Sex When You Don't Feel Like It

Plato spoke of love as a guide to behaving with honor. It was not a lustful endeavor but rather a love between men that had neither to do with sex nor sexuality. It is from Plato’s name that we derive the word “platonic,” describing a connection based on honor rather than desire, implying that the two were mutually exclusive.

The uneasiness between us is both terrifying and exciting. Hello, Desire!

Psychologist Michael Bader even suggests that a good fantasy offers the problem and states the solution.2 Fantasy is there to offer us insight into what makes us tick, whether we like it or not.

Likewise, fantasies of shame and humiliation

Scientists and mystics have tried to measure, quantify, and calculate how desire works for many years. They have come up with theories but no definitive answers. This suggests there is no proven method for cultivating and maintaining desire.

Fantasies are not intended to devalue the more mundane, repetitive, or even familiar aspects of sex but, rather, offer a portal into the erotic imagination that we can call on to kick-start lagging or blocked desire.

Lehmiller’s research into popular fantasies

Perhaps, fantasies about sex with strangers may be speaking to a desire to be free of pressure, duty, and responsibility to others in our day-to-day lives.

Social historian Stephanie Coontz tells that the notions we have of love and indeed marriage today are grossly unrealistic. She asserts that for most of history, the notion of choosing a partner “on the basis of something as fragile and irrational as love and then focus all their sexual, intimate, and altruistic desires on the resulting marriage” i