Romantic / Intimate Relationships: Dating / Courtship / Marriage / Sex / Sexuality

Q: How conservative/liberal should I be about sex / sexuality?

I think it depends on who you're going to be interacting with in your life.

Woman's Sexuality

2014.08.04 - Huffington Post - 5 Reasons You Should Have Sex With Your Husband Every Night
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/meg-conle ... 47291.html

I was getting a manicure the first time I learned that not all wives want to, ahem, go for a roll in the hay with their husbands. I was 16 and had picked out orange nail polish (oh, sixteen). I had a book with me but it wasn't long before I found another source of entertainment. In-between buffings and polishings, the two women next to me talked about how much their husbands wanted IT and how little they wanted to give IT.

[...]

Wait. These women were married...they lived with a guy....who slept in their bed. They could have sex all the time! And they didn't want to? It made no sense. It was like turning down a zero calorie but as delicious-as-creme-brulee dessert. (Or at least I assumed. At that point everything I knew about romance was gleaned from Anne of Green Gables and Moulin Rouge.)

How sad. How wasteful. How stupid. When I got married, I would always want to have sex with my husband! And I would never be too tired. My goodness, it was just ridiculous to want him to bring home a gallon of milk just to prove he cared. Wasn't it just like a woman to make a grocery run a test of love. As the final coat of polish was applied to my nails, I swore to never be like them. My life would be different. I would be better. I would never feel too fat or too tired. Ever.

And then I grew up.

Intercourse, carnal knowledge, lovemaking, knocking boots, coitus, SEX! is everything 16 year old me imagined plus a little whipped cream on top. (Whipped cream, see what I did there?) And once Riley and I got married there was lots and lots and lots of it. Then we had a baby and I really was just so tired my bones hurt. And for a while I did feel fat. Even after I lost the pregnancy weight everything just looked different. Like a cut flower that has been left out in the sun, still lovely just a little...wilted. I became a little distant. We started to fall asleep without talking or kissing.

Man's Sexuality

Q: Is it true that everything men do is about meeting women and having sex?

Jack Nicholson: "‘If men are honest, everything they do and everywhere they go is for a chance to see women."
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/home/moslive ... -more.html

Short answer:
No, but many/most men do spend quite a lot of time thinking about women.

Long answer:
I think the best explanation for this question is in the idea of the hierarchy of needs. I think sex and a woman's company is just another need like the need to eat food and drink water. We now live in societies that make eating food and drinking water so easy that people are never very hungry or thirsty for an extended period of time. In the past, though, it wasn't always like this, so that it seems plausible people could have spent their whole lives yearning constantly for food and water (depending on how plentiful food and water was around them). (Example)

I'm mentioning this because I think this is a very good analogy for our current society's situation regarding sex-related needs: we still haven't figured out a system that will make people feel satisfied the vast majority of their lives. I think in the future, though, society WILL have created such a system, and at that time you might not hear people talking about how all everyone thinks about is sex.

I think you can kind of see this with guys that are in long-term relationships: their need for sex is met, so they start taking care of other needs, like the need to avoid boredom. So they start playing videogames, which seem to be the easiest way to remain mentally stimulated and entertained without straining yourself too hard.

Here's a quote from James Baldwin's Nobody Knows My Name, which I got via Felix Dennis's How To Get Rich:

Money, it turned out, was exactly like sex. You thought of nothing else if you didn't have it, and thought of other things if you did.

Source: How To Get Rich, p6

Examples of guys not getting this need met and feeling bad as a result:

2014.05.25 - The UCSB Shooter
http://gawker.com/heres-disturbing-vide ... 1581050371
https://www.youtube.com/user/ElliotRodger/videos

Older Men

2014.07.12 - HuffPost - My "Naked" Truth
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/robin-kor ... 63576.html