Years ago, in a school RSE session, I was asked ‘am I in love, or is it just great sex?’ I answered it then in person, and I thought I answered it here too, but I haven’t. So here it is.
Love and Sex
Look, first of all it’s useful to remember that sometimes love and great sex goes together, but sometimes not. People can be in loving romantic relationships without sex. Either because the sex isn’t that important to them, or other things are more important. They might not be that sexual in the first place, shout out to all the asexual fans of BISH. If you are in love and you would like the sex to be more important, you might find this recent article about sex and compromise to be useful.
But your question is about trying to disentangle love and sex. Usually I’m not one for disentangle things, but I can see why this might be useful in this case.
Are you in love, and so having great sex?
How do you know that you are in love and having great sex? The BISH position on love is that it’s something we do and feel and that we can’t separate the two. What this does is to allow your bodies (including your brains) to connect with each other and feel together. In order to do that you have to create the kinds of container for your relationship that can allow this to happen. To be both free and gently held, (as I say in this article about how to get a girlfriend, boyfriend, or themfriend).
You do this through all of the micro-moments of interaction you have together. How you feel when you share a joke together. That look you have. Enjoying the smell of each other. How you develop a joint vocabulary and phrases, stories, and memes. Pats. All of this happens within the careful container for the relationship. How you support each other. Asking what each other wants and really listening carefully. Bigging each other up and feeling part of a team. A lot of this is to do with consent really. To be in love we need to be both excited together and relaxed enough to experience the feelings without being overwhelmed. (I explain more about this, the autonomous nervous system, in my article about stress). We need lots and lots of consent to feel this way.
I’ve got lots of articles about love on here that you might want to check out.
Is it just great sex and not love?
If you’re doing all of the above, carefully curating a relationship together and trying to bring as much joy into your lives as possible, then you may already be having great sex. Communication, attentiveness, patience, freedom to choose are the key to being really good at sex. However, if you’re not doing that, you could still be having great sex. Why? How?
Well a lot of people just ‘have sex’ without much communication and all that lovely dovey stuff and they just get lucky. Sometimes people’s bodies just really gel. The thing you like to do is the thing they really like to do. Your bodies just seem to fit really well. You just happen to like their smells. They are in the right place at the right time offering the right thing. You too. (This explanation consent and handshakes might help you understand this).
Think about this like a ‘tessellation’*. You both fit neatly together like tiles on a wall. However, there’s no room for growth, or movement, or a becoming. As soon as something changes, or one of you farts, or comes down with a cold, or is a tiny bit annoyed with something you said, then the great sex can disappear. The vibes: completely off.
*I love this quote from philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari From A Thousand Plateaus, “I am a man, you are a woman; you are a telegraphist, I am a grocer; you count words, I weigh things; our segments fit together, conjugate. Conjugality. A whole interplay of well-determined, well-planned territories. They have a future but no becoming.” p195
Sexual love
The thing about good sex though, is that it can make you feel really bonded with people. As you can see at my article ‘how do I know when I’ve had an orgasm’, our bodies experience a lot of things when we experiencing a lot of sexual pleasure. Experiencing an altered state of consciousness when you are that (physically) close to someone is going to feel like something. Particularly when we live in a culture which says that orgasms are literally the best thing ever.
It doesn’t mean that ‘you’re in love’ in a romantic way (I also don’t think love happens like a thunderbolt of lightening). However, if you’re having really great sex then it might feel like it. After all, no-one else is going to experience that exact same experience as you did. You’re also allowing yourselves to trust each other enough to be naked, making noises and seeing each other’s strange orgasm faces.
You might be like ‘well the sex is really great, perhaps we could see if we could have a romantic relationship too?’ Or you could just accept that you will have all these feelings from great sex with someone, that they wear off after a few minutes, and doesn’t have to mean anything.
So what should you do?
Luckily, nowadays, as a culture we have lots of different ways of doing relationships. Not everyone thinks this is a good thing, but I do! It’s about finding a way of relating to each other that can work for you. Everything from super casual (but with that really great sex and maybe ‘sexual love’) to super serious (which may or may not have the great sex). It’s just about trying to tune into what kind of attachments we would find helpful and seeing how this can fit into the rest of our relationships and lives in general. Our romantic or sexual lives don’t have to be the most important part of being: our friends, family, comrades, our relationship with our selves can all be just as important too. If we treated all these relationships with the same importance as each other, what would that do?
© Justin Hancock, 2025 Find out more about me and BISH here.
BISH is run by me, Justin Hancock. I’ve been a trained sex and relationships educator since 1999. I’m a member of the World Association for Sexual Health. As well as BISH I also have resources, a podcast, and a coaching service for over 18s, as well as some of the best RSE teaching resources around. Find out out about my other work at justinhancock.co.uk. My work has featured (positively) in the media, like the BBC, Financial Times, The Economist, The Guardian, Sky One, and Novara Media.
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