally distinct human products to me, but why does society expect their objects to be merged into one single individual.

Answer 1

Romantic or partnership love and sexual desire need not have the same object. There I agree; and this suggests to me the question whether the two are conceptually distinct and if so, how ? The conceptual dimension brings the issue within philosophy. Certainly both concepts are open to philosophical analysis.

Sexual desire is driven by sexual attraction and motivates sexual activities of various kinds. I do not propose to try to define 'sexual' but its contextual meaning is obvious. I should find it hard to credit someone who claimed to have no idea what sexual intercourse is, or non-penetrative sex or oral sex.

Romantic or partnership love centres not on sexual desire but on emotional attachment - attachment both to another person and, not infrequently, attachment to the children produced by a partnership. If sexual desire produces children, partnership love looks after them. But partnership love can produce children in the absence of sexual desire.

Partnership love and sexual desire can combine in the institution of marriage or cohabitation but this is sociology. Conceptually one can have partnership love for someone for whom one has no sexual desire; one can have sexual desire for someone for whom one has no partnership love. One can have sexual desire for many persons and partnership love for only one; or partnership love for many, and sexual desire for only one (though this is probably rare). The permutations are multiple.

Something to add is that sexual desire and partnership love can be cross-gender in the sense that one can have sexual desire for one's own gender and partnership love for a different gender. And vice versa.

It is a psychological question whether life is more satisfying or open to deeper possibilities when partnership and sexual love combine and centre on the same object - or rather, person. It is also debatable and problematic and I glad not to be doing psychology.

Answer 2

The word love leads to multiple misunderstandings because it is wide and fuzzy but basically implies attraction.

From the perspective of the systems theory: physical attraction occurs between two entities, and it is generated by two forces, one from each entity towards each other. This means that for attraction to exist, there should be a force between entity 1 towards entity 2 and vice versa.

The same occurs with emotional attraction: it occurs between two individuals, and the word love describes such complex attraction. Sex is just one type of attraction, and there are others. In consequence, love implies sexual attraction. Now, from the perspective of each subject, let's observe both forces:

1. Love implies receiving. Receiving generates a force from the subject (me) towards the object (my wife). This means the subject (me) receives contents from the object, as affection, sexual satisfaction, company, etc.

2. Love implies giving. Giving generates a force from the object (my wife) towards the subject (me). This means the subject (me) gives contents to the object, as affection, sexual satisfaction, company, etc. Of course, contents are the same, but in the other direction.

Some interesting consequences that raise from this perspective:

• Philosophically, the preferred kind of love should be giving. For philosophers (e.g. see The Art Of Loving, Erich Fromm), love means only the giving part, because it generates the right attraction.
• Sex is only part of the common notion of love. Sex generates attraction from the subject (me) to the object (my wife). This means, the force that attracts me towards my wife raises because I receive pleasure from her. But sex also works in the other direction: the subject (me) can also give pleasure and create attraction on the other direction.
• Giving generates attraction. If you give love (must be unconditional, or else it is not giving but receiving), you generate attraction towards you. This happens not only in love, but in economy, biology, business, etc. In other words, if you do more work(give) than what you get paid for (receive), your employer feels laborally attracted to you. Of course, this implies you can get physically exhausted (die), but a good attractor is able to equilibrate the give/receive rate based on the selection of its environment (for more, see my book following the website link on my profile).

Answering your question, the philosophical definition of love implies that you will necessarily be sexually attracted to the other person. Feelings are generated by the action of the subject (actions are proactive).

The popular definition of love is associated mostly with receiving. Just listen to any love song on the radio, it is about the attraction that the singer describes towards the object of love, caused by the things he receives, including sex, peace, romance, etc. Feelings are caused by the reaction of the subject (feelings are reactive)

Answer 3

Larry Young and Brian Alexander in their book “The Chemistry Between Us” give evidence that it is neither societies nor cultures that bind us in partnerships but chemical pair-bonding that can be identified in our brains. The cause of what you are concerned about is more at our species level rather than at the level of culture. They also argue for a biological difference between men and women to help explain the benefits of this partnership especially for offspring.

This view goes against the “social construction of gender” and they take up this topic aggressively providing a spirited argument against that idea.

Our species isn’t the only pair-bonding species. Prairie voles are another which further emphasizes that it is not culture that is driving this. However, even though a brain influence has been identified this does not imply determinism. Cultures and individuals have choices to make. Both have to deal with these almost conflicting aspects of our biology, the pleasurable desire to attach to others and the pain of leaving after a particular attachment has been established.