The Love-Sex Link

Research has even taught us something about which women are less inclined to require love or emotional involvement before sex. Women who are most open to sex without love tend to be extroverted in personality, and more open to new experiences of all sorts, including trying new and exotic foods and enjoying traveling to other cultures. Although many women do not require or seek out love before having sex, women, more than men, believe that love should accompany sex. In the Meston Sexual Psychophysiology Lab, over seven hundred college students were asked whether they would agree or disagree with the statement “Sex without love is okay.” Approximately half of the students were of European ancestry and half were of Southeast Asian ancestry. Among both cultural groups, men were significantly more likely than women to agree that sex without love was acceptable. Psychologist David Schmitt and colleagues noted similar findings in a massive study involving fifty-six nations.

Findings from a study conducted in the Buss Evolutionary Psychology Lab also indicate a gender difference in the love-sex link. One hundred men and one hundred women were asked to think of people they knew who had been, or currently were, in love. With these people in mind, they were asked to write down five acts or behaviors that the lovebirds had performed that reflected or exemplified their love. An interesting gender difference emerged: Whereas only 8 percent of women nominated “having sex” as an act of love, 32 percent of the men nominated sexual love acts. This finding reveals that there is at least one sense in which sex and love are more closely linked for men—sex seems to spring to mind as a more salient feature of love in the minds of men than it does in the minds of women. So although women are more likely to see love as a prerequisite for sex, men appear to be more likely to see sex as a defining feature of love.

I was working at my first full-time job and worked with an incredibly sexy guy. I was already a mother . . . and didn’t think I would ever find someone to love me [but] I really fell in love with [a coworker]. . . . He was much more experienced than me and verbally taught me quite a few things about sex. We acted on those lessons and I thought he would fall in love with me if I did the things he asked. Some of those things were oral sex and performing a strip tease and talking dirty to him on the phone. I was not very experienced at this time and really thought if I did these things, he would eventually fall in love with me. He didn’t, and I still have feelings for him to this day.—heterosexual woman, age 46

I probably lost my virginity out of a need to be loved. I lived in a small town and was pretty neglected by my mother, she had lots of problems of her own. I never really found any boys that I liked all through school and when I met a guy I really liked when I was. . . a freshman in high school, I had sex with him very quickly. I had never even kissed a boy and I went from first kiss to intercourse with him in a month. He made me feel desired, special, he told me he loved me. . . . Luckily it was a good pick; we stayed together for four years.—predominantly heterosexual woman, age 25