hotter than coffee, more addictive too.

     In High School, I had my first girl friend, my first kiss . . . and well so on. To some my relationship was seen as a joke because my girl friend and I had not had sex. Does sex really have to be the measure of legitimacy in an intimate relationship? My judgmental peers told me I had to have sex, and honestly, I kind of wanted to, but there were reasons I didn’t. Looking at the relationships around us, my girl friend and I watched as relationships bloomed and died from sex. Our relationship remained stable and we felt relatively content with our non-sexually-oriented connection. From Loy’s chapter What’s Wrong with Sex, the reason becomes clear why so many of my peers' relationships fell apart.
     Whether we like it or not, most of us cannot help but become sexually aroused. Loy recognizes that sexual desire stems from our biological drive to procreate, “sex is an appetite. We do not use our sexual organs; they use us,” (Loy, 75). Sex is not always as graceful as the media makes us believe; however, the feeling experienced during intercourse seems to encourage such an image. Stepping back from our biological craving, we might notice how strange the activity of intercourse really is. Somewhere along the line, our childhoods adjusted its opinion of physical love from cooties to a desire for sex. I really do not mind the change of disposition toward physical intimacy. However, as Loy says, we have a tanha, or “craving” for sex, and according to the four ennobling truths, this craving acts as a source of dukkha. The cycle for the craving of sex drove most of my single friends up the wall in high school, in some cases giving them bouts of depression. My single friends felt a personal failure in being single, as rejected and unwanted. My friends believed that sex might help fulfill themselves in some way, but even my fellow peers who were sexually active failed to find fulfillment from sex. Loy talks about sex and personal fulfillment noting that we have an “expectation of personal fulfillment whether through romance or sexual intimacy,” (Loy, 75). These expectations of romance caused the depression of my friends and the breakups of my fellow peers. From our environment, we learned to believe that sex is the pinnacle of intimacy and the measure of our fulfillment. However, the truth is that sex is simply a biological urge, an appetite of our collective delusion. 

-Evan