Can one love a person without having any kind of sexual relationship with them ? Or, conversely, can you have relationships with a person you do not love? How and to what extent can love and sex be experienced separately? These are some of the most famous questions that human beings ask themselves when they find themselves thinking about the relationship. Let us assume that each type of relationship, whether a young relationship, a decade-long marriage, or a summer-long experience, has its own identity and cannot be compared to another. Therefore, there is no definite and certain answer to the dilemmas posed above. In fact, a sexuality can be completely unrelated to a loving relationship, just as a loving couple can feel happy even without an actual sexual experience.
Love
In a general sense, a loving relationship implies a desire to make one’s partner happy by paying attention to the other’s needs and wants, as well as conveying a sense of protection toward the person one loves. Love understood in this sense is detached from immediate sexual gratification. It is a mix of passion and desire, confrontation and attunement, between two people who share the same path for better or worse. Love, however, has much to do with sex.
Sexuality
In spite of this premise, we can therefore say that although sexuality may be absolutely free and untethered from any relational context, its full expression is nevertheless expressed in the context of a satisfying affective relationship. But, as already mentioned, sexuality becomes a crucial element in proper love relationships as well. In fact, when it is unexpressed or disregarded, it can become a reason for conflict in the couple. Conversely, however, sex can also be a reason for reconciliation when it is understood as a rewarding and restorative mode.
There are couples who manage to experience a very lively and intense sexuality despite having a very conflicted and thorny relationship in their daily lives. Others, on the contrary, despite having deep synergy in everyday life, rediscover themselves as fragile and aseptic in sexual expressiveness. Love and sexuality thus represent two deep dimensions of human beings, and they escape any kind of categorical and fixed classification for any individual, but their expression varies unpredictably from one relationship to another. What is important is to find the right balance within the couple, both sexually and emotionally, so as to make the relationship as stable and fulfilling as possible.
