Love, Lust, and Poly-Friending

Please, no one get your panties in a bunch over where I am going with this thread.  After rereading some of Miss Emma’s blogs I believe I better understand about the desire for a second lover.  I think it has everything to do with lust and a need to satisfy that lust..  That reminded me of one of my classes in grad school.  I dug through my old class notes.  Yes, I still have them and my text books after all these years.  They even proved useful on multiple occasions in my practice.  I would look back through them when I faced unique cases with couples for clues as to how to bring out and deal with some feelings that clients were keeping bottled up.  But I digress. 

It was from a course on the role of sex in marriage and the professor was Dr. Martin.  She was in her early sixties and was my favorite professor.  She was uninhibited.  She was comfortable discussing any aspect of sex.  Our first day in her class she said that she hoped if we learned nothing else it would be that sex is not limited to intercourse in the missionary position.  The only sex that is perverted is rape and anything that leads to intentional injury.  Everything else is normal as long as it is consensual. Again, I am off topic but I think it is important to know something about the person that created my notes.  What follows are my notes that I have tried to make into full sentences and paragraphs. 

We spent at least three class periods on the differences between Love and lust.  She started with these 2 columns on the blackboard, characteristics of love and their counterpart in lust.

            LOVE                                                             LUST

            Grows slowly and steadily                             Desire at first site

            Patient and forgiving                                    Urgent and no apologies

            Friendship                                                   Acquaintance

            About your partner                                      About yourself

            About the future                                          About today

            Lasting                                                       Short term

            Security                                                      Fun

            Giving and Sharing                                      Taking

            Intimacy and intimate love making               Animal instinct sex

            Fulfillment                                                  Instant gratification

            Passion                                                      Excitement

She then said people tend to use lust and passion interchangeably but they are far different.  Passion is a subset of “Love” and is an intense expression of your emotions and your feelings for your partner. It usually results in untamed (Dr. Martin’s word in my notes.) sex.   “Lust” is an intense feeling of individual gratification.  It is about the orgasm you have and how good a lover you are based on how well you satisfied your partner sexually, not emotionally. 

Dr. Martin then emphatically (based on my emphasis in my notes) said that lust is not necessarily bad.  It is the one night stand with the one you meet in a bar.  It makes you feel good and feeds your ego and satisfies your sexual release.  It releases all kinds of hormones that can temporarily mask feelings of loneliness or inadequacy.

Then she said that in many cases the lust will turn to love.  If it is more than a one night stand the couple may start to talk and get to know each other.  They may begin to develop emotional feelings for each other.  The emotional attachment slowly becomes more important than the physical/sexual attraction and the lust slowly turns into love.  She didn’t have any statistics but her gut feeling was that many successful love relationships began as lust. 

Based on my notes it was the next class session when she talked about how a couple would know if they were in love or in lust.  She said a couple should not consider what they have as a relationship for at least 3 or 4 months.  During those first months the couple is in courting behavior mode.  Courting mode can only last for this 3 or 4 month period before the true person will begin to emerge.  At this point if as a couple you feel closer and greater attachment even when you are just doing routine things, than you are probably falling in love.  You aren’t there yet but you are falling in love.  ( She believed no couple should get engaged in less than six months.)  If you fight more and are only really happy during sex or play you are in lust.

My next notes were about cheating.  Dr. Martin said cheating mainly falls into 2 categories, emotional and sexual. 

Emotional cheating occurs when one partner no longer feels loved.  That so important emotional need is not being met.  This person will seek friendship with someone that fills that need.  It does not begin as sexual.  They slowly form an emotional bond.  At some point the relationship usually becomes sexual as well as emotional.  This form of cheating almost always ends in divorce.  The new emotional connection is more important than the old marriage because the marriage had become “empty” and the “cheater” has no desire to reconcile. 

When the cheating is based on sex it is usually because one partner has a much greater sex drive than the other.  One partner craves or even needs the pure lust that the other partner is unable to provide.  Generally, in this type of affair, there is no emotional bond formed between the “lovers.”  It is about the lust.  As long as the “cheaters” do not form an emotional bond, this type of cheating does not always lead to divorce.  If the couple still has that emotional bond, they will both want to save the marriage.  The answer is in finding a way for the partner with the lower libido to learn to satisfy the partner who is addicted to the lust. 

That was the end of my notes on lust vs. love.  But what I found in these pages of notes combined with Miss Emma saying what she felt for Andrew was nothing but pure lust, helps me understand why cuckolding may be important to some couples. Some women need that lust and her partner is not able to provide that pure, hot sex.  If her lust cannot be satisfied, the relationship with her partner becomes stale, even if the “playful and silly” is still happening.  I still don’t know if it is the wild intensity of the sex that the partner just can’t provide or does it require the added excitement of having a “lover” to satisfy that lust?  Some of Miss Emma’s blogs in various ways say one man cannot satisfy a woman while others make the case for monogamy.  In a poly-friending relationship the man understands her need and his inability to satisfy that need.  Her satisfaction is important to him because of their emotional bond and he is okay with her having a lover.  Cuckolding is not the same as cheating because it is consensual.  @ Emma   Am I at least on the right page?

This does not change my personal feeling that the risks of “poly-friending” outweigh the benefits.  The chance that the wife and her lover will start to bond in an emotional way is always there.  If this happens it could destroy the bond with her husband.  Her man’s only role in the relationship is the emotional bond, the emotional satisfaction he provides for her.  When she suddenly finds that in her lover, he is going to feel like the lover has replaced him.  No matter how much she tells her partner she loves him most, the man will feel threatened.  He will feel the pain.  If there is any way the husband can be taught to meet her need for the lust, that would still be my choice.  That is strictly my opinion though.  As long as everyone understands the risks it is totally up to the people involved.