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itself may be momentary, but it is a deep philosophical mistake to think that therefore the significance of sexual intercourse is momentary too. In even the
most transient sexual social encounter, two selves become more than physically intertwined and it is always a wrenching act to pull them apart. The reason sex is
so satisfying in love is not because the sex itself is necessarily any better but because its symbolic consequences are so welcome. Good sex makes love last,
but more important; it is love that gives good sex its significance ibid. p. 180. According to Solomon, there are three ways to get sexual satisfaction in
joys of sex that will be explained later. It will be used to analyse the development of the view about sexual needs that are influenced by sexual experience.
a. Sexual excitement
Sexual excitement is in itself exhilarating, inspiring, and engendering a keen sense of one’s embodiment and our essential interconnectedness, especially
in love. The sex is compensation for communication that is otherwise lacking, or the sensuous grasping for connections that are otherwise not there. Sex maybe the
only situation where two such people have anything to “say” to one another, and it is then usually not a message of love that gets expressed. The excitement of sex
maybe a function of the distance and not the intimacy between two people, like the exhilaration one enjoys while flying at great speed over enormous distance. It
maybe the product of the novelty or the difficulty of two people who otherwise do not know one another getting together in what can be the most intimate of all
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circumstances. Thus the thrill and anxiety of first sexual encounters and the addictiveness of sex for two people who never get close.
Sex and friendship, by way of contrast, mix with tenderness and quiet joy, not explosiveness. The fact that sex can be so comfortable does not preclude its
also being exciting and exhilarating, even an ecstatic religious experience, but it never leaves the solidity of love and does not provide that reckless, thoroughly
intoxicating experience of being “swept away”. The excitement of some sexual relationship maybe more a product of anxiety and the fear of being abandoned
than affection and what is “missing” in some established love affairs may be nothing more than that sense of danger Solomon, 1988, p. 114.
b. Sexual Desire
It is obvious that there can be sexual attraction and satiation without love and that there can be love without the possibility of sexual fulfilment. But, on a
much deeper level, love can not be just sexual desire because what Aristophanes called the “infinite yearning” of love is never satisfied by sex, no matter how
passionate or satisfying or often repeated Aristophanes in Solomon, 1988, p. 115. To understand falling in love is to understand the powerfully dynamic of a
set of underlying ideas, particularly those ideas concerning the desirability of a “fusion” of identities, the reformulation of one’s personal self-identity so that it is
indistinguishable, what in one’s own eyes and in the eyes of the world, from the identity of that special other person. Sexual desire, so understood, need not
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diminish in substance or intensity but only in novelty, which in the eyes of “infinite yearning” is no great loss.
Experiencing love most deeply, sex just is not enough. Aristophanes predicted, people have “infinite longing” that can be satisfied by anything less
than a total and permanent union Aristophanes in Solomon, 1988, p. 115. But nevertheless, people experience sex as the closest that they can come to that
union, at least for a while. It is a powerful desire that expresses a total and permanent union, through
love and as love, not only in the desire for sexual intercourse, but in the many small desires to touch, to care, to gently kiss or stroke a cheek. It would be wrong
to say that romantic love is sex, and it would be dishonest to insist that love requires sex, but nevertheless the tie between love and sex is powerful and
undeniable. It is not just that sex expresses love, but that sexual desire is what fuels as well as defines romantic love. Sexual desire in love is bound up with the
entire body, a delight in the other person rather than an impulse to do anything in particular.
c. Sex in Love
