*This essay is a part of my Feminism series. You must read my Intro before reading this essay.*
This essay is about our society's extremely dysfunctional and restricted view of love. You must be familiar with the terms on my terminology list to understand this essay.
I said in my Intro that, “I love love, I love the psychology behind love, and having healthy and loving relationships is one of the biggest priorities in my life.” Being a lover of love, I love love in all it's forms.
Though some progress has been made, the romanticizing and sexualizing of emotions, especially love and passion, is still systematically overlooked or denied.
Nothing is inherently romantic. Absolutely nothing. What makes something romantic is if you feel romantic attraction when you do it. That's it. Likewise, nothing is inherently sexual. Kissing, hugging, hand holding, cuddling, sharing a bed, living together, etc. - none of these things are inherently romantic or sexual.
It must be understood our culture's views on this subject are purely social constructs, and specific to our time period. So, let's take a trip through history.
As many scholars note, Michel de Montaigne adverts to “the common agreement of the ancient schools” on the unfitness of women for ideal friendship, even though Pythagoras admitted them into his academy, presumably on an equal basis (138). While neither Plato nor Aristotle categorically excluded women from friendship, citizenship, or political rule, their human ideal, as Elizabeth Spelman observes, “is above all else a masculine ideal” (54). The ways in which these thinkers perceived women to be different from men – as less innately capable of reason and discipline – are also inimical to classically defined friendship. Exiled domestically and thrown together in male-dominated cultures, women formed relationships with each other, but these could not achieve the visibility or cultural importance of male bonds. A few instances of female and cross-gendered friendships between husbands and wives occur in later Greek romances of the first century C.E., but these depend upon an equality of status, age, and education and the mutual passion of the spouses characteristic of ideal friendship between men (Konstan, Sexual Symmetry7; Hock 161).
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The dialogue amplifies several key Aristotelian ideas about friendship, such as its requirement of similar aristocratic rank, temperament, and virtue, and repeats Aristotle's familiar formation with an added emphasis on the virtuality of equality and merger: “[T]he true friend is, so to speak, a second self... [T]hey become virtually one person instead of two” (xxi.80-81; 80). As Eleanor Winsor Leach points out, in discussing these commonplaces Cicero uses both the language of resemblance (similitudo) and the language of doubling (alter idem) (12). The “weakness” of women and their need for “protection” from rather than for spiritual mutuality with men prevent their inclusion in such a lofty enterprise (xiii.46; 67).
Centuries later, in the late sixteenth century, Montaigne crafts a romanticized version of Ciceronian friendship discourse in which “distance came to seem a permanent, almost a constitutive, element of friendship” (Weller 504). Montaigne places his essay “De l'amitié” about his “sovereign and masterful” connection with the deceased writer Étienne de La Boétie at the precise center of a collection of essays whose decidedly modern purpose was self- disclosure and self-perpetuation. Thoroughly familiar with the ideas of Aristotle, Cicero, and Seneca, Montaigne protests that “the very discourses that antiquity has left us on this subject seem weak compared with the feelings I have” (143). The key term her that makes this an early modern text is “feelings.”
Friendship, Montaigne asserts, is the ultimate act of unconstrained will, so that kinship relations implying “natural” obligation do not qualify. Such friends are not merely bonded but “fused” and “confused”; their “souls mingle and blend with each other so completely that they efface the seam that joined them, and cannot find it again” (139). But there is also a rapturous, erotically charged, consuming violence in this ineluctable force “which, having seized my whole will, led it to plunge and lose itself in his; which, having seized his whole will, led it to plunge and lose itself in mine, with equal hunger, equal rivalry” (139). While Montaigne does not completely rule out the possibility of cross-gender or female friendships, he declares that at the present moment, “the ordinary capacity of women is inadequate for that communion and fellowship which is the nurse [nourrisse] of this sacred bond; nor does their soul seem firm enough to endure the strain of so tight and durable a knot” (138). Despite women's current spiritual infirmity, the physically nurturing capacities specific to female anatomy provide Montaigne, as Aristotle, with a figure for an intensely spiritual, melancholic, and exclusively masculine friendship. In the context of this prevailing discourse, striving for the ideal renders women's friendships acts of resistance to assumptions of female difference and inferiority.
Because women are not equal with – that is, not like – men, they cannot function as the mirrors that accurately reflect a man's virtue. This failure, in Virginia Woolf's acerbic analysis, has been instrumental to the very progress of civilization: “Women,” she observes dryly, “have served all these centuries as looking glasses possessing the magic and delicious power of reflecting the figure of a man at twice its natural size. Without that power probably the earth would still be swamp and jungle” (35). It is not coincidental that Aristotle's figure of the friend as mirror for the self plays on the double meaning of “reflection” as thought on the one hand and as resemblance or likeness on the other. The psychic symbiosis that for Aristotle signals an intellectual and affective equality, even despite obvious differences, is expressed as a visual likeness and interchangeably that serves to discourage friendship across differences, not only of gender, but also of class and ethnicity. -Perfecting Friendship: Politics and Affiliation in Early American Literature by Ivy Schweitzer
While today's sexism and toxic masculinity label any emotion that isn't anger or aggressiveness as 'feminine' and thus condemn it (especially for men), for most of human history friendship was not only the most spiritual and ideal relationship someone could have with another person, it was the pinnacle of masculinity.
The article The History and Nature of Man Friendships summarizes the evolution of male friendship:
In ancient times, men viewed man friendships as the most fulfilling relationship a person could have. Friendships were seen as more noble than marital love with a woman because women were seen as inferior. Aristotle and other philosophers extolled the virtues of platonic relationships - a relationship of emotional connection without sexual intimacy. Platonic relationships, according to Aristotle, were the ideal.
During this period of time, the idea of the heroic friendship developed. The heroic friendship was a friendship between two men that was intense on an emotional and intellectual level. Examples of heroic friendships exist in many ancient texts from the Bible (David and Jonathan) to ancient Greek writings. A man friendship that captures the essence of the heroic friendship is the relationship between Achilles and Patroclus.
Achilles and Patroclus fought together during the Trojan War and had a close relationship. A really close relationship. When Hector killed Patroclus, Achilles was beside himself for days. He smeared his body in ash and fasted in lamentation. After the funeral, Achilles, filled with a mighty rage, took to the battlefield to avenge the death of his best friend.
The image of Achilles and Patroclus was an important one in the ancient world. When Alexander the Great and his war pal, Hephaestion, passed through Troy, they stopped, with the whole army in tow, in front of the tomb of Achilles and Patroclus, thus demonstrating the veneration they had for these men and their friendship.
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Man friendships during the 19th century were marked by an intense bond and filled with deeply held feeling and sentimentality. Man friendships in many instances had a similar intensity as romantic relationships between men and women. Essentially, it was a continuation of the heroic friendship of the ancient world, coupled with the emphasis on emotion common to the Romantic Age. A fervent bond did not necessarily imply a sexual relationship; the idea that these ardent friendships in some way compromised a man’s heterosexuality is largely a modern conception.
Men during this time freely used endearing language with each other in daily interaction and letters. For example, Daniel Webster, an American senator and one of this country’s greatest orators, often began his letters to male friends with “My lovely boy,” and ended them with “Very affectionately yours.” Even letters by manly man Theodore Roosevelt to his friends were filled with sentimental language that would make most men today rather uncomfortable.
In addition to using affectionate language with each other, men during the 19th century weren’t afraid to be physically affectionate. Many men would give no thought to draping their arms around their bud or even holding hands. And while it is quite foreign to our modern sensibilities, it was even common during this era for men to share a bed to save money. For example, The Great Emancipator, Abraham Lincoln, shared a bed with a fellow named Joshua Speed for a number of years. Some scholars have concluded that this means Lincoln was gay. That’s where we get the term “Log Cabin Republican.” However most scholars conclude that there was no nookie going on between Abe and Joshua; they simply enjoyed a close and comfortable man friendship.
Take a look at these photos of man friends from the late 19th and early 20th Century. These guys were pretty touchy with each other. In fact, it was these photos that inspired me to write the post. During my weekly searches for vintage pics of men for the blog, I kept on coming across old photographs of men being really affectionate with one another. It’s pretty jarring to our modern man sensibilities:
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Some men see these photographs and wrongly conclude that these men were expressing their closeted gay tendencies for the camera. But this is not so. Actually, when you start sifting through old photos, you find that these kinds of poses were not abberations, but were actually quite commonplace. The photos open up a window into a picture of manliness quite foreign to us now.
There are several reasons why men were so damn affectionate with each other back in the day. First, men were free to have affectionate man relationships with each other without fear of being called a “queer” because the concept of homosexuality as we know it today didn’t exist then. America didn’t have the strict straight/gay dichotomy that currently exists. Affectionate feelings weren’t strictly labeled as sexual or platonic. There wasn’t even a name for homosexual sex; instead, it was referred to as “the crime that cannot be spoken.” It wasn’t until the turn of the 19th century that psychologists started analyzing homosexuality. When that happened, men in America started to become much more self-conscious about their relationships with their buds and traded the close embraces for a stiff pat on the back. The man hug was born.
Another reason for the nineteenth century’s intense man friendships was that the social structure of society during this time helped foster such intense bonds. Men and women basically lived in separate homosocial worlds until they got married. There wasn’t much interaction between the sexes at that time. (Interestingly, this is why amusement parks like those on Coney Island enjoyed such popularity in the early 1900’s; it was one of the few places men and women could mingle freely and even “accidentally” fall into each other’s arms on rides.). This separation led many young men to fulfill their needs for physical affection and emotional companionship with other dudes.
Additionally, fraternal organizations, ranging from the Freemasons to the Odd Fellows, were at their peak in membership in American history. Nearly 1/3 of all American men were members of some fraternal organization at the end of the 19th century. At their lodges, men would bond, connect, and help each other become better men.
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The man friendship underwent some serious transformations during the 20th century. Men went from lavishing endearing words on each other and holding hands to avoiding too much emotional bonding or any sort of physical affections whatsoever. Fear of being called gay drove much of the transformation. Ministers and politicians decried homosexuality as being incompatible with true manhood. And like most deviant behavior in the 1950s, homosexuality was associated with Communism.
Additionally, market economics began to influence male friendships. The Industrial Revolution and ideas like Social Darwinism changed the way men viewed each other. Instead of being a potential friend, the man next to you was competition. The world was an urban jungle and the man who looked out for himself was the man who was going to eat. It’s hard to develop the cutthroat instinct needed to destroy the competition when the competition happens to be your bosom buddy.
Increased mobility during the 20th century also contributed the decline in man friendships. When you have to follow your work, it’s hard to set down roots and make true friends. And with the increased leisure time that came with industrialization, men began to play more sports and take part in outdoor activities. They naturally geared their relationships with other men around these sorts of pursuits. Suburbia created other places where men could establish man friendships - the golf course, the front yard, and work. Instead of basing friendships on an emotional bond, men in the 20th century based their friendship around activities.
The one area in modern man friendships where we still see strong emotional bonds is in the military. One of the reoccurring themes I read in stories about a man’s military life are the friendships that they established while in the service. Working in largely all-male teams in life and death situations creates intense bonds and a true brotherhood. Soldiers will never leave a man behind and are willing to die to protect their comrades. Interestingly, it would seem that the overt machismo of the military allows these strong bonds to exist without the fear of homophobia getting in the way.
The authors wrote a follow-up article, Bosom Buddies: A Photo History of Male Affection (I highly recommend following the link so you can see the photos):
In my unending search for just the right vintage images for our articles, I have looked through thousands of photographs of men from the last century or so. One of the things that I have found most fascinating about many of these images, is the ease, familiarity, and intimacy, which men used to exhibit in photographs with their friends and compadres.
I shared a handful of these images in our very early post on the history of male friendship, but today I wanted to share almost 100 more in order to provide a more in-depth look into an important and highly interesting aspect of masculine history: the decline of male intimacy over the last century.
As you make your way through the photos below, many of you will undoubtedly feel a keen sense of surprise — some of you may even recoil a bit as you think, “Holy smokes! That’s so gay!”
The poses, facial expressions, and body language of the men below will strike the modern viewer as very gay indeed. But it is crucial to understand that you cannot view these photographs through the prism of our modern culture and current conception of homosexuality. The term “homosexuality” was in fact not coined until 1869, and before that time, the strict dichotomy between “gay” and “straight” did not yet exist. Attraction to, and sexual activity with other men was thought of as something you did, not something you were. It was a behavior — accepted by some cultures and considered sinful by others.
But at the turn of the 20th century, the idea of homosexuality shifted from a practice to a lifestyle and an identity. You did not have temptations towards a certain sin, you were a homosexual person. Thinking of men as either “homosexual” or “heterosexual” became common. And this new category of identity was at the same time pathologized — decried by psychiatrists as a mental illness, by ministers as a perversion, and by politicians as something to be legislated against. As this new conception of homosexuality as a stigmatized and onerous identifier took root in American culture, men began to be much more careful to not send messages to other men, and to women, that they were gay. And this is the reason why, it is theorized, men have become less comfortable with showing affection towards each other over the last century. At the same time, it also may explain why in countries with a more conservative, religious culture, such as in Africa or the Middle East, where men do engage in homosexual acts, but still consider homosexuality the “crime that cannot be spoken,” it remains common for men to be affectionate with one another and comfortable with things like holding hands as they walk.
Whether the men below were gay in the way our current culture understands that idea, or in the way that they themselves understood it, is unknowable. What we do know is that the men would not have thought their poses and body language had anything at all to do with that question. What you see in the photographs was common, not rare; the photos are not about sexuality, but intimacy.
These photos showcase an evolution in the way men relate to one another — and the way in which certain forms and expressions of male intimacy have disappeared over the last century.
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From the Civil War through the 1920’s, it was very common for male friends to visit a photographer’s studio together to have a portrait done as a memento of their love and loyalty. Photographers would offer various backgrounds and props the men could choose from to use in the picture. Sometimes the men would act out scenes; sometimes they’d simply sit side-by-side; sometimes they’d sit on each other’s laps or hold hands. The men’s very comfortable and familiar poses and body language might make the men look like gay lovers to the modern eye — and they could very well have been — but that was not the message they were sending at the time. The photographer’s studio would have been at the center of town, well-known by everyone, and one’s neighbors would having been sitting in the waiting room just a few feet away. Because homosexuality, even if thought of as a practice rather than an identity, was not something publicly expressed, these men were not knowingly outing themselves in these shots; their poses were common, and simply reflected the intimacy and intensity of male friendships at the time — none of these photos would have caused their contemporaries to bat an eye.
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When the author of Picturing Men, John Ibson, conducted a survey of modern day portrait studios to ask if they had ever had two men come in to have their photo taken, he found that the event was so rare that many of the photographers he spoke to had never seen it happen during their career.
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When portable cameras for the amateur photographer became more widely available, they allowed men to photograph themselves in a greater range of more spontaneous situations, and the practice of sitting for formal portraits together waned in the 1930s. The snapshots usually were developed by someone else who would have gotten a look at all of them, so again, these pictures were not likely purposeful expressions of gay love, but rather captured the very common level of comfort men felt with one another during the early 20th century.
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One of the reasons male friendships were so intense during the 19th and early 20th centuries, is that socialization was largely separated by sex; men spent most their time with other men, women with other women. In the 50s, some psychologists theorized that gender-segregated socialization spurred homosexuality, and as cultural mores changed in general, snapshots of only men together were supplanted by those of coed groups.
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After WWII, casually touching between men in photographs decreased precipitously. It first vanished among middle-aged men, but lingered among younger men. But in the 50s, when homosexuality reached its peak of pathologization, eventually they too created more space between themselves, and while still affectionate began to interact with less ease and intimacy.
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It was also popular for men to get portraits done with the guys they worked with, often while wearing their work clothes — from aprons to overalls — and holding the tools of their trade — from frying pans to hammers. That men wished to immortalize themselves alongside their “co- workers” shows how important work was to a man’s identity and the close bond men used to feel with those they shared a trade with and toiled next to.
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When a photo studio wasn’t nearby, snapshots were taken. These snapshots reveal the camaraderie men felt with those they worked beside.
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As the trades waned in importance, and white collar work waxed, photographs of men on the job became more formal and less intimate. Instead of seeing each as fellow craftsmen, working for a common goal with a shared pride in the work, men became competitors with each other, each trying to get ahead in a dog-eat-dog world. And a lot less work-related photographs were taken in general. Perhaps because we only take photographs of pleasurable things, things we want to always remember, and the pleasure men took in their work had fallen.
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As team sports became one of the great passions of a man’s life in the 1890s, the team photo became a required ritual. A team wished to have a memento of the exploits of the season, and no yearbook was complete without one. The changing poses of the team photo provide a window into the evolving mores of male affection, and perhaps into the evolving nature of sport itself.
At the turn of the century, team photos were more intimate and casual, with teammates piling on top of one another, leaning on each other, and draping their arms around one another.
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Starting in the 1920s, team photos became more formal, more like the team photos we know today. Instead of touching each other, the men crossed their arms across their stomach or put them behind their backs. Each player stood more isolated from the others, much as the space between businessmen had grown as well. Still a team, but a team of distinct individuals.
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Some of the most intense bonds between men have always been found among those who serve in the military. Gender segregation (at least in times past), is at its very highest. Men are far from home and can only rely on each other; together they face the highest dangers and are motivated less by duty to country and more by the desire not to let their brothers down. Serving is such an unquestionably manly thing, that homophobia dissipates; soldiers care less about one’s sexuality than whether the man can get the job done.
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The man who served in WWII and experienced intense camaraderie with his battlefield brothers, often had trouble adjusting to life back home, in which he got married, settled in the suburbs, and felt cut off and isolated from other men and the kind of deep friendships he had enjoyed during the war.
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Today’s serviceman enjoys the same intense bonds as his forebearers did. But, at least in photographs, he is much less likely to express this bond in overt ways. The most common pose among today’s soldiers is standing side-by-side, holding one’s weapons.
These two articles have given a wonderful summary of historical male friendship. But, you may ask, what about women and female friendship? After all, their societies considered them too inferior to participate.
Most humanist representations of friendship, drawing on classical texts such as Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics and Cicero’s De Amicitia, defined friendship as the bond between two virtuous men. This bond held public and political significance, for the rhetoric of ideal male friendship in Renaissance England offered a way of envisioning the ties that held society together. As Alan Bray suggests in The Friend, “The principal difference between the friendship of the modern world and the friendship [of traditional society] is that . . . friendship was significant in a public sphere” (2). Women were often ignored by or explicitly excluded from classical and humanist representations of ideal friendship, but they nevertheless argued for their own ability to engage in friendships of virtue.
The classical tradition of ideal male friendship repeatedly emphasizes the importance of equality and similarity in the establishment of virtuous friendship; in the oft-quoted words of Cicero, the friend is an alter idem, or another self (188). This privileging of likeness presented difficulties for any early modern writer—male or female—who wished to depict or establish a friendship across difference, but this difficulty was compounded for the woman writer. Legal and cultural precepts dictated her inferiority to men, and humanist discourses of male friendship such as Michel de Montaigne’s “Of Friendship” questioned her ability to fulfill the type of active, political virtue associated with ideal male friendship.
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By the time William Shakespeare declared in his 42nd sonnet, “But here’s the joy; my friend and I are one,” the ubiquity of the trope of the male friend as a second self was readily available for satire. Here, Shakespeare invokes this trope only to undermine it: the speaker, having learned that his young friend and his mistress have betrayed him, attempts to console himself with the ideal of the male friend as an alter idem, or another self: “Thou love’st her because thou know’st I love her.” Unable to sustain this tenuous logic, the speaker follows his assertion of oneness with his friend with the exclamation, “Sweet flattery!” We are supposed to recognize that the ideal of the friend as a second self is just that, flattery. The speaker and his friend are certainly not “one” in this case, and the second-self logic of male friendship offers a poor consolation in the face of sexual betrayal. Shakespeare’s satire of the ideal of the friend as a second self indicates the popularity of this trope in Renaissance England: Cicero’s De Amicitia was a foundational text in humanist education, and his description of the male friend as an alter idem was enthusiastically translated, adopted, and reworked by early modern writers on friendship. This description gained such a hold on the popular imagination in part because, as Laurie Shannon argues, it offered an ideological template for nascent ideas of equality within a decidedly hierarchical society (22).1 Indeed, even as Shakespeare satirizes this ideal, he acknowledges its power and appeal when his speaker willingly deludes himself with the consoling thought that he and his friend are the same. His sonnet sequence also contains poems that depict male friendship much less ironically: Sonnet 116, for instance, celebrates male friendship as “the marriage of true minds,” and at the end of Sonnet 29, the speaker tells his friend, “For thy sweet love remembered such wealth brings / That then I scorn to change my state with kings.”
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The tradition of ideal male friendship’s focus on freedom of speech and equality provides a potentially empowering frame of reference even for those whom this tradition would seemingly exclude.
And those the tradition of ideal male friendship most frequently and emphatically excluded were women.
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One reason friendship discourse celebrates sameness so forcefully is because dissimilitude in gender, status, or personal virtue could disrupt the tenuous equality that amicitia posits between friends. If one friend is inferior to the other, his participation in an unequal friendship cannot escape the appearance of avarice. Cicero condemns friendships founded on weakness or personal gain and, tellingly, associates such friendships with women:
there are others, I am told, who, with even less of human feeling, maintain . . . that friendships must be sought for the sake of the defense and aid they give and not out of goodwill and affection; therefore, that those least endowed with firmness of character and strength of body have the greatest longing for friendship; and consequently, that helpless women, more than men, seek its shelter. (157)
The volitional nature of ideal friendship therefore demands not only similarity between friends but also self-sufficiency on each friend’s part; a man’s independence shows that he enters the bonds of friendship electively. As Cicero asserts, “To the extent that a man relies on himself and is so fortified by virtue and wisdom that he is dependent on no one and considers all his possessions to be within himself, in that degree is he most conspicuous for seeking out and cherishing friendships” (142-143).
Independence is also important in ideal friendship because friendship carries the potential to transform into a very demanding relationship. While friends do not (ideally) enter into friendship in the expectation of material benefit, they are expected to share their goods and help each other in need. Montaigne asserts that everything is “by effect common betweene [friends]; wills, thoughts, judgements, goods, wives, children, honour, and life” (93-94). This list begins with the shared emotional and intellectual benefits— wills, thoughts, and judgments—of ideal friendship, then claims that material goods should be shared between friends, and then, somewhat surprisingly, suggests that wives and children may be sacrificed to this sacred bond as well. Here, Montaigne clearly illustrates women’s role in the early modern discourse of ideal male friendship. Most women in early modern England (with the notable exception of some widows) were legally answerable to their fathers, husbands, or other male relatives and therefore could not, at least theoretically, claim the independence that the rhetoric of amicitia demands.
In Montaigne’s formulation, women are not the independent practitioners of friendship, but rather its raw materials.
Even the classical tradition’s emphasis on virtue is highly gendered. The virtue that Cicero insists upon in De Amicitia is a specifically civic virtue. Laelius praises Scipio’s service to the Republic, noting “how dear he was to the State” (121), and he explains that their friendship was based on a combination of personal affection and public duty: “I feel as if my life has been happy because it was spent with Scipio, with whom I shared my public and private cares; lived under the same roof at home; served in the same campaigns abroad, and enjoyed that wherein lies the whole essence of friendship— the most complete agreement in policy, in pursuits, and in opinions” (125). Later, he uses the story of a man who commits treason for his friend’s sake as an example of friendship’s perversion; amicitia helps build the state, not tear it down.3 Early modern writers also connected male friendship to public duty and civic virtue. Churchyard, for instance, declares that the “first braunch” of friendship is “the affectionat loue that al men in generall ought to beare to their countrie” (3). As the masculine noun indicates, this type of active, civic, and public virtue was normally associated with men. The word “virtue” itself is, of course, formed from the Latin vir, or man, and while it carried today’s meaning of personal worth and moral goodness, in Cicero’s time and in the early modern period it also meant strength, “the possession or display of manly powers; manliness” (OED s.v.).
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But Cicero’s male friends express their virtue not only in their roles as soldiers and statesmen but also as counselors. Cicero claims that counsel is one of the most important duties of the friend: “in friendship let the influence of friends who are wise counselors be paramount, and let that influence be employed in advising, not only with frankness, but, if the occasion demands, even with sternness, and let the advice be followed when given” (157). Early modern writers on friendship also privileged the frank counsel of the friend. Francis Bacon, for example, declares that “The greatest trust between man and man is the trust of giving counsel” (379). This focus on counsel gave women an entrée into the political function of ideal friendship, for while they could not sit on privy counsels, they could offer counsel to their husbands, family members, friends, and, perhaps most importantly, their readers. The women writers I discuss in this dissertation all present themselves as virtuous counselors speaking in the privileged mode of friendship, thus asserting their own ability to enact the political virtue that Cicero celebrates in his ideal male friends.
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The particular virtuous “means” Aristotle goes on to discuss include temperance, liberality, patience, truthfulness, wittiness, friendliness, and modesty. These are virtues that women as well as men may possess—indeed, in early modern England, the virtues of patience and modesty were particularly associated with women—and while Aristotle assumes the male gender of his perfect friends when he claims, “it is between good men that both love and friendship are chiefly found and in the highest form,” his more inclusive definition of moral goodness offers significantly more room for women’s participation in virtuous friendship than Cicero’s emphatically masculine conception of virtue (263-264).
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While a system of friendship in which a woman must interiorize and compensate for her own inferiority may seem like a poor model for a woman writer to adopt, Aristotle’s recognition of affective connections that are not ideal but nevertheless valid opens up a space for the discussion of difference in friendship.
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That both Cavendish and Isabella Whitney, writing a century earlier and from a very different social position, depicted positive friendships with male relatives demonstrates the enduring association of friendship and kinship. Cavendish also refers to her husband as her friend, and in this epilogue, I briefly discuss the intersections of friendship and marriage. Like the other women I discuss in this dissertation, Cavendish saw the potential for friendship within marriage, but she also recognized that the imbalance of authority between husband and wife created a barrier to perfect friendship. I also discuss the intellectual friendships that Cavendish formed with men outside of her family circle. These friendships with men gained Cavendish recognition from such all-male institutions as the Royal Society, demonstrating that she, like Katherine Philips, cannily negotiated her friendships with men to promote her own career as a writer and thinker.
As this example demonstrates, the stakes for women’s participation in friendship were high: as a relationship that overlapped with and encompassed other forms of affiliation, friendship offered to early modern thinkers a way of thinking about the ties that held society together. Women’s assertion of their own ability to participate in this tradition was, therefore, also a claim for a type of social and political enfranchisement. The ways in which these women writers creatively engaged with and revised this tradition suggests that women played a more active role in early modern friendship practices than dominant male-authored texts on friendship would at first indicate. The women writers I discuss in this dissertation understood that the discourse of male friendship, a discourse from which they were often explicitly excluded, nevertheless held valuable opportunities for them. If it insisted on perfect equality between friends, it could also, at least textually, create a space in which a writer could claim a type of equality across hierarchical gender and class divides. If it refused to recognize difference between friends, it could also provide a means for bridging difference. And if it excluded women, it also provided them with a vocabulary and set of tropes that they could adapt for their own purposes.
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Whitney uses these portrayals of friendship to shore up her self-representation as a virtuous woman writer: her poetic exchanges with male writers demonstrate her ability to participate actively in the masculine world of literary production, while her correspondence with her siblings and other family members illustrates her enduring connection to a supportive family circle, even as she moves beyond the confines of the domestic sphere.
Of course, moving beyond that sphere to claim a public position as an author was no easy feat for an early modern woman who was expected to confine herself and her speech to the home and family. Therefore, even as Whitney highlights her family connections, she distances herself from love and marriage, both of which would pose a threat to her independence (or, in the case of love, her chastity and reputation) and effectively place her back in the home. However, her status as a single woman and her decision to publish her poetry could also damage her reputation: as Patricia Phillippy has demonstrated, single urban women were often associated with “loose living” (446); and, as Ann Rosalind Jones claims, the association of “female eloquence with promiscuity” made publication a fraught enterprise for any early modern woman, but especially a woman who did not enjoy the protection of an authorizing husband or aristocratic status (1). I would suggest that Whitney defuses these threats by emphasizing her own chastity and virtue and by fashioning herself as an active and equal member of a caring community of friends and kin. Friendship, including friendships among siblings and other family members, allows Whitney to depict virtuous relationships with others that— unlike the traditional marital and domestic roles to which early modern women were usually relegated— are based on equality. Adopting the trope of the friend as counselor and equal, Whitney dispenses advice to her friends, relatives, and readers, thus illustrating that, while this single woman writer may inhabit a public role, she is protected both by her own morality and by a virtuous support system of family and friends.
The contemporary discourse of friendship that would have been available to Whitney celebrated absolute equality between friends: Cicero’s oft-quoted formulation of the friend as “a second self,” for example, demonstrates the appeal that the equalizing potential of friendship held for early modern humanists (108).5 Therefore, when Whitney distances herself from love and marriage and instead describes her relationships with others in terms of friendship, she replaces these hierarchical relationships with one that is predicated on the equality of its participants. However, equality and similarity are not the same thing, even though early modern writers on friendship equated the two more often than not. (source)
According to Wikipedia, “Isabella Whitney (born 1545?; fl. 1566–1573) was arguably the first female poet and professional woman writer in England. More specifically, Whitney is credited with being the first Englishwoman to have penned and published original secular poetry under her own name.[1]”
We are now going to skip a few centuries, to the 1800's. First, though, we need to discuss an extremely dysfunctional and harmful term that is commonly used when speaking of friendship in that time period – 'romantic friendship'.
Wikipedia summarizes 'romantic friendship' as:
A romantic friendship or passionate friendship is a very close but typically non-sexual relationship between friends, often involving a degree of physical closeness beyond that which is common in the contemporary Western societies. It may include for example holding hands, cuddling, hugging, kissing, giving massages, and sharing a bed, or co-sleeping, without sexual intercourse or other physical sexual expression.
In historical scholarship, the term may be used to describe a very close relationship between people of the same sex during a period of history when homosexuality did not exist as a social category. In this regard, the term was coined in the later 20th century in order to retrospectively describe a type of relationship which until the mid 19th century had been considered unremarkable but since the second half of the 19th century had become more rare as physical intimacybetween non-sexual partners came to be regarded with anxiety.[1]Romantic friendship between womenin Europe and North America became especially prevalent in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, with the simultaneous emergence of female education and a new rhetoric of sexual difference.[2] (source)
It is crucial to acknowledge that wehave created the term 'romantic friendship'; it did not exist before the mid 1900's. Before that, friendship had not been romanticized or sexualized. If we wish to be healthy and have an egalitarian society, we must normalize all forms love and passion. This extremely dysfunctional belief system and it's terminology have to go.
(On a side note, we currently have two other terms relating to friendship that are extremely harmful: 'friend zone' and 'bromance'. The term 'friend zone' was created by Rape Culture and perpetuates Rape Culture, toxic masculinity, and heteronormativity (see here and here). 'Bromance' is a harmful term because not only does it code any close relationship between two males as romantic, it also enforces toxic masculinity and homosexism (see here).)
However, it is commonly used in scholarship, and the next two articles use it. Just remember as you are reading the following quotes that there is nothing romantic about 'romantic friendship'.
Because women's friendships have generally been conducted in the private sphere, they have been poorly documented, particularly those of working-class women, who often had neither the education nor the leisure to write their own accounts. Letters, diaries, and literary writings of middle- and upper-class girls and women are the sources of most accounts of women's friendships. These, with a few documents on working-class women, reveal patterns of sociability, cooperation, and attachment persisting among women kin and friends.[85]In addition, historians have documented a female culture of romantic friendship that extends from sixteenth- century platonism through eighteenth-century private religious and spiritual experience to the sensual and passionate sorority of Victorian "true womanhood."[86]
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Proponents of domesticity worked to expand girls' schooling to prepare them for women's socially influential domestic responsibilities.[93]The flowering of school friendships both complemented and added adolescent passion to the solidarity of spiritual sisterhood. Carroll Smith-Rosenberg and Nancy Cott illustrate this passionate sorority of educated young women in the late eighteenth century, friends who throughout schooling and courtship relied on each other for spontaneity, emotional expression, and love; they addressed letters to "My Beloved," to "lay our hearts open to each other" and closed, "Imagine yourself kissed a dozen times my darling."[94]Passionate attachments such as these, expressed in public embraces, kisses, and the luxuriant sharing of beds caused no disapproval among elders or suitors.
Spiritual sisterhood was further secularized and sentimentalized in the nineteenth-century adoption of European romantic styles, including the epistolary tradition.[95]Women and girls recorded their ardent feelings for one another in passionate letters, diaries, and novels. Lillian Fademan's history of romantic friendship quotes typical passages from popular literature, such as these turgid verses by Christina Rossetti:
Golden head by golden head,Like two pigeons in one nest,Folded in each other's wings,They lay down in their curtained bed:Cheek to cheek and breast to breastLocked together in one nest.[96]
Thus, by the nineteenth century, adult middle-class women had adopted the romantic conventions of friendship that earlier generations of school girls had pioneered.[97]A mature diarist describes her friend: "Time cannot destroy the fascination of her manner. . . her voice is music to the ear."[98]Demonstrating the romantic spur of obstacles, the letters and diaries of nineteenth-century married women who found themselves separated from friends were especially passionate: "Dearest darling—How incessantly have I thought of you these eight days—all today—the entire uncertainty, the distance, the long silence—are all new features in my separation from you, grevious to be borne.” [99]
A friend's death presented an obstacle nothing could overcome. One newly married woman whose best friend died, mourned: "To me her loss seems irreparable, I have not a friend on earth, to who [sic] I could so freely communicate my feelings, at any time."[100]Even a honeymoon could stimulate romantic yearnings for a friend. From her honeymoon voyage, one bride writes to her friend of havingno onewith whom to share the pleasures of traveling and seals her complaint: "Darling, do you think every day that in my heart, I am close, close by your side?"[101]
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Nancy Cott seems to suggest romantic friendship absorbed the tension between the ideals and realities of nineteenth-century marriage.[105]Certainly, romantic friendship fit easily into traditions of female interdependence, sociability, and attachment, whereas romantic marriage contradicted inherited modes of authority, deference, and demeanor between husbands and wives. Romantic friendship thrived on its practicability in a period in which romantic companionate marital ideals were unpracticable.
From the late nineteenth century through the 1920s, various influences undermined romantic friendship; it remained in decline for most of the twentieth century. One set of changes involved male-female companionship, as education (especially coeducation) for women expanded and urban recreation diversifed. Young men and women spent more time in mixed-sex socializing; both in school and with peers, they shared more common interests and endeavors. Dating, which became widespread in the 1920s among high school and college women and men, was an intensive and time-consuming leisure pattern.[106]It isolated couples far more than nineteenth- century courtship or peer activity had, and it preempted the energies of female friendships. In 1920 a woman professor pronounced that "one seldom sees" the kind of women's friendship "that has all the wonderful community of interest one finds in ideal marriage."[107]
Another influence on friendship was the spread of popular sexology and psychoanalytic ideas. A new belief in the ubiquity of eroticism lifted the mantle of innocence from formerly unclassified romantic and sensual language and behavior. Schools actively condemned romantic friendships among girl students. Those that survived were forced underground.[108]The "lesbian threat" would hereafter shadow the course and culture of female friendships. By 1934 one sociologist, Joseph Folsom, observed fewer girls' "crushes," and less "homosexuality . . .in the form of strong friendships," which, he maintained, had been predominant among women more than men in the preceding fifty years.[109]
In response to a divorce rate that had been rising steadily from the late nineteenth century, sociologists and the up-and-coming professionals of marriage counseling placed more and more prescriptive value on companionship in marriage (strongly emphasizing mutuality), couple socializing, and "togetherness." M. E Nimkoff observed this new emphasis on "comradeship and understanding" in reviewing family sociology of the 1920s and 1930s.[110]Finally, the burgeoning industry of advertising increasingly sold identity and status through consumption, targeting women and urging them to explore romance and individuality with purchases. Beauty became a commodified individual quest, its products hyped with invidious female comparisons. Advertisers threatened that each failure of a homemaker's acumen or allure could result in loss to her sharper competitor.[111]
These remarks do not indicate the decline of same-sex friendships among women but rather the decline of romantic friendship, a culture of friendship that had been constructed within the ideology and practices of radically separated spheres of gender. Un-romantic but intimate friendships among women seem to have survived, filling the gap in marital companionship noted by twentiethcentury observers. As the companionate marriage ideal became more popular and more specifically romantic, egalitarian, and empathic, women intensified their emotional investment in marriage. Doing so, they relied increasingly on friendships to manage the emotional strains of marriage and to sustain their commitment to it. The researches of Harvey Locke and Ernest Burgess each concluded that friends were more important for the "marital adjustment" of wives than of husbands.
Sociologists in most eras of this century noted—if not in detail—both the intimacy of women's friendships and the contrast with the greater distance of men's.[112]The sociologists who restudied Middletown in the 1970s found "overwhelming" evidence that marital communication had improved since the 1920s and offered, without further comment, "a typical example from one housewife": "I feel there is nothing I couldn't go to him and ask. . .I mostly talk to one of my best friends, but I feel that you should look to your own husband for basic communication."[113]
The romantic friendship ideal withered as twentieth-century social changes accelerated the companionship of men and women. They amplified egalitarian and empathic themes in the marriage ideal, stigmatized passionate attachments between women, and replaced material interdependence between women with consumption in the marketplace. The tone of adult women's friendships faded from passionate attachment to affectionate camaraderie. Romantic friendship was not to emerge again among heterosexual women until the 1970s when contemporary feminism opened a new era of gender consciousness and conflict. It emerged once again within a middle-class segment, this time among young, college-educated women. Part of a much narrower class- and age-based stratum, they relied on its countercultural support rather than the larger structures of religion and mass literature that had spread nineteenth- century romantic friendship.
In the 1980s romantic friendship has drawn publicity, particularly from advertisers, who must still exploit autonomous feminist and female cultural themes because women have remained their most important audience. Long-distance telephone commercials, for example, portray the longing and intimacy between separated women friends. For the moment, however, romantic friendship appears to flourish mainly within small feminist circles. Yet if romantic friendship has been in eclipse for most of the twentieth century, intimate friendships among women have continued to thrive in spite of the vicissitudes of geographic mobility, the double day of work within and outside the home, pronatalist and marital revivals, and the feminization of poverty. Intimate friendship among women has not only persisted; it has expanded as effective individualism has affected new sectors of society.
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I have revised the history of friendship and marriage because my contemporary interviews contradicted so much of what the sociological account of the decline of community and the rise of companionate marriage would predict. I interpreted more than a decade of new social history to suggest that friendship and marriage evolved intertwined, symbiotic cultures infused with the modern ethos of affective individualism. The economic forces that separated public and private life, and associated forces of individualism, fostered the change from traditional forms of female interdependence to modern forms of intimacy. Concurrently, intimate friendship and intimate marriage became social ideals. But for women the ideals of friendship were generally more practicable than the ideals of marriage; and so romantic friendship both compensated for and served as a model for romantic companionate marriage. As husbands and wives became more companionate, women's friendships became less romantic. Intimate female friendship quietly persisted, unheralded support for women as wives and mothers. (source)
And:
According to Faderman, the way women have been allowed to express their friendships has changed dramatically in European and American history. In centuries past, and culminating in the 1800s, passionate friendships between two women often included physical displays such as kissing, hand holding and mutual caressing. These "romantic friendships" were not only common, but were considered quite normal, even "sweet", and in some instances, uplifting.
These relationships were "romantic" because they included almost all of the aspects of a modern heterosexual romantic relationship. Such friends would exchange verbal expressions of fondness, love letters and romantic poems. They would become jealous when others encroached upon the affections of their friend. The women in these friendships would declare their undying devotion to each other, and would profess to not be able to live without one another. They would spend all of their time together, or at least whatever time their husbands or fathers would allow, and they would pine for each other when separated. However, these relationships were "friendships" because in the ideal Victorian romantic friendship, although two friends could kiss, fondle each other, and hold one another all night long in sleep, there was no sex.
For example, in the German novel by Elisabeth Dauthendey, Of the New Woman and Her Love: A Book for Mature Minds(1900) the protagonist is a woman who rejects the "impure advances of sapphists (lesbians)" and falls in love through her friendship with another woman. And so goes climactic scene:
Without a sound, in the silent ardor of deep, blissful joy we lay in each other's arms. And the breath of our beating pulses was just enough to let us speak the beloved name -"Lenore"-"Yvette"-
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In America and Europe, romantic friendships were so highly valued and well accepted in their day that a young woman in a passionate and intense friendship who did not express her fondness for her friend with public displays of kisses and hand holding was considered to be "cold". However, at the same time sexual - or maybe, more specifically, "genital" - expressions of love between people of the same sex were scandalous, criminal, and specifically for women were often considered to be impossible because of the lack of a phallus. (source)
Like with men, passionate friendships between women became unacceptable in the 1900's. However, the new cultural mindset continued to be sexist and have distinct gender roles, which have created structural differences in current same-sex friendships.
For example, female friends are allowed to have emotions and hug. They are not allowed to hold hands or give small affectionate touches.
Men, of course, are not allowed to have any emotion other than aggressiveness.
But that is according to sexism. What is the truth? The truth is that the asexual community has done an enormous amount of work that will ultimately benefit everyone. Let's dive in!
Imagine: Bobby and Billy Joe are your very rad neighbors. They live together. They hold hands when they walk down the street. They pay their taxes together. Sometimes, they kiss. You would probably assume that they’re in a romantic relationship, but why is that? Holding hands is not inherently romantic. Neither is sharing a house, and neither is kissing.
But that’s what we’ve been taught to think. Our society holds very specific expectations for what a committed relationship should look like. The relationship should be romantic in nature. It should be monogamous. It should be central to our lives and should take precedence over platonic relationships. It should involve kissing and holding hands. It should involve saying “goodmorning” and “goodnight” and “I love you” to each other. It should involve sex and living together and marriage.
We also impose very specific expectations for what a friendship should and shouldn’t look like. Kissing would be strange; the friendship should not be as important or central as a romantic relationship; living together makes sense until the friends find romantic partners; marriage is out of question.
These black and white ideas about friendships and relationships are so ingrained that it’s difficult to question them without sounding or feeling stupid. “Why should kissing my friend be perceived as romantic?” may appear to have an obvious answer (that kissing is what people in romantic relationships do?), but that “obvious answer” usually does not have a strong basis besides that it is what people have been telling us. Kissing can be romantic, but is not inherently so.
We as a society also perpetuate the idea that platonic relationships are lesser than romantic relationships. For example, people often toss around the phrase “just friends,” implying that friendship is less important and less committed than romantic relationships. We are taught to throw away friendships for romance. We are taught to spend a good chunk of our lives searching for “the one”—a central, romantic relationship to whom we devote all or most of our physical and emotional intimacy. Why is romance the deciding factor of the importance of a relationship? As Kaz (one of the initial people who identified feeling a type of emotional attraction that was neither platonic nor romantic) puts it, “From a very young age, we are taught The Relationship Hierarchy. Which is something like: blood ties and marriage ties trump other sorts of ties. Sexual relationships trump non-sexual relationships. You have only one partner, who shall be your sexual partner and your lawfully-wedded spouse, and no other partners, and they trump all other relationships. Marriages that produce children trump non-procreating relationships, but Thou Shalt Not Be A Single Parent. ‘Family’ and ‘Friends’ are distinctive sets of people, and ‘Family’ trumps ‘Friends.’ ‘Friends’ should mean only people of the same sex, but otherwise, same sex friends trump other sex friends. You shall be emotionally intimate only with same sex friends, unless you are a man, and then Thou Shalt Not Have Emotions.”
In reality, though, there are many different kinds of relationships with many different nuances. But often, these nuances are colored over in an effort to fit societal molds of what a relationship should be. Two friends may want to kiss but won’t, fearing that it makes their relationship romantic. Two people may not experience romantic attraction for each other but may, because of sexual attraction, mistake their attraction for romantic, because sexual attraction is portrayed as an integral part of romantic relationships.
But what if you don’t want to be confined by typical definitions, ideas, and expectations of what a committed relationship should look like? What if you could have a serious, committed relationship without defining it as romantic or otherwise? Romantic love is portrayed as the ultimate and all-fulfilling type of love that we should spend our lives searching for. But here’s a plot twist: it doesn’t need to be.
The term “queerplatonic relationship” was coined to describe relationships more intense and intimate than what is considered common for a friendship, but that also don’t fit into the traditional romantic and sexual couple model. A queerplatonic relationship is characterized by a strong and significant bond or emotional commitment that is not romantic in nature.
Note that the “queer” in “queerplatonic” does not refer to identifying as queer/LGBTQIAP+, but rather the “queering” (challenging/deconstructing) of traditional notions of relationships. People of any gender, sexual orientation, or romantic orientation (and lackthereof) can be in a queerplatonic relationship. (Also, there are a ton of other terms that refer to relationships that are neither friendships nor romantic relationships. The important part is the self-defined aspect of the relationship.)
This broad and encompassing term questions the traditional model of a relationship and breaks down societal expectations of what a committed relationship should look like. It functions on the idea that people can do whatever they want in a relationship and shouldn’t need to fit their relationship into the binary “just friends” or “romantic partners” system. Depending on the specific relationship, people involved in the queerplatonic relationship may consider themselves partners, a couple, a triad, or any other term that implies commitment and intimacy. Queerplatonic partners can choose to live together, celebrate their anniversary, kiss and cuddle, and do anything they want to do. They can also choose to do none of the above. As Aromantic Aardvark describes it, “It’s uncharted territory that has no societal bounds, that has no one making a strange face at what you do or don’t do in your relationship (or at least, not from people who understand the concept).”
Since queerplatonic relationships are all different from each other, they are best described by (a variety of) people with personal experience. Here are some insightful perspectives on queerplatonic feelings/relationships:
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Queerplatonic is a word for describing relationships where an intense emotional connection transcending what people usually think of as ‘friendship’ is present, but the relationship is not romantic in nature … The ‘queer’ is a reference to the idea of queering relationships and ideas about relationships, not for describing the orientations or genders of anyone in a queerplatonic relationship. (Smith)
Love is not inherently, exclusively romantic. A primary partnership is not definitively romantic. You can have sex with a nonromantic partner, you can be committed to a nonromantic partner, you can kiss and cuddle and hug a nonromantic partner, you can live with a nonromantic partner, you can raise kids with nonromantic partners, you can mutually put each other first in a nonromantic relationship. Everything and anything you could possibly do or feel can be experienced in friendship and nonromantic partnership, except for romantic attraction. (The Thinking Asexual)
A commitment to live together forever, to raise a family together, to put each other first just like any pair of primary partners would, sharing the highest level of emotional and/or physical intimacy you’re willing to share with anyone, spending more time with each other than you do with anyone else, buying a house together, signing on as each other’s power of attorney in case of medical emergencies, pooling finances, etc., are all things that ordinary, common friends don’t do because they’re doing it all with their respective romantic-sexual partners instead. A pair of common friends in adulthood generally don’t live together, don’t share a great amount of physical intimacy, don’t go to each other first for financial support/emotional support, don’t have any expectations of each other that go beyond talking on the phone or getting together for coffee or whatever. A pair of common friends have a mutual understanding that they’ll drop each other in favor of their own romantic-sexual partner, if they have to or want to—in big ways or small ways—and this is especially true if one or both friends is married and/or seriously committed to a long-term romantic-sexual partner. “Friendship” is an inadequate word to describe nonsexual-nonromantic relationships that function as primary partnerships or otherwise go far beyond common friendship in expectations, emotions, and behavior. (The Thinking Asexual)
No behavior is inherently romantic. In a perfect, free world, you could be romantic monogamist but still have physically affectionate/sensual friendships with people you are not romantically interested in but do love, even while participating in a monogamous romantic relationship. You don’t have to want to fuck someone, in order to want physical intimacy and closeness with them. If you do want physical closeness with a friend, you don’t have to feel obligated to fuck them in any way, if you don’t really want to. Or date them. Ever. (The Thinking Asexual)
The “romantic-sexual/platonic” love dichotomy leaves no room for the real emotional nuances people experience in their attachments, and I think that it often causes us to live with simplified relationships not because we want to or because we have simple desires and feelings but because we have no experience, cultural context, or language to accommodate a complex social life or set of relationships. (The Thinking Asexual)(source)
I went over the basic definitions for the six different types of attraction in my terminology list. I'm now going to expand on them.
Emotional attraction. It is either passionate or companionate. Passionate platonic love is definitely real, even though our society now says it isn't. Again, if we wish to be healthy and have an egalitarian society, we must normalize all forms love and passion. This extremely dysfunctional belief system and it's terminology have to go.
Once again the asexual community has benefited us all by creating the term 'squish':
a squish:
- is an intense feeling of attraction, respect, appreciation and admiration
- is a desire to be close and connected and important to each other
- is not a desire to have sex or be in an exclusive romantic relationship
- gives you a nervous or excited feeling when you're with that person, and you may act kind of silly
- makes you think about them a lot
- gives you disproportionate joy to see that they like or respect you back
- makes you feel delighted that this person exists! (source; see there for history on the term)
Even a conventional website like lovepanky has an article on squishes, and googling 'intense friendship' brings up an infinite number of personal stories and articles. Again, there is absolutely nothing inherently romantic or sexual about emotions – either passionate or companionate.
Romantic attraction. If nothing is inherently romantic, than what is romantic attraction? Simply put, it's like wearing colored contacts or glasses. Everything you experience with that person is filtered as romantic (like holding hands or watching a film) because you feel romantic love instead of platonic love.
Sensual attraction. Sensual attraction is everything that is physical but not sexual. It is an incredibly wide spectrum, so the best way I can think to explain it is to give multiple quotes from multiple people.
General:
I love physical contact (hugs, kisses, playing with each other's hair, cuddling mostly) with people I care about, but I'm asexual and have no desire to have sex with them. [cut]I'm sex-phobic, so it's not even like I can compromise with whoever it is I'm with. It seems there are only 2 ways my situation can end; with me not being able to cuddle or kiss somebody in the platonic way I want to, or cuddling and kissing another person, only to leave them frustrated and upset because they didn't get what they want. (source)
If my touch aversion is low (so with people I trust enough) I oftentimes experience a sometimes very strong sensual attraction towards that person, I'd like to hug them, cuddle with them, kiss them (cheeks, forehead, lips, just in general), run my fingers through their hair and stuff. Just be physically affectionate. Most people I know, not just close friends, are totally fine with hugs. But for those specific people towards which I experience sensual attraction the rest (cuddling, kissing,..) is still “odd”. I've actually been told by one of them that it was “weird” when I was very affectionate with him (due to being very drunk..) and that “usually only people who want to hook up with me do this”.(source)
Anyway, when (and only when) I really trust guys sometimes I want to hug them and play with their hair and sit close to them and stuff, but not actually have sex with them. I try not to do it because I don't want to send the wrong message, but it can be very confusing for both parties. It's weirdly primal; the best way I could describe it would be skin-hunger. There is this one (straight) guy who is very tactile, and I flat out told him that sex was off the table and I was just using him for cuddles, and he's cool with it. So that's nice.
But what you guys are describing resonates and it's reassuring that other people like to touch their friends without it being sexual. So, thanks. (source)
Anonymous asked: Is sensual frustration a thing? Like sexual frustration but it's with sensual stuff?????
It’s totally a thing, Anon. I feel it frequently :/ Snuggling is awesome and when I can’t or feel like I’m imposing too much on my friends to ask if we can I either get really frustrated or sad. (source)
Homosensual? Like, desiring to cuddle and kiss someone of your gender? And, Bisensual would be that but, your gender + another? I think you just solved my most recent confusion! I knowI'm aroace but I just wanna kiss and cuddle girls and nbs and I was like f*** am I not aro but I amand Bi/Polysensual is the word I was looking for! Thank you! (source)
Anonymous asked: So, are the aesthetic and sensual attractions just as varied as the romantic and sexual are? Does that mean that one can be sensual-repulsed, or a-aesthetic? What would a sensual-repulsed person behave like, in your opinion?
Absolutely!
I would actually call that touch-averse, which is terminology already out there. That person wouldn’t want to be touched by others - it might be as mild as just not wanting to be touched by strangers, or just not wanting certain types of touch, or it could be not wanting any kind of contact at all with anyone.
Sensual and aesthetic are terms that don’t lend themselves well to our current prefixes, so we usually don’t label them, but there are definitely folks who don’t experience sensual and/or aesthetic attraction. (source)
For more on touch aversion, see here.
Caressing:
I have always enjoyed “feeling up” a woman, although touching breasts gets pretty boring to me - rather quickly. But a woman's body has a nice touch to it. And there is a certain intimacy of touching, togetherness and physical beingwith someone nice that I really like. It just gets too weird if she wants to take off her underpants - because I never have much cared for the sex act. I very much prefer to never have the sex act. I do not want to go there. (source)
There's something to be said for a good feel up too!!! I was never quite sure whether I was just anti-sex or anti-intimate (still not to be honest!) but I do like a good grope and snog now and then. A couple of people mentioned liking the soft female form and I can confirm (being a female myself) that it works both ways as the male body is also a nice turn on for it's anti-softness!! - have never wanted to take it any further though, just have a nice kiss, cuddle and a bit of a snog-fest now and then! (source)
Kissing:
Anonymous asked: Does sensual attraction have to include kissing? Because I think that's what I'm feeling towards someone but I just don't like kissing (and lots of things I've read on sensual attraction include that.) Could you please point me towards some sites/resources to help me?
I don’t really know of any resources specifically geared to sensual attraction, but no, it does not have to include kissing! It generally just involves wanting to do intimate/sensual (but not sexual) things with another person, but what that looks like will vary from individual to individual.
For example, I love people biting my neck, but my stomach is too sensitive for much touching, so I don’t particularly like stomach caresses. But someone else could absolutely love stomach caresses and think biting was just painful and off-putting, and that’s all okay! We could both still be feeling sensual attraction, and just want it to be expressed in different ways. You don’t have to tick off every point on a bullet list for it to be considered sensual attraction. So you don’t like kissing! There are plenty of other ways to be intimate/sensual. :) (source)
I'm very sure that I'm asexual and yet I love french kissing. love it. can't get enough of it. for hours if possible.
That has nothing to do with my asexuality. (source)
I love making out, cuddling, and affection in general, just not sex. (source)
I love it! Haha!
I love any kind of physical contact, the kissing, the cuddling, wrapping myself around someone and the rolling about on the floor and in the fields! (source)
And to answer the question - enjoying french kissing does not automatically mean that a person is not asexual. I'm asexual, & I really enjoy it. :) (source)
Not like just quick pecks on the lips. But like… deep, platonic kissing, whatever that means to you.
Do you think platonic kissing is fine? Like kissing between friends or other people you care about?
By platonic I mean there is no sexual intention behind the kiss at all and most likely no traditionally romantic ones. The kiss as a way to be physically intimate without sexuality playing into it. Without romantic or sexual motives or thoughts.
I’m just curious because platonic kissing has come up a few times recently for me and now I’m wondering what other people think about it. (source)
There are, however, people who find kissing calming or a way to express emotional intimacy through physical contact. The deepest relationships aren’t always sexual or romantic ones and as human beings we tend to seek a physical way to express our closeness to another human being. If you have very deep binding relationships and you feel the need to be physically close, but you have no romantic or sexual interest in the other person, kissing I think is a beautiful way to express that (provided that they also feel the same way). It’s never right to go around forcing touching on other people, but if you both feel the same way there’s nothing wrong with it.
I think it’s a valid form of physical self expression for people in a platonic relationship. (source)
I’m an aro ace and holy crap do I love kissing.
I guess my thoughts on platonic kissing are YES? (source)
omg kissing is lovely so YES
tbqh i like kissing the best when there are no romantic or sexual motives? (source)
This is a really interesting idea. I’ve recently just said f*** it all and have just started kissing a lot of my friends but not like…deep kisses? But I like small, short, sweet kisses and face kisses a lot better, no matter who I’m with. But I don’t see a problem with kissing other people, especially if you’re good friends. Like NBD? (Taters and Slimm y'all are gonna get smooched so hard I swear.) (source)
I think platonic kissing is fine. [i personally want to platonically make out with my best friend if that makes sense. Like I love them but platonic only and I just want to show them affection?] (source)
Asexuals and sex. As I define on my terminology list, some asexuals are sex-favorable. It does not matter if one is repulsed, indifferent, or favorable – all are equally valid versions of asexuality.
One article says:
It seems like the hot new thing these days in asexual visibility is to highlight the existence of asexuals who like sex.
Or is it really? I can’t actually think of any example where it’s mentioned in major media. It doesn’t appear to be in Huffington Post’s massive six-part series, although they mention that some gray-A and demisexual people like sex. It seems aces talk about it in their own spaces (with more or less emphasis, depending on the space), but it doesn’t actually make it into the media, for better or for worse.
Talking about asexuals who like sex serves many points that we often wish to make:
1) Asexual spaces are very inclusive. We’re okay with people flirting with the boundaries of our socially constructed boxes.
2) Asexual spaces are sex-positive. We’re not skittish about people in our midst having sex.
3) Sexuality is complicated and we know it.
4) We take very seriously the definition of asexuality as lacking sexual attraction. It’s not about behavior, and it’s not about all those other reasons why people like sex. There’s something about sexual attraction that makes it especially important to our experiences.
By repeating all these ideals, we encourage the community to fulfill them.
Of course, there are disadvantages as well. Are mainstream audiences really ready to hear about asexuals who like sex? It seems like it could potentially provoke major negative reactions above and beyond the typical negative reactions. Our de facto solution is to talk about it amongst each other and not talk about it much to outsiders.
Also, some asexuals feel a bit uncomfortable with point #4, because to them, not wanting sex really is the most important aspect of their asexiness. It’s like when I said last month that self-awareness of difference was the most important aspect of asexuality to me, and multiple commenters said that they weren’t so self-aware in the way I meant it. Wow, the experience I think is most important, other aces didn’t even experience! Imagine that. It’s almost like we are more than one person.
In my own observation, the discussion seems to be missing something important: People talking about their own experience as asexuals who like sex. (Disclosure: I am a gray-A and I like sex, so that’s sort of close.) I almost always see it posed as a hypothetical. As in the title of this post, it’s always about “them” and not “us”. This is rather bothersome to me, as if asexuals who like sex were merely a political tool, even if it is used for positive ends. I also think it empowers critics, because it’s easier to diss people not present than to diss people to their face.
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On the other hand, asexuals who like sex may not be speaking up because they don’t want to be put under personal fire. Some of them may even be talking about their own experience right now, but choose to hide it by posing it as a hypothetical situation. That seems like the kind of thing I might do, hypothetically. I like that it’s common knowledge among ace communities that some asexuals like sex, and I like that I don’t have to put myself out there to make the point.
TL;DR: There are lots of good reasons to talk about asexuals who like sex, but I have mixed feelings about the how it’s dominated by third-person accounts.
And another:
I am asexual. I want sex. These are not mutually exclusive in the least.
It is quite frustrating to be reading AVEN and for so many asexuals to discuss asexuality as if it meant asexuals did not want sex. They have sex drives, just like anyone else. It just so happens that unlike most people their sex drive doesn't drive them towards any particular sex.
It is bad enough when other people misunderstand asexuality, but when asexuals on this board misunderstand as well, I find it quite alarming.
Wanting sex because it is pleasurable is entirely separate from not experiencing sexual attraction. I am not attracted to people, but they happen to be quite nice and have useful physiological features.
On the flipside, you can experience sexual attraction and not have the slightest interest in sex.
Asexuality is the lack of sexual attraction, nothing more and nothing less.
This is a repost of my article “Asexual Elitism is Alive and Well” from Issue 25 in AVENues, put online in 2013 and written in 2012. Since writing this article I have found many asexual 101 and 201 spaces that don’t repeat the trends I identify here, but asexual elitism is also still pervasive in the ‘asexual’ tag on Tumblr so I thought it was worth a revisit. See end for comments on edits to this version.
As asexuals we’ve been fighting to get out of the closet of societal obscurity, but we might have lost a few of our own along the way. In the push to legitimize asexuality as a unique sexual orientation, some asexual people have become elitist as they police the barriers of who is in and outside of asexuality.
This topic has been discussed for years on the forums of the Asexuality Visibility and Education Network (or AVEN), and as the user gbrd143 wrote in a pinned sticky on the Q&A forum, “this is an old subject which, for some reason. Just. Won’t. Die” (gbrd143). I’d like to propose a reason for this; perhaps asexual elitism is still alive and well, albeit in a manifestation we have not considered before.
Asexual elitism is an elitist attitude where some asexual people don’t consider others to be asexual because they participate in an activity that the asexual elitist thinks falls outside of the realm of asexuality. Notably, people who are not asexual also participate in this trend. What the activity is, be it masturbation, kissing, or sex, varies between asexual elitists (gbrd143).
AVEN, as a whole, does not participate in asexual elitism by defining asexuality on its website homepage as “a person who does not experience sexual attraction.” This definition allows an asexual person to engage in any type or amount of sexual behavior; their identity only relies on the fact that they are not sexually attracted.
On the AVEN forums, gbird143 expands on this by writing “[i]n theory, a person could even earn their living as a prostitute and still be a perfectly valid asexual” (gbrd143). While it might seem like we have exposed and challenged asexual elitism, I will argue that in fact we have only changed its superficial appearance. We see this through a distinction between 'exposed’ and hidden asexual elitism, an exploration of what being sex-favourable is like for some asexual people, en explanation of how asexual elitism is used to protect some asexual people from sexuality, and by ultimately rejecting asexual elitism in all of its forms.
Asexual elitism can, at least, be 'exposed’ or hidden. Exposed asexual elitism has been described up to this point as the only form of asexual elitism. I describe it as exposed because it has been a topic of much discussion and some people believe we have it exposed it, challenged it, and no longer need to discuss it. This is an erroneous belief. Exposed elitism is an active rejection; one person will tell another person that they are not asexual because they participate in a 'sexual’ activity such as masturbating, kissing, or having sex (gbrd143). The asexual person’s sexual identity is overtly attacked and they are actively rejected from the asexual community.
Hidden asexual elitism is a passive rejection; asexuality is defined in a way where a person who self identifies as asexual finds that they do not fit under the definition of asexuality. This is done when academics and asexual people expand the definition of asexuality beyond sexual attraction, or suggest asexuality can be understood or marked by traits other than self-identification or sexual attraction. For example, this can occur when people say asexual people do not have sex or do not like sex. Although these are common traits within asexuality, they do not define asexuality and are not representative of all asexual people.
Hidden asexual elitism may leave some asexual people feeling as if they are rejected, but no one has actively kicked them out of the community. Academia and the asexual community frequently practice forms of hidden asexual elitism.
Inherent to nearly all conversations about asexuality, on AVEN and in scholarly journals, is the assumption that asexuals either do not want to have sex or will have sex if it is the most convenient option. One example of this is gbird143’s claim that a person is still asexual if they have sex under “extenuating circumstances”. These circumstances are described as possible of being “less than a death threat” and potentially as small as “the path of least resistance which will avoid an argument” (gbird143).
This is echoed in Mark Carrigan’s article, “How do you know you don’t like it if you haven’t tried it?”, when he describes asexual people’s personal interest in sex as either sex-averse or sex-neutral. There are only two categories. Carrigan claims that asexual people exist who specifically want to have sex, but the explanation for this is that they have sex for the intimacy it offers (14). In all of these articulations the asexual person who wants to have sex because it feels good is absent.
A person who wants to have sex, but is not sexually attracted to anyone, is a type of asexual that is largely ignored or, as shown in Carrigan’s explanation, written away as wanting to have sex for a reason other than the act itself. This kind of asexual person is so absent from conversations about asexuality that we might be led to believe that they don’t exist or are impossible. This is only an illusion created by asexual elitism.
In our quest to define asexual people as different from allosexual people (often reduced to their sexuality), many asexual people originally said that asexuals don’t have sex. This has since been exposed as asexual elitism and has been rectified to say that some asexual people will have sex because of hypothetical reason a, b, c, and so forth. Even though this list is hypothetically judgement free and exhaustive, my earlier quotes of gbird143 show that it assumes that an asexual people has sex as a compromise.
If the asexual sex worker could receive money for playing basketball, or if the asexual person in the relationship could avoid an argument or feel intimacy by going swimming, they wouldn’t choose to have sex. They typically have sex because the other person wants sex, and not because they want to. What about the asexual people that have sex because they orgasm, it feels good, and they actually want to? This is a perfectly legitimate reason to have sex; I’m sure many allosexual people would agree with me. So why is this reason suddenly suspect when it’s suggested by an asexual person?
We have not entirely left asexual elitism behind. While we may not outright say that asexual people who want sex because it feels good are not asexual, we fail to include their reasons in the list of reasons that asexual people would have sex. How we speak about asexuality inherently ignores this type of asexual. I believe that this is not incidental and occurs because even though we outwardly reject asexual elitism, the remnants of it remain in how we conceive the world and who we say exists in it.Asexual elitism is not gone; it remains pervasive because it is difficult to isolate and because we have attached a stigma to being an asexual elitist. We don’t want to consider that we may in fact be one, but we encourage asexual elitism by failing to acknowledge specific reasons for having sex. Having sex because it feels good is an important reason to include or exclude; it defines an entire type of asexual people. If I may be so bold, I would say that these are the sex-favorable asexuals that should be added onto Carrigan’s defining list of asexual people’s interest in sex as either sex-neutral or sex-averse (14).I have no illusions that I can speak for all sex-favorable asexuals, but I hope to better illuminate the lived situations of at least some of them. I have often described sex-favorable asexual people as having an itch they want to scratch. They cannot find the right tools for the job, but they’ll use whatever is available because it really itches and they don’t mind the tools at their disposal. They’ve accepted that there is no “right tool” and that they will never get the job done the typical way allosexual people get it done because they are not sexually attracted to their partner. In many cases, that’s fine. The sex is of a different kind, but not ruined.
Another type of sex-favorable asexual could have no metaphorical itch or sexual libido. They might enjoy sex simply because, like jogging, it feels good. If something feels good, why not do it?
Unfortunately, the ignored reasons for sex-favorable asexual people having sex might be unwelcome because we’ve heard them before and asexual people have made an effort to shut them out.
The reasons sex-favourable asexual people have sex sound similar to insulting responses to asexual people we’ve heard before from some allosexual people. “You’re missing out”, “have you tried it?”, and “you’ll change your mind” are just a few of the responses allosexual people have given to my asexuality. Since sex-favorable asexual people are equally capable of telling sex-neutral or sex-averse asexual people these things, they become the wolf in the sheep pasture.
Hidden asexual elitism stigmatizes and threatens to kick out sex-favorable asexual and protect the other asexual people from what seems to be a allosexual mindset. We must reject this.
Our earliest rejections of asexual elitism have taught us that having sex is not the line between allosexual and asexual; similarly, liking sex should not be the line between allosexual and asexual. Only when we are ready to be self-critical, and see who our language assumes to not exist, can we consider putting asexual elitism behind us.
Until then, we need to keep it in our message boards, in our wiki definitions pages, and in our articles, and expose it again and again as something that we will not condone. We can’t be too aggressive though; the intention is not to stigmatize asexual elitists in place of the asexuals they tried to exclude. We know what it’s like to be excluded from society. We must be careful to not repeat that trend.
I want to stress that I am only giving these three quotes to challenge mainstream stereotypes of asexuals hating sex; not to imply that sex-favorable asexuality is better. It's not. And it doesn't matter what your sexuality is, nothing is more important than consent. Consent is always the bottom line. Always.
I'm going to finish this part with one last quote:
Anonymous asked: Is it strange to want to kiss or have sex with my [Queerplatonic partners]? [cut] It just seems like, if we hadn't been set up by society to think sex was the result of only a few types of love, if we were just going by out feelings... we would be okay with it. But I'm afraid of going too far or scaring them off
Nope! Wanting to have sex or kiss your QPP is completely normal. All QPR’s are different and some people connect in different ways with their partners. Sex and kissing are two of the many things people often think QPP’s don't engage in when often times they are quite common. And you are right! Society set us up thinking that sex is connected to certain types of love or romance when in reality it isn’t.
As for being afraid of scaring them off I would just talk to your QPP about it. Tell them exactly what you told me in the respects of society and love and sex. Make sure they are okay with it and that you are both secure with your needs and wants of the relationship. Maybe explaining to them how all QPR’s are different.
For your romantic feelings you think you may be feeling I would just test it out and see. Only you can know if they are romantic feelings. If they are or you are concerned about them I would try talking to your partner about them as well. But it is 100% possible that you just want to kiss and have sex with your QPP despite romantic feelings. Romantic feelings do not need to be involved for those or many other actions. (source)
We are now going to turn to the science of love!
The most fascinating and positive thing to me about science is that there is always something new to discover, and oftentimes that something changes life as we know it – like discovering the world was round instead of flat. The well-known quote “I am the wisest man alive, for I know one thing, and that is that I know nothing.” is very true, and often attributed to Plato and Socrates (if Socrates really said it is a whole different story).
So as we move forward let's remember we know very little about the brain and to always keep an open mind.
What we do know is that Brain Chemistry, or Neurochemistry, is the “chemical processes and phenomena related to the nervous system” (source); and that there are seven important neurochemicals that are fundamental to the various types of love. Neurochemicals is an umbrella term for hormones and neurotransmitters.
Oxytocin.
In 1920, a popular New York pediatrician reported a startling and heartbreaking problem: Institutionalized babies were dying. In fact, all institutionalized babies were dying. The death rate was 100 percent for children under two. What was happening? They had shelter. They had food. Their diapers were changed. They were otherwise healthy. So what was the missing link?
The missing link was touch. These babies received little to no touch and caring, and thus could not thrive. The surprising (or not so surprising) truth is that babies require touch, love, and cuddles to survive. Touch is the only sense a child cannot live without. Deaf children will survive, blind children will survive, but unless a child can touch and be touched, he will die.
Now, I’m guessing our ancestors never worried about giving their children an adequate amount of touch. Babies were carried and held because that’s how mammals do it. Evolution made it so. The safest place for babies was in the arms of a caretaker. In many traditional hunter-gatherer societies like those observed in The Continuum Concept, babies are held constantly in the first six months of life. In Bali, at the age of three to six months, families will perform a ground-touching ceremony to celebrate the first time a baby’s feet touch the ground. Humans aren’t the only species that need copious amounts of touch. In his famous studies in the sixties, Dr. Harry Harlow found that rhesus monkeys preferred softer, cloth-covered dummy mothers to wire ones, and in times of distress preferred the cloth dummy if it offered no food, even if food was available with the wire dummy.
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Research with other mammals indicated that the more physical contact infants had with their mothers, the less fearful and the more confident they were. They were also more mentally healthy later in life and were calmer and more attentive with their babies, and coped well with the stress of unfamiliar environments. Dr. Henry Chapin, the famous pediatrician who made the observation about institutionalized children, also found that animals who did not receive enough touch tended to be frequently tense and exhibited impulsive, anxious, irritable, and aggressive behavior.
Research consistently confirms how critical touch is to human development. Our skin and brain develop from the same embryonic tissue and some scientists even consider skin to be the “outer layer of the brain.” In Colombia, the phenomenon of “kangaroo care” (periods of skin-to-skin contact) was invented out of necessity to keep premature infants warm, but doctors noticed some other positive side effects: the death rate, which had once been at 70 percent for premature infants, dropped dramatically. Doctors found that skin-to-skin contact regulated the babies’ heart rates and breathing, and helped them to gain weight more easily. Additionally, researchers found that preemies who received kangaroo care had brain development patterns in ten minutes that was equal to four weeks of development in preemies who received normal care. They found that skin-to-skin contact helped develop neural synapses and increased the amount of alpha waves (associated with contentment and bliss) in the brain. (source)
Oxytocin has been linked to Motherhood for a while. Researchers have long noted its link to the letdown of milk and the pacing of birth. Yet it’s only recently that information has started to be gathered on just how central oxytocin is to the maternal experience.
During pregnancy, the levels of oxytocin in a woman’s body rise steadily, priming her for bonding with her infant. In animal research, as delivery approaches, the MPOA region of the hypothalamus ( a region already rich in oxytocin receptors) notably increases the size of its cell bodies, making the region increasingly capable of oxytocin production. This extra-oxytocin-enriched region then goes on to liaise with the dopamine-producing (reward) regions of the brain, making all of this bonding behavior extra rewarding.
Put plainly, one of the major changes your brain goes through in pregnancy is the laying of the groundwork for an increased sensitivity to (and pleasure taken from) bonding. From a neuropsychological perspective, bonding — on repeat — is very likely job one of Motherhood. Babies can’t explain what they need. So our brains direct us to keep them close to help figure it out. We could perceive these new arrivals to our world as strangers. We could ignore their entreats for warmth and nourishment with cold indifference. But we don’t. We fall in love with them at first site. And our oxytocin-soaked brains very likely maneuver the entire operation.
Of course, given the many ways the brain can produce Oxytocin, pregnancy is not the only route to bonding with a new baby. Oxytocin is in ample supply during both delivery and breastfeeding. Yet it also comes from simple touch. From holding a gaze with someone you love. From meeting the needs of that person and having feelings of compassion for them. All opportunities in high supply during the early moments of caring for a new arrival. Whether you physically carried your baby or not, early parenthood is brimming with opportunities for genuine, caring connection — and these are the landmarks of oxytocin country. (source)
Physical affection releases feel-good hormones. One of the reasons why hugging, holding hands, and touching feel good to us is that these behaviors elevate our level of oxytocin, a hormone that reduces pain and causes a calming sensation. Oxytocin is increased during sexual orgasm and also as a result of affectionate touch, as this study demonstrates. (source)
Released during sex and heightened by skin-to-skin contact, oxytocin deepens feelings of attachment and makes couples feel closer to one another after having sex. Oxytocin, known also as the love hormone, provokes feelings of contentment, calmness, and security, which are often associated with mate bonding. (source)
The results of the study uncovered some fascinating findings on attachment. The brain scans of participants show that the same parts of the brain that are active for long-term romantic love have been known to be engaged for maternal attachment. These brain regions, such as the thalamus and the substantia nigra, have a high density of oxytocin and vasopressin receptors. Oxytocin and vasopressin receptors are interesting because they have been shown to regulate social behavior, monogamy, and bonding.
Another interesting finding that emerges from this research concerns the body's regulation of pain and stress and its relationship to romantic love. The research shows that certain areas of the brain, such as the dorsal Raphe, are activated in intense romantic love. The dorsal Raphe is involved in the body's response to pain and stress. Past research has suggested that the goal of the attachment system is to feel a sense of security. Research indicates that association with an attachment figure reduces pain and stress. What we can gather from this research is that feeling safe and secure is an important criteria in long-term intense romantic love. (source)
After exposing the participants to several cognitively stressful tasks, which included performing complex mental arithmetic and watching a video of a marital conflict, the researchers took biochemical samples to assess level of stress. They also took measures of oxytocin, a hormone associated with childbirth that also increases during sexual intercourse and in response to nonsexual touch.
Everyone became more stressed by the experimental manipulation. However, participants who rated high on the affectionate scales also showed a more positive oxytocin response. This meant that the highly affectionate participants were better able, physiologically, to handle the stress of the situation. The participants were stressed, but their bodies bounced back from the experimental manipulation more quickly than did those with low levels of affection in their daily lives. (source)
Social scientists have shown in many studies over the years that supportive touch can have good outcomes in a number of different realms. Consider the following examples: If a teacher touches a student on the back or arm, that student is more likely to participate in class. The more athletes high-five or hug their teammates, the better their game. A touch can make patients like their doctors more. If you touch a bus driver, he's more likely to let you on for free. If a waitress touches the arm or shoulder of a customer, she may get a larger tip.
But why does a friendly or supportive touch have such universal and positive effects? What's happening in our brains and bodies that accounts for this magic?
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In addition to calming us down and reducing our stress response, a friendly touch also increases release of the oxytocin — also called the “cuddle hormone” — which affects trust behaviors.
“Oxytocin is a neuropeptide, which basically promotes feelings of devotion, trust and bonding,” Hertenstein says.
Oxytocin levels go up with holding hands, hugging — and especially with therapeutic massage. The cuddle hormone makes us feel close to one another.
“It really lays the biological foundation and structure for connecting to other people,” Hertenstein says. (source)
My loving boyfriend runs off early in the morning to work long hours as a radio reporter, while I write from home during the day and teach adult education classes two nights a week. That kind of schedule usually left us with very little time to be near each other long enough to get in more than a passing hug. And I was hardly getting much physical contact with people in other areas of my life. I might hug and kiss a friend hello, but rarely would I sit so close that our arms touched or cram into the same side of the booth at a restaurant. And I routinely used the purse-as-shield trick in crowded public spaces. That’s why the encounter on the bus caught me by surprise. Things have to be pretty bad if you’re on the verge of nuzzling an unsuspecting commuter, right?
It was then that my journalistic curiosity kicked in — I wanted to find out if it was actually possible to be “touch deprived.” My research led me to psychologist Matthew Hertenstein, PhD, director of the Touch and Emotion Lab at DePauw University. According to Hertenstein, touch deprivation is a real thing. “Most of us, whatever our relationship status, need more human contact than we’re getting,” says Hertenstein. “Compared with other cultures, we live in a touch-phobic society that’s made affection with anyone but loved ones taboo.” (Behavioral scientists have found that about two to four feet is the accepted amount of personal space most Americans need to feel comfortable; in Latin America and the Middle East that distance can shrink to less than a foot or two.)
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I knew how good it felt to get a reassuring hug or squeeze, but I’d never given much thought to how my body interpreted the sensation. “A hug, pat on the back, and even a friendly handshake are processed by the reward center in the central nervous system, which is why they can have a powerful impact on the human psyche, making us feel happiness and joy,” explains neurologist Shekar Raman, MD, based in Richmond, Virginia. “And it doesn’t matter if you’re the toucher or touchee. The more you connect with others — on even the smallest physical level — the happier you’ll be.”
With this advice in mind, I decided that for one week, I’d make it my goal to touch someone every day — in a noncreepy way — to see what I was missing. The most logical place to start was at home with my boyfriend. As Hertenstein told me, when it comes to touch, awareness is key; if I was distracted, I’d be less likely to reap the stress-reducing rewards. So before my boyfriend left for an overnight trip, I concentrated on how we held each other close as we said goodbye. I tightened my grasp around his waist, closed my eyes, breathed deeply, and focused on the feel of his shirt buttons against my cheek and his hand cupping the back of my head. Those few moments made me feel closer to him all day, as if we’d filled up on a hearty embrace, rather than snacked on a light hug.
In public, however, things were trickier. While Hertenstein had assured me that opportunities present themselves frequently, I had a tough time discerning when it felt right to reach out. But I got my chance on day two, when I accidentally stepped on the back of a woman’s shoe in line at the grocery store and she whirled around to give me a dirty look.
“I’m so sorry,” I said, pausing to squeeze her wrist to drive home my sincerity. Her expression softened as she said, “No problem.” It was a small gesture — and not nearly as awkward as I had imagined.
No one wants to be stepped on, of course, but a warm touch, even if the other person isn’t prepared for it, can create an instant attitude makeover, says neuroscientist Michele Noonan, PhD. “Touching someone while apologizing helps build a connection,” she explains. “The sensation triggers the brain region called the insula, which is involved in emotional processing, and can help ease a person’s irritation in the moment.”
That night, when an old friend came over for dinner, I felt dissatisfied by our perfunctory hug hello. It seemed a shame that in light of my recent experiences, I greeted her with a squeeze that felt as if we were merely fulfilling a rote social obligation.
“I need another one,” I blurted out. My friend laughed nervously — she’s one of the least demonstrative people I know — but she opened her arms so we could embrace a few seconds longer. When we separated, she said, “You know what? I needed that.” The hug seemed to unleash her: Suddenly she was tearing up, telling me about how the man she’d been seeing had become distant — not calling, canceling dates. When she’d arrived at my apartment, her face hadn’t betrayed that anything was wrong, but that extra physical connection allowed her to feel safe enough to let it all out. Such a simple action, I realized, had conveyed deep meaning. (source)
One particularly famous hormone, oxytocin, is released from the hypothalamus in response to a variety of touch. Oxytocin is released by skin-to-skin contact between newborns and mothers. During nursing, the feel of an infant suckling elicits oxytocin release, which in turn evokes milk letdown. But oxytocin is also released by massage, by hugs, by grooming among members of a baboon troop, by rodent mothers that lick their pups. Children raised in large Romanian orphanages and deprived of touch are emotionally ravaged; they also have low blood levels of oxytocin. Oxytocin is thought to underlie the enduring bonds we form with a parent, friend or lover. Presumably we call our mammalian companions ‘pets’ because it is touch and the oxytocin it releases that binds us. Their soft fur, so different from that of wolves or African wildcats, seems designed for the pleasure of our touch. Look into the eyes of your dog and chances are good you will both release oxytocin. (source)
We animal lovers have long known that, no matter what life may bring — sickness, sadness, or radiant health — pets make us feel better. Numerous studies have documented astonishingly wide-ranging effects. Cat owners enjoy a 30 percent reduction in heart attack risk. Watching swimming fish lowers blood pressure. Stroking a dog boosts the immune system. Now researchers can explain the source of our companion animals’ healing powers: Our pets profoundly change the biochemistry of our brains. “This is science that supports a truth the heart has always known,” Meg Olmert writes in her book “Made for Each Other,” a synthesis of more than 20 years of work on the biology of the human-animal bond. She singles out one neuropeptide: oxytocin, a brain chemical long known to promote maternal care in mammals.
Oxytocin levels rise in a mother’s brain as she goes into labor, and produces the contractions that deliver the baby. Once her infant is born, just the sight, smell, or thought of the baby is enough to trigger milk letdown (a fact that has caused many a new mother to ruin a blouse.) Humans have known for millennia that this affects animal mothers, too: Ancient Egyptian tomb art shows a kneeling man milking a cow with her calf tethered to her front leg.
But oxytocin’s powers are not, as once thought, limited to mothering or triggered only by labor. Nor is it confined to females, to mammals, or even to vertebrates. Even octopuses — who not only lack breasts, but die when their eggs hatch — have a form of oxytocin called cephalotocin.
Oxytocin causes a cascade of physiological changes. It can slow heart rate and breathing, quiet blood pressure and inhibit the production of stress hormones, creating a profound sense of calm, comfort, and focus. And these conditions are critical to forming close social relationships — whether with an infant, a mate, or unrelated individuals — including, importantly, individuals belonging to different species.
In a study published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences last June, Japanese researchers sprayed either oxytocin or saline solution into the nostrils of dogs, who then reunited with their owners. The owners were told not to interact with their dogs, but those whose pets inhaled oxytocin found them impossible to ignore. Statistical analysis showed the oxytocin inhalers were far more likely to stare, sniff, lick, and paw at their people than those who had saline solution.
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All animals appear to have cells directly under the skin that activate oxytocin in the brain. So gentle touch — from grooming your horse’s coat to making love with your spouse — is a powerful trigger. But so is simply thinking about someone you love, whether it’s a person or a pet. And in fact, a small study published this fall at Massachusetts General Hospital found that MRI scans of women’s brains lit up in the same areas when shown pictures of their pets as when shown pictures of their children. (source)
Vasopressin.
With regards to relationships, vasopressin acts similarly to oxytocin and is rarely talked about by itself.
Previous research has shown that vasopressin, like the hormone oxytocin, is associated with parenting behavior and social bonding, including falling in love. In fact, the two hormones are structurally very similar, and there are receptors in the brain that interact with both of them. (source)
Vasopressin is linked to behavior that produces long-term, monogamous relationships. (source)
Oxytocin and vasopressin are knownas the attachment hormones, and are a fundamental and universal part of life. Everyone has them, and we all have a deep need forthem.
However, this does not invalidate being touch-averse and there is nothing wrong with being touch-averse. Everyone's body is different and everyone's experiences are valid.
There are two more sets of neurochemicals to cover, so let's move on. We'll be talking about how they all work together at the end.
Norepinephrine.
Norepinephrine, as is clear from its other name Noradrenaline, stimulates the production of adrenaline, which makes our heart race, and the palms sweat. (source)
Norepinephrine, a stimulant closely related to dopamine, is most likely what gives you the energy for late-night sessions of staring into each other’s eyes. It can produce sleeplessness, elation, loss of appetite, butterflies in the stomach … in short, the whole megillah of nuttiness that comes with romantic love. (source)
Before a big date, you might notice your heart rate tick up and your hands get sweatier. It's not just a nervous tick that causes your anxiety to rise; it's actually the stimulation of adrenaline and norepinephrine, says Dr. Kirk. "This can lead to having a physical sensation of craving and the desire to focus your attention on that specific person," she says. (source)
Have you ever wondered why your heart rate increases and slows down? Epinephrine and Norepinephrine are responsible for regulating cardiac output.
During exercise, your brain will release epinephrine and norepinephrine because it has been told that the body needs to adjust to the new demands that must be met.
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When your heart rate increases, it's safe to say that epinephrine was more than likely the culprit in conjunction with Norepinephrine.
Norepinephrine is responsible for keeping your blood vessels under tension. This is the cause of the increase in blood pressure that is experienced during exercise, along with the constricting effect that epinephrine has on blood vessels. These effects make the heart work harder, which is a good thing. The amount of these hormones secreted is dependent upon the level of activity. The amount of hormones has a direct effect on how fast your heart will beat. (source)
Dopamine.
Dopamine is a neurochemical that is getting released by the brain when we feel good, for instance, by the influence of a good food [3] or reading a fascinating book. It also makes people more “talkative” and excitable. It affects brain processes that control emotional response, movement, ability to express pleasure, but also pain.
Dopamine is very similar in structure to the norepinephrine, and is actually its precursor [4]. What does that mean? There will be no adrenaline produced, no sweating and heart racing if the brain can not produce enough dopamine first.
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Briefly, dopamine makes us feel better and better by activating as many as five types of different receptors in the brain [5], which, of course, are called “dopamine receptors”. Most of them are associated with the pleasure system of the brain, providing feelings of enjoyment and reinforcement to motivate a person proactively to perform certain activities. (source)
Dopamine, a neurotransmitter, makes you focus on the beloved—and desire more time with him or her. It is central to your brain’s reward circuitry: When you do something highly pleasurable, dopamine is released, effectively telling the brain, Do it one mo’ time. “If you have higher activity of dopamine in the brain, your susceptibility to falling in love may even go up,” Fisher says. “We’ve put over 50 people who were madly in love in the brain scanner [MRI], and one of the brain regions most activated is the area where dopamine is produced, the ventral tegmental area, or VTA.” Just about anything that gives you pleasure will elevate dopamine activity—from eating a box of chocolates to hitting a hole in one.
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Novel experiences also raise dopamine activity, so if you want to up the chances of falling in love … well, having dinner with a new interest is great, but you might want to try skydiving, too.
Dopamine gets released when an addict uses drugs, which explains the feeling of being “addicted” to your partner when you’re falling in love. “Evolutionarily, one of dopamine’s purposes is to help us become attached to each other,” explains Larry Young, of the Center for Behavioral Neuroscience at Emory School of Medicine. In other words, when Bryan Ferry sang “Love Is the Drug,” he was more accurate than he knew. “There is a kind of addiction that occurs when we fall in love,” Young says. (source)
The ventral tegmental area is part of what is known as the brain’s reward circuit, which, coincidentally, was discovered by Olds’s father, James, when she was 7 years old. This circuit is considered to be a primitive neural network, meaning it is evolutionarily old; it links with the nucleus accumbens. Some of the other structures that contribute to the reward circuit—the amygdala, the hippocampus, and the prefrontal cortex—are exceptionally sensitive to (and reinforcing of) behavior that induces pleasure, such as sex, food consumption, and drug use.
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Being love-struck also releases high levels of dopamine, a chemical that “gets the reward system going,” said Olds. Dopamine activates the reward circuit, helping to make love a pleasurable experience similar to the euphoria associated with use of cocaine or alcohol. Scientific evidence for this similarity can be found in many studies, including one conducted at the University of California, San Francisco, and published in 2012 in Science. That study reported that male fruit flies that were sexually rejected drank four times as much alcohol as fruit flies that mated with female fruit flies. “Same reward center,” said Schwartz, “different way to get there.”
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“A state-of-the-art investigation of love has confirmed for the very first time that people are not lying when they say that after 10 to 30 years of marriage they are still madly in love with their partners,” said Schwartz. In the Stony Brook study, he added, the MRI scans showed that the pattern of activity in the participants’ dopamine reward systems was the same as that detected in the brains of participants in early-stage romantic love.
For those whose long-term marriage has transitioned from passionate, romantic love to a more compassionate, routine type of love, Olds indicated it is possible to rekindle the flame that characterized the relationship’s early days. “We call it the rustiness phenomenon,” she said. “Couples get out of the habit of sex, of being incredibly in love, and often for good reasons: work, children, a sick parent. But that type of love can be reignited.” Sexual activity, for example, can increase oxytocin levels and activate the brain’s reward circuit, making couples desire each other more.
That alone, she said, may be enough to bring some couples back to those earlier, exhilarating days, when all they could think about was their newfound love. (source)
The results of the study indicate that the feeling of intense passion can last in long-term relationships. “We found many very clear similarities between those who were in love long-term and those who had just fallen madly in love," says Dr. Aron. "In this latest study, the VTA showed greater response to images of a long-term partner when compared with images of a close friend or any of the other facial images.”
This means that the VTA is particularly active for romantic love. “Interestingly, the same VTA region showed greater activation for those in the long-term couple group who scored especially high on romantic love scales and a closeness scale based on questionnaires,” Dr. Acevedo explains.
Previous studies have shown that activity in dopamine-rich areas, such as the VTA, are engaged in response to rewards such as food, money, cocaine, and alcohol. Additionally, studies have demonstrated the role of the VTA in motivation, reinforcement learning, and decision making. This research suggests that the VTA is important for maintaining long-term relationships and that intense romantic love commonly found in early-stage love can last through long-term relationships by engaging the rewards and motivation systems of the brain.
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The participants in long-term romantic love reported high sexual frequency. And higher sexual frequency was linked to activation in a particular brain region. This area is the very sexy left posterior hippocampus. Additionally, the results indicate that participants in long-term love, who scored high on scores measuring passion, showed greater activation in the posterior hippocampus.
Prior studies have shown neural activity in the posterior hippocampus of couples who have recently fallen madly in love. The results prove that the feelings of intensity, passion, and sexual desire, commonly found in early-stage love, can be maintained into long-term love. To understand how and why this is possible, we must first increase our understanding of the role of the posterior hippocampus. This is a bit tricky to do since little is known about this mysterious brain region.
Some studies have linked activation of the posterior hippocampus with hunger and food cravings, with higher neural activity in obese individuals. Other studies have shown that lesions in the hippocampus of rodents impair the ability to distinguish feeling hungry from feeling full. We know that the hippocampus is very important for memory. So, perhaps this area is important for remembering the stimuli associated with certain rewards.
Because the posterior hippocampus is related to feelings of cravings and satiating desires, this brain region can hold the key to understanding how some couples stay sexually interested and passionate in long-term relationships.
Romantic long-term love activates the dopamine-rich brain regions. The recruitment of this dopamine system, which controls reward and motivation, suggests that romantic love is a desire and a motivation to unite with another.
Additionally, during long-term love the activation of the dorsal striatum, the area of the brain involved in motor and cognitive control, suggests romantic love is a goal-directed behavior. Since romantic love is a desire for a union with another, behaviors such as wanting to be close to one's partner or do things to make the partner happy, are enacted to maintain closeness and union. (source)
Phenylethylamine.
The last but not the least is phenylethylamine (PEA), acts as a releasing agent of norepinephrine and dopamine [6]. The first attraction causes us to produce more PEA, which results in those dizzying feelings associated with romantic love. Large quantities of PEA increase both physical and emotional energy [7] and at the same time release more dopamine. (source)
The final set is Serotonin and Cortisol.
Serotonin, a neurochemical that creates feelings of calm, is present in lower levels in those experiencing the first blush of love. “This may go a long way toward explaining that state of anxiety and obsessive thinking that characterizes love in its initial phase,” Fisher says. There is unquestionably a relationship between love and emotions like anxiety and fear. In 2004, researchers from Italy’s University of Pisa released a study that measured hormonal activity in 24 young people who reported having recently fallen in love. The newly smitten had higher levels of the stress hormone cortisol than their workaday counterparts. (source)
Levels of the stress hormone cortisol increase during the initial phase of romantic love, marshaling our bodies to cope with the “crisis” at hand. As cortisol levels rise, levels of the neurotransmitter serotonin become depleted. Low levels of serotonin precipitate what Schwartz described as the “intrusive, maddeningly preoccupying thoughts, hopes, terrors of early love”—the obsessive-compulsive behaviors associated with infatuation.
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If love lasts, this rollercoaster of emotions, and, sometimes, angst, calms within one or two years, said Schwartz. “The passion is still there, but the stress of it is gone,” he added. Cortisol and serotonin levels return to normal. Love, which began as a stressor (to our brains and bodies, at least), becomes a buffer against stress. (source)
Before we talk, I want to quote one final article:
Researchers compared the brain scans of long-term married individuals to the scans of individuals who have recently fallen in love. Surprisingly, the results revealed similar activity in specific brain regions for both long-term, intense romantic love and couples in early-stage romantic love. These particular brain regions could be the clue to why certain couples stay madly in love years, even decades, later.
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The research evidences a surprising difference between romantic love and friendship-based love. In order to understand these differences, we must first understand the distinction between “wanting” and “liking.” Research has suggested that wanting and liking are two different motivations, which are mutually exclusive. The results of the study show that romantic/passionate love is associated with the dopamine-rich systems characteristic of wanting, while friendship-based love related to the brain areas high in opiates characteristic of liking. The data suggest that romantic love is a motivation or a drive based on wanting, focused on a specific target, rather than a feeling or emotion.
While long-term romantic love exhibits patterns of neural activity similar to early-stage romantic love, the study shows that for long-term romantic love, many more brain regions are affected than in early-stage love. The brain scans reveal activity in the opioid and serotonin-rich brain regions, which was not active in early-stage love. These regions are involved in regulating anxiety and pain. This suggests that one pivotal distinction between long-term love and early-stage love is a sense of calmness, characteristic of the former.
Additionally, the study shows that unlike findings for newly in love individuals, long-term love shows activation in the brain regions associated with attachment and liking. As we have seen, liking is very important to friendship-based love. Thus, long-term romantic love that is both intense and close is sustained through the co-existence of wanting motivations and rewards, as well as through liking and attachment bonding. Previous studies have suggested that it can take almost two years to form enduring attachment bonds. This could explain why individuals newly in love do not reflect the same neural activity for liking and attachment as for individuals in long-term romantic love since bonds take time to develop. (source)
While this last article gives us plenty of great information, it is still unfortunately conventional. What all of this research shows is that dopamine and norepinephrine are the crucial difference between passionate and companionate love. Squishes and all of history prove that platonic passionate love is very real.
Not only does norepinephrine get your heart racing when you're feeling passionate love, it also gets your heart racing during exercise – which is why cardio is so good for us.
Something that makes me incredibly happy is that the “honeymoon phase” has been scientifically proven to be able to last. The dopamine and norepinephrine keeps flowing while oxytocin, vasopressin, and serotonin replace cortisol.
There is a reason so many articles above mention sex. Not only does sex release norepinephrine and count as cardio, it also releases dopamine and oxytocin. But just because it is one of the most conventional answers doesn't mean it's the only thing that can keep passionate love alive.
For many couples, there is a precipitous decline in relationship satisfaction after a few years. The “romance” is gone. Attachment may be there, and the relationship is OK, but how can we increase relationship satisfaction in a long-term partnership? Novel and arousing situations increase dopamine, which increases activity in our reward system, and novel and arousing activities increase relationship satisfaction.
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He and Dr. Elaine Aron have developed the “Self Expansion Model” as a way of understanding love and relationships. The basic idea is that there are two fundamental human drives. One is for survival and the other is the drive to expand ourselves. Self-expansion includes: exploration, acquisition (of everything from “things” to knowledge, to status and experience), and increasing our personal efficacy, particularly with regard to achieving goals.
The Self Expansion Model offers insight into the rush and excitement of the early stages of a relationship. When you enter into a relationship, you literally increase who you are. You take on/share in your partner’s perspective on the world in addition to your own, their social status, their resources. In fact, so much self-expansion takes place in the early stages of a relationship that it very likely contributes to the rush and excitement we feel that makes that time so special.
The self expands to the point that we start to include our romantic partner in the self. So much so, in fact, that the neural activity recorded when one thinks about a close other is similar to thinking about oneself. In one of our studies, the more the person included the other in their sense of self, the more the VTA, or dopamine-related system, was activated.
Self-expansion partly explains why the first few months or year of a new relationship feels so utterly intoxicating. So how can we keep that going, even a little bit?
While there are many things that can influence happiness in a long-term relationship one stands out that every couple can work on: novelty. Doing challenging, exciting, new things with your partner has proven both in and out of the lab to be one of the single most effective ways of keeping the spark alive.
This doesn’t mean you and your partner need to learn hang-gliding. It may be something as simple as walking in a new part of town, trying a new restaurant, or giving bowling a try. Maybe taking a class together. The point is to do something novel and challenging – self-expanding.
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Interestingly, doing different things early in a relationship (less than a year together) has almost no benefit. The relationship itself is novel enough. But after the relationship is established – often around the one year mark – the benefits of new and challenging experiences together are enormous. And they last. Studies have followed couples for years and found that novel activities have huge benefits for the relationship.
In the “Novelty” video, Dr. Aron makes another important point. When we go to the movies, plays or the opera together, even if we do it often, we are getting caught up in the exciting, arousing life of the actors and the plot. Each movie or play or opera is a novel experience together. So, going to the movies a lot can produce a novel experience each time. Adding a challenge to that makes it even more effective. Maybe you both have to work really hard to set aside the time for it! Just getting to a Broadway play can be a challenge. (source)
And:
They’re always trying new things together. Boredom can be a major obstacle to lasting romantic or companionate love, and successful couples find ways to keep things interesting.
Psychological research has suggested that couples who experience the most intense love are the ones who not only experience a strong physical and emotional attraction to one another, but also who enjoy participating in new or challenging “self-expanding” activities together, Psychology Today reported. (source)
Novelty is the key to keeping passionate love alive, and it's universal. Anyone who experiences passionate love, whether platonic or romantic, has the potential to keep it alive. Isn't that incredibly empowering?
I want to switch directions for a moment and mention one last piece of science.
What is sociosexual orientation?
Sociosexuality is a personality trait. The construct of sociosexuality or sociosexual orientation captures individual differences in the tendency to have casual, uncommitted sexual relationships. The term was introduced by Alfred Kinsey, who used it to describe the individual differences in sexual permissiveness and promiscuity that he found in his groundbreaking survey studies on sexual behavior.
Evolutionary personality psychologists classify men and women on sociosexual orientation between the extremes of unrestricted and restricted.
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Sociosexual orientation is a personality trait, and is relatively stable over the life course; in other words, people are either sociosexually restricted or unrestricted most of their lives. (source)
And:
A recent study conducted by researchers from NYU and Cornell dispels the popular notion that casual hookups — defined as sexual activity outside the context of a romantic relationship — will leave you with low self-esteem and depression. The research, published in the journal Social Psychology and Personality Science, involved a group of NYU students who kept a weekly diary over the course of 12 weeks documenting any and all adult snuggles — and the effect those instances had on their overall well-being.
Sociosexually unrestricted students reported higher well-being after having casual sex compared to not having sex, the researchers found. Also, those who were sociosexually unrestricted reported lower stress and greater overall emotional health after casual sex. (This is … maybe not super surprising.)
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The study’s authors explained that “the effects of casual sex depend on the extent to which this behavior is congruent with one’s general personality tendencies.” So, in other words: if you want to have casual sex, you definitely should. If you do not want to have casual sex, you shouldn’t. The main takeaway of this study? You do you. (source)
The bottom line of all of this? No matter what your orientations on the attractions are, or your sociosexual orientation, you and your experiences are valid.
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