Why We Fuck

I was sprawled across my bed, utterly wrecked, one morning many years ago. I'd just had amazing amazing phone sex with someone who, to this day, remains the most attachment-avoidant person I've ever met.

"Holy fuck," I mumbled, made dreamy by ravishment. "Why was that so...good? We were on the phone."

"People need connection," he said simply. To my surprise, even he had known this, deep in some barely accessible part of his poor love-avoidant heart. And it had been a connection, an intense sexual communion that felt like something real had happened, even though no body parts had been touched or even seen.

This private connection between lovers--This is why we fuck each other, even though there are plenty of promiscuous toys, pillows, and shower spouts that can do the job quite well. And, yes, it has to be fucking (of some sort) because other human interactions--a nice chat in the bank line, for example--just won't do it.

Bearing witness to someone surrendering to their instincts--just being with them in the moment they lose themselves--is fucking powerful. And to find someone you trust enough to fall into that void with them, well, it's a rare and beautiful gift.

On a less sublime level, I think it's also about being present in the Now and existing in a state of Flow, where you are wholly consumed with what you are doing. These are purportedly optimal (and often needlessly Capitalized) states for achieving happiness, inner peace and well-being. (See also: Ekhart Tolle's  The Power of Now and Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi's  Flow). The orgasm is, like, a bonus to what's really going on.

Caitlin Moran describes this kind of focused-attention-on-another in her book How to Build a Girl about a teenage Brit who transforms herself into a badass music journalist/sexual adventurer:

"Here's the amazing thing about sex:  you get a whole person to yourself, for the first time since you were a baby.  Someone who is looking at you--just you--and thinking about you, and wanting you...You are in a room with a closed door, and no one else can come through it....It seemed to me that this was the real reason people wanted to fuck so much. To get here. To get to this tiny, quiet place where there was nothing else to do but be with each other. Just to be two humans who had--for a short while--stopped wanting."

That idea fits nicely with what I discovered when I looked on PornHub the other day for the Top Rated Video of All Time. It wasn't "Bitch takes cum in her hair" or whatever I was expecting, but a sweet little clip of a sleepy, tousled-haired woman waking her lover up and giving him a blow job. 

This top-rated video--OF ALL TIME!--showed two people portrayed as affectionate, familiar lovers happy to be waking up together in such a nice way. They weren't over-the-top porn excited, but just enjoying the everyday-yet-so-amazing swollen pleasures of taking someone you like in your mouth and/or being taken thus. In the world of porn, this was maybe about the squarest, most vanilla thing ever. And yet it was the most loved...of all time! (For that one day, at least. Today, alas, I can't re-find it. It has been replaced by "Hot blond maid having anal." Top-ratedness is apparently fleeting. )

The point of all this being: sexual connection, in whatever form it takes, is something we all seek, including the millions of surreptitiously wanking users of Porn Hub on that particular day. Even my old friend, dear attachment-avoidant boy, needed this intimacy, albeit from the distance that felt safe to him.

We all need to get this place, however we can--where you get to be two humans who have--for a short while--stopped wanting.

Go find your place.

xoxox
jill

(photo)