Surprisingly, this question comes up quite a bit for folks who are on a journey of exploring their sexuality.
When we start to get curious about our past sexual experiences, we might start to notice patterns which can make us stop and question why we might be drawn to certain types of partners or certain types of sex.
Of course, this largely has to do with how we experience sexual attraction and arousal. But when it comes to certain relationship dynamics, it can feel extremely confusing to notice that what we’ve learned about attraction and desire for sex and sexual partners doesn’t align with our own experience of healthy attraction and desire.
If you find yourself having better sex with, or experiencing more sexual desire for, people you don’t necessarily like or have an intimate connection with, let me be the first to tell you that you are not broken. You’re not weird, you’re not “f*cked up” or “crazy,” I promise.
What if I told you that, in many ways, you’re actually hard-wired this way?
Essentially, through reading thousands of different people’s fantasies, desires and “hottest sex” stories, he unpacked what’s going on in the human brain when we experience that erotic charge that changes an encounter from any other sexual experience to a peak sexual experience.
His book, The Erotic Mind, was groundbreaking for the study of sex and relationships. He landed on what he refers to as The Erotic Equation, which is basically the recipe for how our mind interprets any given situation as “erotic.”
I’m sure you’re familiar with the idea that humans inevitably want what they can’t have, or can’t easily have. Most of us identify with the appeal of a challenge, but have you ever considered how this shows up in eroticism?
Picture this: if there’s a series of obstacles between us and someone we aren’t even attracted to, there’s not really much excitement to engage with them because we don’t care anyway. But if we find ourselves even3% attracted to someone, and then obstacles appear between us and them, this is where we find the “thrill of the chase,” or a bubbling sense of eroticism. This can show up as any form of attraction, which is why it also includes folks that we might not get along with super well. As long as there’s a hint of attraction on some level, obstacles and the thrill of overcoming them can lead to excitement.
This is often why, when we think of our peak erotic experiences, our “hottest sex” or sexual encounters, they’re often not the neat and tidy, predictable, or easily attained ones. Often, our peak erotic experiences come with some other element that makes them just a little less likely, or a little more spontaneous.
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If you’re thinking to yourself “well that doesn’t sound like a super healthy relationship dynamic,” you’re not wrong. This is why many people find that their eroticism and their sexual fantasies live outside of comfortable, stable, healthy relationships, because it is precisely in the danger or mystery of a person or encounter, that can be the instigator of our arousal.
When we find ourselves yearning for that person that gets under our skin or flat out makes us angry, or when we think back to the incredible sex we had with that ex we’d never in a million years get back with, understanding the erotic equation can make it make a little more sense.
There’s nothing wrong with you for feeling like you had better sex with that arsehole, you very well might have. But that doesn’t mean the relationship was healthy or that you should go back for more, and it doesn’t mean you’ll never have mind blowing sex like that again.
What it does mean, is that you might have to work with your eroticism, rather than against it, in order to find that type of excitement and attraction in healthier, more stable relationships.
Building on the Erotic Equation, Morin presents the Four Cornerstones of Eroticism as another key concept from his research.
The Four Cornerstones of Eroticism expand on the Erotic Equation to reveal what’s actually going on when it comes to the attraction piece, breaking down what Morin considers to be the four main ways humans experience eroticism:
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Most often, we can resonate on some level with the first three cornerstones as listed above, but it’s the fourth one, Overcoming Ambivalence, that shows up most commonly when we’re confused about why we have such great sex with people we don’t necessarily like. This one also might not feel as obvious as the others, which is why it feels so off-putting when it shows up in our own eroticism.
The experience of “overcoming ambivalence” is where our curiosities will go to really dive deeper on why we have better sex with people we might not like. Stay tuned for more on this topic in our next blog, coming soon…
Written by Taylor Neal
Embodied Counsellor and Trainee Sexologist