On Sex without Romance
“Yeah. A drawing. Anything that comes to mind.”
I get so many people explaining why they couldn't have an open relationship. They find it difficult to untether the physical from the emotional. And they often don't want to try, because once severed, this would mean that sex could never be used as an expression of love. But that's like saying that, and I'm going to use a food analogy again, eating can only be used for pleasure again and never be used to sustain life, or morphine can only be used to get high and not suppress pain, or hiking can only be used to see the Brecons and not as exercise. There's a dual function for all. And to stop just short of comparing romance sustaining sex as a hastily scoffed M&S Simply Food sarnie, I'm going to defer to what I found in the literature.
The fiction goes like this: sex is the physical expression of romantic love, the body catching up to what the heart already knows, the ultimate act of intimacy between two souls who have chosen each other and forsake all others now. It is significant and resonates in every culture, but it is also empirically wonky — or at least, a dramatic oversimplification of what sex actually is and what it actually does for people. Human sexuality is and has always been a far more varied instrument than the Hollywood romantic narrative allows. People have sex for reasons that have nothing to do with love and always have. We keep pretending and teaching otherwise, and it costs us when we do. The role that cultures paint of sex seems to change over the ages:
Prehistoric (~200,000 BCE) Survival reproduction: Group-based, seasonal. No pair-bond norm. Small bands, high infant mortality. Sex tracked fertility cycles. Social, not romantic. Venus figurines suggest fertility cult worship.
Ancient (3000–500 BCE) Alliance & property: Dynastic, transactional. Egypt, Mesopotamia, Greece: sex as political tool.Sacred prostitution (Ishtar temples). Concubinagenormalised. Marriage = land and lineage transfer.
Classical (500 BCE–500 CE) Pleasure + hierarchy: Codified, gendered. Greece: pederasty as mentorship; hetaerae as intellectual companions. Rome: sexual availability mapped to social class. Romantic poetry emerges (Ovid).
Medieval (500–1500 CE) Duty + sin: Church-governed. Sex only for procreation. Courtly love. Idealised desire without consummation. Chastity as spiritual virtue. Pleasure = corruption of soul.
Romanticera (1750–1900) Love as enlightenment: The great conflation begins. Sex, procreation and romantic love formally merged for the first time. Victorian paradox: public prudery, private vice. Prostitution boomed. Sexual repression = hysteria.
20thcentury (1900–1999) Liberation + science: Kinsey, pill, revolution. Gay rights. AIDS crisis.
Now (2000–present) Plural + algorithmic: Apps, CNM, identity. Dating apps gamify selection. Porn instantly accessible. kink-awareness. CNM, asexuality, queer frameworks fracture the single-narrative. Consent foregrounded.
If we were to summarise geographical implications too, then they might look like this:
WesternEurope: Romantic ideal + secular pleasure. High CNM acceptance.
SouthAsia: Arranged marriage norm; Kama Sutra heritage vs colonial-era prudery. Highly Romanticised
NorthAmerica: Puritan origin + hypersexualised media. Therapy culture externalises shame. App-dominated meeting mechanism. Porn industry as de-facto sex-ed.
Sub-Saharan Africa: Polygyny common. bride price structures desire. Fertility as social capital.
Middle East / N. Africa: Religious law governs access. Honour/shame architecture. Muta'a (temporary marriage) is legal.
Latin America: Catholic guilt + machismo alongside growing queer visibility. Sensuality public.
EastAsia: Confucian family duty vs urban sexual liberation. Sexual eccentricity. Commercialisation and technologisation.
The oldest pattern running from prehistory through most of the ancient world is sex as a logistics operation. Reproduction, alliance, resource transfer. The Greeks and Romans began to aestheticise desire, but they still kept it firmly categorised by class and role rather than fusing it with love. The romantic conflation is genuinely recent. It solidified in the 18th and 19th centuries, largely in Western Europe, under the influence of Romanticism as a literary and philosophical movement. The Victorians are the most spectacular case: they produced the ideology that sex belongs exclusively within love and marriage, and simultaneously presided over the largest expansion of prostitution in European history. The public frame and the private behaviour had almost no relationship. The 20th century did the reconstruction work, Freud founded sex as the engine of everything, Kinsey measured what people were actually doing (which was not what the romantic narrative predicted) to codify into spectra, and the contraceptive pill in 1960 finally broke the mechanical link leaving but a spiritual link between sex and reproduction that had been the fallback justification for treating it as serious business.
What's striking regionally is how much the romantic-love model is a specifically Western export. Bride price systems in sub-Saharan Africa, muta'a temporary marriages in Shi'a Islam, polygyny across South and Central Asia, the Confucian duty framework in East Asia — all of these organise sexuality around something other than romantic love, and none of them are aberrations. They're the majority of human history.The consistent through-line is that sex has served reproduction, power, pleasure, identity, and commerce in every era and region. The romantic spin is only 250 years old.
Sex on Autopilot
Ask any long-term couple to identify the last time sex felt genuinely spontaneous and you will often be met with a pause longer than comfort allows. This is not a moral failing. It is what happens when two people share a bed for a decade.
Researchers Cindy Meston and David Buss in Archives of Sexual Behavior (2007) conducted one of the most comprehensive studies of sexual motivation to date, collecting 237 distinct reasons people have sex categorised across 4 broad purposes: physical, goal-based, emotional, and insecure. Among the most commonly endorsed were stress-relief, habit, and conflict avoidance — reasons that had nothing to do with desire or affection, let alone love.
Live-in couples often continue having sex because it's Tuesday. I personally find it quite sad to hear that couples aim for once a week and are happy with that. Nonetheless, they screw because it's Tuesday, and because stopping would require a conversation neither person wants to have. Sociologist Anthony Giddens in The Transformation of Intimacy (1992) described long-term relationship sex as starting out of conscious choice rather than structural obligation, yet the active decision frequently gives way to procedural repetition.
The "Suspension Bridge Study," conducted by alliterating Psychologists Donald Dutton and Arthur Aron in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology (1974), is a landmark psychological experiment demonstrating the misattribution of arousal. Researchers used two bridges over the Capilano River in North Vancouver, Canada. The Capilano Canyon Suspension Bridge, which was 450-feet-long, made mainly of rope, swayed and tilted, had low handrails, and a terrifying 230-foot drop to the rocks below. Located further upriver was a solid, wide, and low wooden bridge over a shallow stream. Male passersby who crossed either bridge were approached by an attractive female interviewer who asked them to fill out a brief questionnaire and write a short story about an ambiguous picture. After completing the task, she offered the men her phone number in case they wanted to ask questions about the project later. Men who crossed the fear-inducing bridge were significantly more likely to call the female experimenter later that evening, and the stories written by men on the rope bridge contained significantly more sexual and romantic content. Having a much less wild bridge is a good control, although of course every permutation of interviewer gender and interviewee gender was used and showed that it should be girls inviting boys to horror films if they want to smuggle romantic feelings into them via their limbic systems. So when a person is frightened on a swinging bridge, their body goes into a natural "fight or flight" state. If an attractive person is nearby, the mind can unconsciously misattribute any fear-based adrenaline spike as attraction, and this has been mapped to long-term partnerships too: sex is activating unique internal experiences that are being misattributed to romance rather than the experience of getting dirty.
Safe Containers for the Unspeakable
There is a particular kind of sex that long-term partners sometimes have with each other that unromantically serves a function neither is consciously aware of: the safe exploration of desire that cannot yet be spoken aloud. People use established loves as laboratories. The logistics are solved, the trust is legible, the rejection is unlikely. This creates a paradox: the very security that dulls routine desire also makes the relationship a low-risk container in which to quietly test the edges of something newer like BDSM, exhibitionism, watersports. We are never encouraged to experiment with sex to fall in love deeper, but sandwedge our mojo out of bunker, to play with play.
Kleinplatz et al.'s landmark study in The Canadian Journal of Human Sexuality (2009). on "great sex" found that what distinguished exceptional sexual experiences was not romantic depth but rather qualities like presence, deep erogenous intimacy, and the capacity for exploration — factors that could exist independently of romantic attachment and that long-term couples often described as hard-won rather than naturally occurring. The partner is, in these moments, neither the fantasy nor the object of love, but something more functional: a trusted instrument of discovery. Comfort to experiment lovelessly is one of LTRs' most underappreciated offerings.
Transactional Sex
Perhaps nowhere is the separation of sex from romance more plainly visible than in the global sex work industry. The client who visits a sex worker is not, in most cases, someone without access to romantic love. They are 99% likely to be a 'he' and much more likely to be in a sexually closed relationship than single according to Monto & Milrod's work in the Journal of Sex Research (2014). The punter is seeking sex without obligation and emotional labour something that he hasn't learned how to nurture in the relationship, something that feels like cheating were he to even ask.
Research by Ine Vanwesenbeeck in the Annual Review of Sex Research (2023) found that men who visited sex workers frequently reported motivations including variety, availability, and a desire for sex without relational strings. This is uncomfortable territory for romantic ideology, because it implies that what is being purchased is not merely physical relief but a kind of freedom from the entanglement that sex within love necessarily produces.
If commercial sex represents the most visible market for non-romantic sexuality, pornography represents its most democratic. Approximately 40 million Americans visit pornographic websites regularly. The scenes in porn are evacuated of almost everything relational: no conversation, no history, no vulnerability, no morning after. Healthy porn usage is to consume the content instrumentally, like watching the news when we feel too out of touch, or hitting the gym to let off steam. Nicole Prause et al's neuroimaging research in PLOS One (2015) found that the brain's response to pornographic stimuli does not differ categorically from its response to other reward stimuli that fire the reward circuit. Sex, in this context, is simply another input to a system that processes pleasure. Romance is not invited.
There is a thought experiment worth taking seriously: the fantasy of the tennis coach, the barista, the colleague who held a door open in a way that was briefly interesting. These are the fantasies that most sexually active adults carry quietly, the ones that have nothing to do with their lives as structured. Nobody having a fantasy about the tennis coach is simultaneously imagining what to serve at the wedding reception. The fantasy is clean, precisely because it is bounded: it exists only as sensation, untethered from the relational scaffolding that real desire requires.
Leitenberg and Henning's review of sexual fantasy research in the Psychological Bulletin (1995) found that the majority of people across genders, orientations, and relationship statuses regularly fantasise about someone other than their current partner, and that this is positively associated with sexual satisfaction rather than negatively. This is because the object of the fantasy is a role and an energy rather than a person. In fact some romantic utterance coming from the sex object in place of exasperated compliments and requests would actively ruin the fantasy’s dynamic. “It’s all very well you hiking my tiny white skirt and taking me for 40-love but when am I meeting your parents?”
Sex as Reproductive Strategy
In polygynous societies still practised across significant portions of sub-Saharan Africa, the Middle East, and South and Central Asia, the function of sex is reproductive. A woman who enters as wife #3 does so within a cultural and economic logic that has little to do with romantic love as the West understands it and everything to do with resource access, lineage, social standing, and fertility. Evolutionary anthropologists like Buss in The Evolution of Desire (1994) have long argued that human sexuality evolved to serve multiple functions simultaneously — pair-bonding and reproduction in some contexts, short-term mating strategy in others. The romantic-love model is a relatively recent historical construction, particularly its insistence that love and sexual partnership should be synonymous.
In many polygynous contexts, sex between a co-wife and husband is simply reproductive labour. Romantic love is neither the precondition nor the goal. Research by Tertilt in the Journal of Political Economy (2005) found that polygyny correlates with specific economic conditions, particularly high bride-price systems, in which women's reproductive capacity has explicit social and economic value. The romance-sex conflation is, in this light, a cultural artefact rather than a primal truth.
Severing the Tether
The quickest way to achieve sexual liberation [See - On Sex Positivity, Liberation, and Enlightenment] is to throw oneself into it. It's literally a case of practising sex out of its usual context. Finding a memory of a one night stand that on average was probably embarrassing and a net negative, isolate the factors such as the alcohol consumption, the lack of prep, the fact that the washbag was on the other side of town – a journey that would have to be made in the early hours avoiding eye contact with the suited commuters.
Fore and post-play are a scary part of the equation since they emulate a sort of courtship. These acts are sex but they are trying to effectively promote a mental state that will translate into a physical arousal, effectively a miniature of the falling in love process, but these stages too can be looked at as something echoing just sex. Vivian puts the brakes on kissing in Pretty Woman (1990) because it is so intimate, so one would hope that she has another trick up her sleeve, or down her knickers. But the psycho-sensuality of kissing is partly another unfortunate link that Hollywood has padlocked together. Do I need to remind you of all the people you've kissed and cuddled in your life that didn't lead to flashing images of a house, garden, kids, etc.
We would do well to anchor such experiences to start with in the realm of interactive porn. Focus on the physicality of the experience, using the partner as a warm body, an interactive sex toy, an immersive scene. Having said that, we might direct a bit more. Making love is quite freeflowing and with a limited playbook, but in fucking we might help ourselves out by achieving less conventional positions, techniques, and kinks all under instruction and perhaps non-reciprocally. That's where tops vs bottoms and doms vs subs and givers vs takers combine to have great casual play.
The final trapping here is biological. Oxytocin and vasopressin release during orgasm don't care about your stated intentions as Helen Fisher's neuroimaging research showed that the same dopaminergic reward circuits activated by romantic attachment fire during sexual novelty. So the brain doesn't automatically distinguish between "this is fun" and "this matters." But the feelings that arrive after sex with someone are, in part, pharmacological. Labelling the bonding hormone oxytocin as a love detector is conflation [See - On How to Fall in Love]. It releases with your cat, your massage therapist, a good hug. The flush of affection after sex is real; it doesn't predict anything about the person, just the appreciation for the experience.
Always ground every interaction in the context of a friend with benefits, and sex is, as I've described it elsewhere, a fantastic dessert that actually removes calories rather than adds them.
The evidence from anthropology, evolutionary biology, sexology, and psychology suggests that sex has always carried multiple functions simultaneously: reproductive, recreational, relational, experimental, commercial, habitual. Romance is one of those functions, and in the right context it is a profound one. But it is not the only one, and treating it as definitionally primary has never been accurate to human experience. Sex is older than romantic love. It's older than monogamy. It doesn't need the romantic story to justify itself. Sometimes it's just Tuesday.
