We Could Get Honest About Sex and Why We Accomplish it!

 

People take big risks for sex, it seems clear.  Perfectly reasonable people go can off the deep end where sex is involved, risking everything they know and love for sex.  We often hear the stories about politicians engaged in politically unacceptable acts that bring their careers crashing to a halt.  What’s less clear is why they do it; the reasons aren’t always what you think.
Asking people directly about their motives would be the most straightforward way to find out why people do things, but when it comes to sex people are not always upfront and honest, particularly when it comes to the riskier things they do. And I’m not sure people really know the true answers about why they do things.
Arianne Cohen took a different approach as the creator of The Sex Diaries Project, in which over 2500 people have told their anonymous stories about their sex lives.  Since the stories are anonymous, people are often surprisingly frank in the stories they tell, perhaps more so than with their significant others. 

After collecting so many stories this way, Cohen started to see a pattern.  She found that the motivations behind risky sex are often about more than sex.  “Lots of people do risky things,” Cohen said when I talked to her for the book I was working on about risk and how we see it. “They’re trying to get their needs met, their emotional, sexual, and life needs. Sex is a big way of dealing with emotional as well as sexual needs,” said Cohen.

A British man who told his story in the Sex Diaries Project was seeing prostitutes throughout a four year relationship with his girlfriend.  This behavior was not accepted by his girlfriend, who did not know and would not have approved. “The girlfriend had no idea whatsoever,” Arianne said. “And obviously she would not be okay with this. But what’s interesting to me is what makes it risky: not the behavior itself (seeing others), but that the behavior is not agreed upon with his primary partner.”
The man must have known that this was not the right thing to do and that he was taking a big emotional risk with his relationship by doing this, but he did it anyway.  Why? “He was getting an emotional release out of it,” said Cohen. “He also thought that he was expressing sexual proclivities that he couldn’t express with his girlfriend—though the reality is that he never asked her.”  He balanced an emotional risk against an emotional reward.
The needs for sex runs deep, but is surrounded by social rules about what is considered okay or not so okay by those around us.  A common example is the need some people feel for multiple sexual partners.  Society may consider monogamy the only acceptable solution, but not everyone feels that this meets all their needs.  The British man was risking a great deal, but somehow managed to convince himself that everything would be okay, that the risk was manageable, because he was driven to look for more.
Why do people do things like this, jeopardizing things that matter so much to them?  Why start a relationship like this when right from the start he had to go outside the relationship to meet some of his needs? It seems that along with the British man in the story many of us don’t entirely understand how all of these influences affect us.  If we did, it seems like we would do things differently. Instead, we’re often making things up as we go, doing our best to patch together a series of solutions that meet all of our needs, even if the various patches don’t really fit together and end up coming apart over time.  Maybe with time and experience, and by better understanding ourselves, we will find better solutions that reduce the risks for ourselves and those around us.

Glenn Croston is the author of “The Real Story of Risk”, exploring the distorted ways we see risks is our lives, our work, and our world.  He is also the author of “Gifts from the Train Station”, telling the inspirational stories of people who overcome great challenges and build new lives by reaching out to help others, and “75 Green Businesses You Can Start to Make Money and Make a Difference”.