Sex and Life: Can romantic desire truly be sustained?
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The rise and popularity of series like Sex/Life and Bridgerton indicate a growing unrest amongst women around passionate love, and fulfilling sex.
The Netflix series Sex/Life which ‘broke the internet’ has received polarised reviews—with many arguing the barely-there storyline, and cringe-inducing actors’ performances are enough to turn people off sex, and even according to one journalist, life itself.
Yet, the astronomical success of the program (and the number of TikToks developed over that shower scene), would point to a broad fascination with the program, and subject matter.
As a brief overview, Sex/Life, is all about the sexual frustrations and fantasies of Billie, a former New York party girl, who trades her wild ways, for a quiet life in the suburbs with her “perfect” husband Cooper, and their two children. But she misses some elements of her old life, in particular, her bad-boy ex-boyfriend Brad, a leather-jacket clad, Australian-accented, well-endowed (yes, back to the shower scene) type, with which Billie had the best sex of her life (mostly in the stairs and elevators of neon-lit clubs).
We could delve into the sub-par acting, awkward dialogue, or the fact that Billie’s ‘perfect’ life in the suburbs quite literally is perfect (which begs the question, what hope do the rest of us have?), but ultimately, the theme that engaged so many people, and women in particular, was: can a marriage be great without sex?
Both Sex/Life and corset-busting, lust-filled Bridgerton set epic dialogues into motion around waning or non-existent sex lives within marriage. As the weeks passed (mostly in the Sydney lockdown), I marveled at the number of opinion pieces that were penned for multiple publications, by women who found themselves wondering: would they ever have mind-blowing sex ever again within their relationship? And if the answer was no, was that ok?
The big question here, heavily underlined, bolded, and even highlighted is: can romantic desire truly be sustained? As a PhD researcher in intimacy and dating apps and the host of a podcast on love, I spend an inordinate amount of time considering romantic love—the construction of it, the narrative scripts we employ in narrating our own love stories, and even the potential for lasting passion.
One would think there is nothing simpler than love, sex, or desire, but in fact, it’s more complex than we believe. Those emotions, or states of beings, or wants, are often trapped between two polarities. They become sources of tension and contradiction. Our understanding of romantic love has morphed and changed over time. Today, we find ourselves in a unique moment in time, where we demand from our partner: a passionate lover, a companion, a best friend and even, a path to self-actualisation.
As many sociologists and psychologists would indicate, like Esther Perel or Eva Illouz, it is the first time in human history that we’re looking to find all these characteristics in the one person, or the one relationship.
Similarly, Perel would argue that the desire for passionate love as a key factor within a romantic relationship is at odds with the structure of married or companionate life itself. The passion and desire of sex are juxtaposed to the mundanity of bills, mortgages, walking dogs, cleaning up—and the 101 chores and minor tasks that we are required of us on a daily basis.
The ultimate irony being that we take something which is wild and free and place it within a space, laced with rules and regulations, and yes, underlying boredom. The ultimate romantic buzzkill.
Alongside this, sex and intimacy have a curious push/pull effect, often known as the paradox of intimacy and desire. As a couple grows closer together, developing the building blocks required for an intimacy, like trust and security, desire often diminishes. Perel writes:
“If love is an act of imagination, then intimacy is an act of fruition. It waits for the high to subside so it can patiently insert itself into the relationship. The seeds of intimacy are time and repetition. We choose each other again and again, and so create a community of two…There is a complex relationship between love and desire, and it is not a cause-and-effect, linear arrangement. A couple’s emotional life together and their physical life together each have their ebbs and flows, their ups and downs, but these don’t always correspond. They intersect, they influence each other, but they’re also distinct.”
In Sex/Life, Billie and Cooper traded their desire for each other for intimacy—but were they really intimate at all? Or were they simply strangers wandering the corridors (bathrooms, kitchen, nursery, outdoor areas etc) of their grandiose house, alone, and not really together? Perhaps it’s not that intimacy and passionate sex/love can’t co-exist, but that the lack of intimacy and passionate sex/love make for a sad conclusion.
It struck me that really we were asking the wrong questions in those hundreds of op-ed pieces rapidly being tapped out on keyboards. Were they just sexless relationships? Or were they also relationships without intimacy?
What struck me as curious in Sex/Life was that Billie was de-satisfied with Cooper (the perfect husband) but wanting to slot Brad (the well-endowed bad boy) into exactly the same relationship paradigm. Wouldn’t this make for another relationship failure, or a similar outcome? Is a re-do under the very same circumstances really worth it?
Perhaps we need to revisit our concepts of sex, love and intimacy and re-write the underlying narratives in ways that are more conducive to our own happiness.
Not everyone will have crazy, wild sex, from the day they meet their significant other till the very end. Nor will they be intimate all the time. And perhaps they have to find different ways of living the relationship paradigm. Different stories can be told, we just have to be willing to step outside the square.
