The Student Room Group

"Love" and "sex" - do u think they are the same?

You might get confused when answering the question in the title of this thread as the question might seem to be ambiguous, so here is a brief explanation to the question I want to ask you all.

I'm assuming that the readers of this thread have seen and observed a lot of couples (both married and un-married ones) around them and/or have personal experiences in having a gf/bf.

I have seen a few (unmarried) couples who seemed to be in true love and had a "never going to break up" attitude. However, after few months/years, they broke up. This did not surprise me much until when I found them going out with someoneelse.

From various sources I have always heard that True Love happens only once in a lifetime. Then why such serious relations break up?

I've also seen a girl who had a bf and was sincerely in love. When she went to some other place for attending a uni, she fell in love with another guy and is now going out with him without even breaking up with her 1st bf. Why?

I don't think there's anything called true love in this materialistic world. It's the physical attraction (rather than feelings from heart) which gets more importance, in general. What do you think? Please discuss.

PS: I'm starting thread just to discuss and share our individual opinion and thoughts. In case you're wondering about my relationship status, I'm still single and never got into any serious kinda relationship.

Scroll to see replies

nope love and lust are very different animals. there is overlap but they are in no way the same.
Reply 2
:dito: i totally agree, there is some overlap, and to be honest, i think i'd personally call that bit 'sex'
Watch Love & Sex, one of the most underrated movies I've ever seen. It's realistically honest yet funny and captivating in its approach to portray the difference between love and sex - and it is vast(!) - and also what people consider to be true love.

- an impartial Review
- Buy it at Amazon.co.uk

Between the lines, it summarises that the emotions involved in love and sex originate from two very different sets of stimuli. Love comes from the need to survive whereas sex satisfies a primal replication need. However, despite their differences, each can trigger the other.
Reply 4
I personally love the idea of having a soul mate and all those romantic ideas, but cant help but believe that it is mainly a matter of effort, and that you can be in love with many different people over the course of a lifetime. A marriage or being together with someone long term is less a matter of whether youre meant for each other, and more a matter of whether you both deal with problems in an appropriate measure.
Reply 5
I don't believe in soulmates. If you look back in time, for thousands of years, there haven't been soulmates. And the ones that are, end up dying in some tragic war - Whoever it was and Helena of Troy, Romeo and Juliet. Other than that, there were forced marriages.
Shakespeare, for example. He loved his wife, sure, but he only gave her his second best bed. And for centuries, people only got married to find a mother/breadwinner, and to have sex.

Why should we now, in a generation where sex is so casual, and lives are so busy, true love suddenly exist?

Sorry if I've ruined anyones dreams...x x x
Reply 6
I think sex is a product of love.
I don't think there are soulmates. It's about circumstance. If I go move to England I feel that I have just as much a chance finding a lifetime partner as I would if I stayed in the US, or if I moved to Germany, etc. You find the best person for you in a given situation, and that's who you love.
Simulatio
I don't believe in soulmates.
I do.

There's always someone, or some people, you find your counterpoint in. Sometimes you just need your lives to be going in the same direction for long enough to find out in the first place. It puts a whole new paradigm on your life and you radiate and glow while empowering and energising others, who'll just think you're exceptionally passionate.

You've simply not been there yet. As for your examples, Troy was legend and R+J was fiction. :wink:
Reply 9
I know that it was fiction, but its the example that true love didn't really exist up until this point...people didn't marry for love, they married because they had to. Only from the 20th Century people married for love - I just fail to see what makes us now "special" enough to have soulmates.

I think that there are people that you click with, people that you get on better with - but I don't neccessarly think that its "soulmates"
True love definitely does exist but circumstances get in the way. There are millions of reasons why people get together and it's not necessarily because they're made for eachother.

As for love, it's one of those words that can be applied to every feeling and also no feeling whatsoever: infatuation is a form of love, lust is a form of love, physical dependence is a form of love, emotional dependence is a form of love. Every time someone is in love and the relationship ends, they always convince themselves later, that it wasn't love. The fact is, feelings develop when you're with someone and you can't help it. You become attached, you become dependent in many ways. But is that really love?

Love and sex definitely can't be separated. You can however take the sexual element in love away and take the loving element in sex away but then you're not experiencing the whole thing.
When you sleep with someone, you're experiencing physical intimacy and physical intimacy is going to be linked to emotional intimacy. People who manage to sleep with people without becoming attached, force themselves to ignore that emotional intimacy part. The trouble is, that's the best part of sleeping with someone. It's also what makes sex good.
Actually, Sams got a very good point - there are so many diferent types of love. I think that Ancient Greek has about 20 different words for different types of love. x
Simulatio
Actually, Sams got a very good point - there are so many diferent types of love. I think that Ancient Greek has about 20 different words for different types of love. x


I don't think it was 20, I thought it was just 3. I was thinking of making that point but I'm not cultured enough to be able to list all the different types.

What I was getting at was that what we often call "love", we later put down as being only an impression of love: dependency, infatuation... when really they're all just different forms of love or if we don't agree with that idea, maybe we just have to accept that true love doesn't exist. After all, we're just human beings who experience feelings. After a breakup, any "feeling" is later put down as being just that, especially when you meet someone else, to prove to yourself it wasn't love. "It was just something I was feeling". Sure, we could hope that there's a form of love that's transcendental but that's probably not very realistic.

Someone said that true love is when it's selfless: you don't love the person because they make you happy or because they bring you something. But then, that means taht true love isn't the fireworks-going-off, butterlies-in-your-stomach type of love we're told about in the Western world. It's a lot less mind-blowing, passionate with no butterflys in your stomach.
Reply 13
I don't believe in the idea of a soulmate or true love. I believe that you can love people in different ways and with different intensities but I also think that you can love more than one person completely and totally in a life time and I don't think that there is only one true love in a lifetime. I think that the main reason that people break up is because they grow apart or one person just goes off the other.

In terms of sex and love I don't think that they are the same you can have sex without loving someone and you can love someone without having sex.
Reply 14
I def think there is such a thing as love but I don't necessarily believe it happens only once in a lifetime. At the end of the day how feelings develop is due to circumstances. The ages we are all at now can make it difficult to sustain true love due to distance between people because of been away at uni etc. This can obv make a relationship difficult so feelings fizzle out. I personally believe this does not mean true love was never present just circumstances prevented it from continuing.

The physical attrcation part is a factor in love but I wouldn't say that is ALL love is. There has to be more between 2 people than just physical attraction for it to work. My views are partly shaped around my beliefs I do admit which are that sex is never just sex...sex is about showing love for someone and should never be just about fun.
randdom

In terms of sex and love I don't think that they are the same you can have sex without loving someone and you can love someone without having sex.


Well to say they're not the same is one thing. To say they're unrelated is another.

There's physical intimacy in sex and physical intimacy leads to emotional intimacy unless you make sure it doesn't.
Reply 16
SamTheMan
Well to say they're not the same is one thing. To say they're unrelated is another.

There's physical intimacy in sex and physical intimacy leads to emotional intimacy unless you make sure it doesn't.

I don't think that they are unrelated but they don't have to be related if that makes sense. When you are in love with someone then sex must be much more meaningful than when it is just casual. However I just don't think they have to be linked.
Love and lust totally competeky different.
I think the idea of 'one true love' (or even to some extent soul mates) is a completely romantisied idea which doesn't exist. Love is hard work, its not all plain sailing which is why sometimes these relationships break apart.

But then again its not all about physical attraction either. Like most debates, this boils down to a good compromise: a mix of that gooey feeling we call love and the whole physical element of it. Love without lust doesn't work longterm and visa versa.
randdom
I don't think that they are unrelated but they don't have to be related if that makes sense. When you are in love with someone then sex must be much more meaningful than when it is just casual. However I just don't think they have to be linked.


I agree I guess...

but isn't sex just sex? isn't that really just a fabrication of modern times to say that "sex is meaningful"? I see what you mean but the physical intimacy is going to be quite similar in a casual sex scenario or a relationship scenario. The only thing that changes is whether you acknowledge that intimacy. In the same way that you can kiss someone without accepting the fact that you're doing something that is an important part of being in love.

When someone cheats on their partner and then says "It didn't mean anything", who exactly are they fooling? They've just thrown away what made sex with eachother special: the physical intimacy. Yes, maybe they did it without fully accepting what they were doing, but in the grand scheme of things, the intimacy is there, even if it isn't in their head.