THE LUST INTO LOVE FORMULA:
1 First, you feel powerful sexual chemistry with someone or, in raw terms, lust.
2 Next, you act on those urges and have sex with that person.
3 Then you experience some guilt or discomfort having been so sexually intimate with someone you aren’t that emotionally connected with.
4 Finally you create a relationship with that person to legitimize your lust.
Obviously I’m not saying that every time you form a relationship with someone you are following the Lust into Love Formula. However, if you are a strong believer in Love Myth #5, you may find yourself in this situation more often than you’d like to admit.
Here are the negative consequences of believing in Love Myth #5:
1 You get involved with people you are not compatible with.
Ann is a twenty-six-year-old buyer for a clothing store. Here is her story about how Love Myth #5 got her in real emotional trouble:
‘Brian and I met while we were both skiing in Colorado. I guess being away from home combined with the cold and how cute he looked on skis took precedence over my better judgment, and I slept with him on our second date. Maybe it was the altitude, but I’d never had such exciting sex in my life. Brian prided himself on being a great lover, and he was. I was sure I had fallen head over heels.
‘Our vacation ended—he went back to Seattle, I returned to San Francisco. We talked on the phone every few days, and I told him how I felt about him. For six months we spent every other weekend together, and, you guessed it, most of the time we were in bed. The physical passion between us was spectacular, and so I assumed I must love him very much to feel that way. We even began talking about marriage.
‘That summer, we both decided to take two weeks off from our jobs and spend it together at my house. I could hardly wait for Brian to arrive. The first few days were wonderful, as usual. But then things began to fall apart. We started arguing about everything. First it was Brian’s smoking—I’d known he smoked, but we were in bed so much that it wasn’t that frequent. Now that we had more time together, he seemed to be smoking constantly. And I’d never realized how negative he was. He found something bad to say about my friends, the way I’d decorated my house, even the way I drive. Things got progressively worse until we weren’t having sex at all, and I could hardly wait for him to leave.
‘The night he went back to Seattle, I lay in bed crying my heart out. I was so confused, and I felt like my dreams were shattered before my eyes. I spent the next few days really thinking about my relationship with Brian, and suddenly everything became clear: I’d never had a relationship with Brian. All we ever did was make love. Our meeting was a romantic fling, and the six months afterward were filled either with phone calls that consisted of a lot of flirting and joking, or short visits during which we were in bed the whole time. I’d never seen Brian as a person, just a sexual partner. Once I did, I didn’t even like him very much!’
Ann had never had really good sex with any of her previous boyfriends. So when she met Brian and the sparks flew, she assumed it must be love. It was also hard for her to admit that she could be that sexually turned on with someone she didn’t love or wouldn’t marry. She learned the hard way that passion doesn’t always come from love. All she and Brian had in common was that they loved to ski and loved sex—enough for a fling, but not enough to make a long-term relationship work.
2. You stay in relationships longer than you should, and have a hard time letting go of partners who are not right for you.
Jamal approached me after a seminar in which I talked about Love Myths. ‘You were describing me!’ he exclaimed. Jamal is thirty-eight, divorced, and a teacher. Here is his story.
‘I got married when I was really young to my high-school girlfriend. I was pretty inexperienced sexually, and she had never been with anyone but me, so it took me a while to realize that we were sexually incompatible. As the years passed, I lost all attraction to her, though I loved her very much. We had three children, and I tried to make it work for them, but finally when I was thirty-one I left and we got a divorce.
‘I was on the dating scene for the first time since I was nineteen years old, and I was ready to roll. I promised myself that I’d never end up in some sexless relationship again, and I have to admit I was pretty wild for those first few years. I was so afraid I’d fall in love with someone I wasn’t attracted to that I would only date women I felt totally and immediately turned on by.
‘That’s how I met Sabrina. We were at a jazz coffeehouse, and she was sitting at the bar. The first thing I noticed about her was her body—she looked like my fantasy woman. We started talking, then dancing, and I could hardly keep it together until we went back to her place and got it on. Man, I thought I had died and gone to heaven. She was like a wild pony. It felt the way I always thought it should be with a woman.
‘I had promised myself that I wouldn’t get involved again until I was completely sure of the relationship, but my resolve was shot to pieces. Sabrina would purr and wrap herself around me until she got her way. I ended up moving into her place within a month, and that’s when the trouble began. I found out Sabrina had no money—she’d been supported by an ex-boyfriend, and she had a stack of unpaid bills. I was under her spell, so I agreed to help her out until she got back on her feet.
ESCAPING THE PRISON OF SEXUAL PARADISE
Jamal continued: ‘Six months passed, and our relationship was like a roller coaster—one minute we’d be fighting and the next we’d be having wild sex. Sabrina was like a spoiled, irresponsible child. She never even looked for a job, and was draining me of all of my energy. I knew I had to get out, but each time I told her I was leaving, she would seduce me and I’d end up staying.
‘Finally, one day when Sabrina came home with a thousand dollars’ worth of new clothes, I couldn’t take it anymore, and I left. I felt free for the first time in months. Unfortunately, that feeling didn’t last. Sabrina would call me at my new place and show up dressed in what I call a ‘screw me’ outfit, and I’d lose my willpower. We’d see each other a few days, then I’d break it off again for a month or two. Then one night she’d call me, tell me she was lonely, and I’d find myself back in bed with her again. I was disgusted with myself.
‘I hate to admit this, but I was so hooked into the great sex it took me two years to finally let go of Sabrina.’
Jamal’s story is dramatic but not that uncommon. He was sure that if sex with Sabrina was that good, she was the right woman for him. It took several years of drama and humiliation to teach Jamal that good sex didn’t necessary mean healthy love.
Here’s the reality about Love Myth #5:
GOOD SEX HAS NOTHING TO DO WITH TRUE LOVE, BUT MAKING LOVE DOES.
If you have fantastic sex with a partner:
It does mean: