by Tracy Clayton
Welcome to installment two of my series of ruminations on love and relationships. In case you missed it, I am now a relationship expert! I got my degree at DeVry, where I minored in TV/VCR repair.
This week’s question: What is the difference between having sex and making love?
The folks over at The Love Project asked random passers-by their thoughts on this very same topic. Watch.
Let’s discuss.
Maybe the first question to ask is if there’s even a difference between the two to begin with. The answer here is yes; absolutely. It seems that a lot of people define that difference in terms of what you do, physically, with you partner while doing the horizontal Harlem shake in the bedroom. Stereotypically, making love is sweet, right? It’s emotional. It is slow, soft, and intimate. Your partner is lavished with kisses as Luther Vandross croons softly to you both; hands are held, eye contact is made. Your hearts beat in rhythm and sweat beads up on your bodies in the shape of joined wedding rings. So beautiful. So tender.
But sex?
Sex is dirty, right? It’s primal , frenzied, and carnivorous; sweaty, clawing, and foul-mouthed. Instead of Luther and champagne, you have a couple bottles of malt liquor and the dirty rap tunes your parents wouldn’t let you listen to as a kid. It’s porn without someone holding a boom mic over your head. It’s taking the gravy and whipped cream from the fridge and doing things with it that your Grandma Mattie would never approve of. It’s nasty, filthy, and everything that love (making) isn’t.
Right?
Wrong, my freaky little friend.
I have always resented this dichotomy. It fuels another dichotomy that I, as a woman, hate: the lady vs. the whore. We hear things like this all the time, in snappy little sayings picked up from who knows where (“you can’t turn a hoe into a housewife!”), and in our favorite hippety hop rippety rap songs (Ludacris, for instance, wants “a lady in the streets, but a freak in the bed”). There is an obsession with being and finding “wifey” material, and the litmus test is rigidly black and white. Hoes do ABC, ladies do XYZ, and never the twain shall meet. What boring boxes. What needless essentialism. How unfair and utterly ridiculous.
I am going to posit a radical idea here. The difference between having sex and making love–stay with me, here–is love.
It doesn’t matter what you do in the sack. Whether you’re strictly missionary, fully clothed from the waist up with a sheet separating the two of you (as good God-fearing folk should get down), or whether your leg is over there and somebody else’s is tangled in the bedframe and there are saddles, riding crops, blindfolds, and video cameras involved–if there’s no love between the participants, it’s just sex. And just because he pulls out the rose petals, Freddie Jackson’s greatest hits, and a vintage bottle of Boones Farm, it doesn’t mean that he’s ready to walk you down the aisle.
As long as you’re in love, you can get as nasty, dirty, filthy, and messy as you want. It’s still lovemaking. Just nasty, dirty, filthy, messy love making, and listen–ain’t a thing wrong with that. Might just make your in-loveness better.
So go ahead. Break out the handcuffs and wrap your left leg around your neck in the name of love.
[Photo credit: Shutterstock]
