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Love and Sex

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Catlovers141

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I'm a child sexual abuse survivor, and have some difficulty understanding how sex can be loving. I understand how it can be consensual, but how does it express love? It feels very confusing, because sex is separate from love yet somehow connected to it? Like hookups exist but sex is also loving?

These things all seem very contradictory... could someone explain how this works?

(I feel like a ten-year-old asking this, but I'm really almost 30!)
 
Think of all the different kinds of smiles. Just because polite smiles, or nervous smiles, or cruel smiles exist? Doesn’t mean that happy smiles, loving smiles, nostalgic smiles, excited smiles, relieved smiles, etc. don’t also exist.

Or holding hands. Someone can grab onto you against your will and drag you along by the hand. Or crush your hand in their grip in a power play. But friends hold hands. Lovers hold hands. Kids hold hands. People saving people’s lives hold hands. People giving birth hold hands. People crying in grief hold hands.

Actions? Are tied to intent. And reciprocity.

Someone can grab you by the hand and yank! you against your will... and save your life, as the car you didn’t see speeds by. Anger shifts to gratitude & relief. Or a polite smile can turn warm. Or any of a thousand other examples, in either direction. Or any direction.

Sex is the same way. Thousand different kinds of sex, out there. An act of love, just one type of sex. A smile can be an act of love. Holding hands can be an act of love. But none of them have to be. Or are made less by other versions existing.
 
I'm a child sexual abuse survivor, and have some difficulty understanding how sex can be loving. I understand how it can be consensual, but how does it express love? It feels very confusing, because sex is separate from love yet somehow connected to it? Like hookups exist but sex is also loving?

These things all seem very contradictory... could someone explain how this works?

(I feel like a ten-year-old asking this, but I'm really almost 30!)


I think an important thing might be ‘what is sex to you?’

It took me far too long into my sex life to realise sex was only something I feel comfortable with as part of a loving expression. I am ‘Demisexual’. For others love doesn’t need to have anything to do with sex.

I guess it’s like you can greet everyone but what it means with different people is different? My hello to my husband is different to my hello with an acquaintance I like a lot but don’t love. I think sex can be the same. It just doesn’t work well for ME like that :)
 
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