Søren Kierkegaard (1813−1855)
“Where there is a crowd, there is untruth.”
Why is every guy, that is a womanizer, so obsessed with my sex life?
My first few days living in a college dorm my freshman year, I was frequently approached by guys asking me the same question, “my girlfriend will be able to visit me in a few days, will you fuck her for me?”
A guy I had known in high school and happened to become friends with a couple of years ago was constantly bragging about all the girls that we mutually knew from high school. He told about how the girls would make a fist and hold next to his genitals to measure the size.
We went to a bar in a small town nearby. When we got out of the car, he handed me a Viagra.
The therapist that I was seeing was also obsessed with my lack of a sex life. He kept telling me how great sex was and how I had really missed out. I basically said he was full of shit, it’s over exaggerated because of peer pressure and because society says that being sexually active is, “COOL“.
What is it that makes everyone so damn obsessed with my private sex life?
I know how obsessed with sex guys can be in college. Some were always bragging about how they got some pussy. I wondered if some of them were making it up to convince other guys that they were real men. They tended to be kind of roughhewn. I wondered how girls would find them attractive when there were a lot more attractive men on campus.
I developed a buddy relationship with a guy who was in the class ahead of mine. He was really good looking (kind of an Adonis figure with curly blond hair and muscular build) but he never said anything about girls he had dated. I asked him once if he had ever had sex. He asked me why I asked. I said, “because I want to know what it’s like.” He told me that meet a girl who really turns me on, I will probably find out. “I don’t think it’s the same for everybody,” he told me. He wasn’t bragging about his sex life but he came back to campus the following year married. I only found that year that a girl I knew had had a relationship with him and was disappointed that he had gotten married..
I’ve learned that each of the partners must be erotically attracted for good lovemaking to happen. This not a passive eroticization because flesh touches flesh. It must be an active eroticization in which each is in love with other. It might not happen if one partner isn’t passionate about the other. I assume mutual passion is present when a couple wants to get married. How much passion is there in the marriage when other responsibilities intrude? There have been few studies of how much passionate love occurs in a lifetime among married couples.
However, there has been a study of how much passionate love occurs in the lives of single men between the ages of 18 and 99. Out of a sample of over 10,000 single men, on average only 2% of single men had experienced passionate love in their lifetimes. 14% of the sample had never experienced sex. Older single men had more passionate love experiences than younger single men. (Reported by Ashley Fike in Vice February 14, 2026.) This may be due to the fact that young people today aren’t dating, having sex, or forming relationships, and holding off marriage until they are settled in their career. Having grown up during COVID-19 when people kept their distance from each other, they probably didn’t learn te skills that make confident in dating.
The sample didn”t distinguish between Gay and Straight men. It would have been interesting to see what percentage of gay men were in the sample and whether their percentage of passionate love was higher than straight men since, if they desire it, there are more opportunities for gaymen to get togethers. But if they’re married, it wouldn’t count in the survey. Most of the gay men of my acqaintance have husbands.
Remember, this is a survey only of single men. But maybe married men are only a little higher on the passionate scale. Passionate love is marketed as a required life experience, like your friend and the therapist were pushing on you to have sex. The research suggests that passionate love is rarer than we think. Missing it doesn’t make a man (or a woman) abnormal. It would seem more normal to live thout many instances of passionate love or none at all. It seems that many men and women in the millennial generation aren’t interested in sex or marriage until maybe later once they are settled into their careers. Our birth rate in the U.S.A., as in many European and East Asian countries, is going down.
I want to comment on that therapist you’ve been seeing. A professional psychotherapist won’t give you directions for your life. He or she would ask probing questions that bring you to a conclusion about your own life. You may have had early life experiences that had something to do with the direction of your life. Those could be probed, But if you’re satisfied now to live life without sex, that’s your choice and no one should look down on you for your lifestyle, especially your therapist. I’d quit his practice and look for someone else with a more professional approach.
The picture over this post is of the Danish philosopher Søren Kierkagaard. He wasn’t one to follow the crowd, even in his love life. He became engaged to Regine Olsen because society expected it. She was passionately drawn toward him, but he broke off the wedding because he didn’t feel the passion in return. His philosophy centered more on the inner life, and that’s where one finds Kierkegaard’s passion. He thought that one has to be passionate about something, but it doesn’t have to sex. Eros can be a passion or love toward anything, as Plato taught. Eros or desire is not what I have, but what I lack. The pursuit of this desire can be different for everyone. You don’t have to follow the crowd. Follow your own desire.
Pastor Frank
