Wednesday, May 9, 2012

Le Respect, la Relation, et le Risqué

Dad I know you read my blog from time to time and this is one of those posts that I ask you avert your eyes and skip over. Seriously.


Keeping an anonymous blog is harder than one may think. That said, I want to again address something I mentioned lightly before. Respect, and the risque. Can we objectify in the bedroom and retain respect in a relationship? Specifically, must we only make love to stay in love, or can we also have sex? Where is the correct medium between slipping into the banal and crashing into the unacceptable?


I'm currently in a very sexual relationship, and I find myself regularly conflicted about what's the most healthy for us. I worry that if we don't have enough sex, or enough exciting sex, things will get boring and we'll cool off into a typical long term; or that we'll go too far and loose a necessary respect for one another. I'm not sure if the later is even possible - granted I haven't seen signs of it, but, (and now for the not-dad-safe sentence) could any amount of oral or anal sex somehow skew our positive feelings for each other? Admittedly, we aren't worshipping one another in these situations; we're objectifying one another. In spite of how much we enjoy it, I can't decide if this is wildly healthy or flat out detrimental.

On the other end of the spectrum, a friend who volunteers with me in my little Dijonaise cafe faces relationship problems amusingly inverse to my own. She's passionately God-fearing, and refuses to have sex, or even extensive physical contact, before marriage. (I know, I know! I thought France was predominantly devoid of that!) This is a kind of love I know nothing about, and, for that matter, can't even begin to imagine. Sex is such an immense part of romantic connection; an integral facet of truly knowing someone, and the final frontier of openness and trust to your partner. Yet she, like me,

-I just found chocolate smeared on my keyboard and have no idea how it got there-

Yet she, like me, spends hours hoing, humming, and heart-aching over what she believes is love.

How much does sex define a relationship? Does it make it or break it? And, if it's such a powerful element, as I believe it to be, can it govern our feelings outside of the bedroom?











4 comments:

  1. Hi, there, first-time commenter here. I’ve been following your blog for around nine months now but haven’t found the courage to comment yet. However, assuming your questions in this post aren’t purely rhetorical, I thought I’d share at least one outsider’s viewpoint on the topic.

    In a twist that may amuse you, I actually have much more in common with your coworker than with you in that I, too, for religious reasons, didn’t have sex or even, as you put it, “extensive physical contact”, before marriage. (My husband and I have been married for almost four years now. We lived in France for three of those years and visited Dijon twice while we were there—lovely city.)

    I agree with you that sex is “an integral facet of knowing someone, and the final frontier of openness and trust to your partner”. In fact, that’s one of the reasons my husband and I waited until marriage—because we thought it was so special that we didn’t want to share it with anyone else prior to/outside of marriage. Obviously, you and I don’t agree on this point and so I won’t try to convince you one way or the other (but now you know where I’m coming from).

    However, from the point of view of someone already in a sexual relationship, I would say that, while integral to the health of a romantic relationship, sex is also the main area where you see a “trickle-down effect” from other aspects of your relationship. That is, in an otherwise healthy relationship, even more “adventurous” sex can build it up and strengthen your bonds of love (as long as both partners are on board with the terms of the “adventurous” sex, obviously). But in a relationship where there are other problems, even the most boring, conservative sex can cause major tension and damage.

    So I would say to look to other areas of your relationship to gauge where you stand. If other areas look good, you’re probably okay with your bedroom pursuits. If other areas are lacking, it may be time to reevaluate more than just your time between the sheets. I would say that sex is more like a barometer that measures the quality of the relationship rather than the atmospheric pressure that changes it (does that analogy make sense?).

    Anyway, hope this helps. Best wishes.

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