This article is an excerpt from the Shortform book guide to "The School of Life" by The School of Life. Shortform has the world's best summaries and analyses of books you should be reading.
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What is healthy sex in a relationship? What are the benefits of healthy intimate relationships?
Having healthy sex in a relationship starts with reframing how we think about sex in the first place, claim the authors of The School of Life. According to them, our society has come to believe that sex should just be easy and fun, yet the authors argue that human desire is much more complicated than this.
Read on to learn how the authors define healthy sex in a relationship and why it’s so important.
Rethinking Healthy Sex in a Relationship
We believe in our sexually liberated era that sex should be uncomplicated, easy, and fun if you do it “normally”: have only one committed partner, stick to common sexual practices, and so on. But, according to the authors of The School of Life, a significant way to improve a relationship is to recognize that more often, sex is complicated. This is because humans have complicated needs and desires and are rarely satisfied with socially sanctioned sexual practices or what we typically define as healthy sex in a relationship. The authors argue that this doesn’t mean that people who seek out such sex are atypical, but rather that our conception of “normal” sex and sexual desire is wrong.
(Shortform note: Some might disagree with the idea that we believe societally that sex should be easy and that there’s a standard for “normal,” healthy sex in a relationship. Many people are now opting for ethically non-monogamous relationships, like polyamory, open relationships, swinging, and sex with multiple partners. These types of relationships are based on the understanding that sex and love are complex and that there might be different ways to meet your intimate needs. They also represent a worldview that sees all forms of relationships as equally valid and thus normal.)
For instance, the authors claim that, we should recognize that most people become sexually interested in other people after they’ve been with a partner for a certain amount of time (and despite still loving that partner). Also, many kind, caring people desire rough sex or fantasize about sex they’d never want to actually have. Finally, many people are sexually interested in people they don’t like or don’t care about emotionally.
(Shortform note: In Mating in Captivity, Esther Perel confirms that many people have fantasies of unemotional or aggressive sex. She adds that such fantasies are symbolic, not literal: They’re a way for us to process irrational desires privately so they don’t end up causing us to do anything foolish in real life. What’s more, statistics prove that people indeed feel attracted to people other than their long-term partner: 70% of participants in a study noted they felt attraction to someone outside of their relationship. This happens because attraction is an immediate, instinctive reaction, over which we have no control. This also helps explain why many people want to have sex with people they don’t like personally.)
Finally, to reframe our views of what healthy sex looks like in a relationship, the authors note that many of the more taboo forms of sex (like oral, anal, and rough sex) are simply humans’ attempts to feel completely accepted, in all our darker shades, by a partner—they’re not abnormal or problematic. If someone can see all these parts of our bodies and needs without shying away, we feel completely understood by that person.
(Shortform note: Here the writers assert that certain types of sex let us feel completely accepted in a healthy relationship—a feeling humans crave. However, the writers also note (as covered earlier in this guide) that complete acceptance of your partner is a false Romantic idea and that it’s OK to not love and appreciate every one of your partner’s quirks. So there seems to be a conflict: According to the writers, we strongly desire our partner’s complete acceptance, yet it’s OK to not offer that acceptance to our partner. Perhaps we can view this conflict simply as an example of how challenging it is to be in a partnership with another human and a good reason to develop emotional intelligence.)
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- Why most people lack emotional intelligence and make poor choices
- How emotional intelligence can make you feel more fulfilled in life
- How to gain emotional intelligence about yourself, others, relationships, and work
