Romance as Sex plus Love (an Emotional Connection):
Platonic Love as an Emotional Connection without Sex,
Hookups and Friends with Benefits and Being with people who are not your partner while in an open relationship as Sex without Love.
Level of lust and being horny as intensity of sexual desire, level of loneliness and desire for a partner and best friend and to fall in love as romantic desire, desire for romance as a function of sexual desire times romantic desire.
If you have one, or the other, or none, but not both, then you do not have romance, instead you have either sex without love, or love without sex, or neither sex nor love. Something can be either disgusting or nice. Sex is disgusting, love is nice, romance is nice. It’s like body, soul, and soul in body. Body is disgusting, soul is nice, soul in body is nice.
And in love, there is a great belief, a misconception, dating back to Plato himself, that you can either choose someone who makes you horny and for whom you feel sexual desire and are physically attracted to, or choose someone because you love them and have feelings for them or they make you laugh or they’re fun to hang out with, but, in fact, you can choose both. The first is sex, the second is love, the third is romance. Romance includes both sex and love, and this is how I have defined it, as a thing that has those two properties, romance equals sex plus love. You can choose sex, or you can choose love, or you can choose romance, but the odds don’t change any which way, because it is all just random chance if you meet someone who matches the criteria that you’re looking for. In modern times, people tend to look either for sex, or for love, but not both, and they assume that it is impossible to have both, to have true romance, but this is because they assume and accept the premise of Platonic love, that sex and love are opposed and in conflict, that dichotomy, of soul against body, whereas Objectivism says that soul and body should live in harmony, so sex and love can go together, as romance.
Should you seek romance? You should seek either romance, sex, or love, based upon your own personal preferences and what you want and what would be best for you. If you find that perfect person for whom you feel both lust and love, and you like them and they like you, that’s perfect, but if, for example, you feel love for one person and lust for another, and you feel like you are being pulled in two different directions, that doesn’t prove that soul and body are in conflict, instead it merely proves that being human sometimes requires you to make tough choices, and to make a decision about whom you prefer, whom you would rather be with, to decide what you want in life.
Then, on top of that, there is more to a relationship than merely being in love, or feeling lust and sexual desire, you have to “make the relationship work,” so to speak, and be compatible, and be able to see each other when you want, and enjoy spending time together, and have shared interests so that you have hobbies or events that you can do together to bond, or enjoy the same restaurants or clubs or bars to go on dates, and be compatible in emotions and psychology, and be the same or accepting or not caring about each other’s religious or philosophical or political beliefs, etc.
But this is why, since so much has to go right, you probably never find a perfect person, you just find someone you love, and/or think is sexy, and you try to make it work, and forgive as much as you can, and then, if you can’t forgive any more, you walk away, and leave one imperfect person for the next imperfect person. If you’re looking for a soul mate, or the perfect match, on the theory that there is one special person for whom you would be perfect, the logistics of dating and marriage and romance indicate that this theory is not going to be true, you have to find a real person, with some flaws, and love them, you will not find a special snowflake who is the love of your life: the love of your life isn’t a quality that someone has, rather it is something that you create when you have a great relationship and fall in love with someone, but the other person is human, not an angel.
However, there are things that people want, and people want what they want, so you can, and should, define a baseline level of what you’re looking for, and then reject everyone who doesn’t have what you want, and only look for people who have what you want. And I don’t believe that, when it comes to sex and love and romance, I don’t believe that what you want is something you decide, instead it is based on who you are and what you are, so, in a sense, yes, you are born that way, and you can’t change it, not because it couldn’t be different, but because you would not be the person whom you are if it was different, so it can’t be different because you are you, a thing is itself, “A is A.”
Such things include, for example, being gay or straight or bi or pan, being into cis or trans or NBs or all, being a top or a bottom or verse, being sub or dom or both, what sort of things you are sexually attracted to like beauty or handsomeness or muscles or tattoos and piercings etc., or qualities of personality, like being nerdy and geeky or being smart or being normal or having a sense of humor or being sarcastic or being simple and sincere or being humble or being audacious and courageous or being religious or being philosophical or being on the Left or on the Right.
In LGBTQ theory, right now, and recently, there is a big movement for defining sexuality as different from romance, so that a person could be asexual, or aromantic, but these are two different things, and a person could be, for example, bisexual but gay romantic, and want to have sex with men and women but only want to date men, or a person could be straight romantic but gay sexual, and want to date the opposite gender as them but only have sex with the same gender as they are. And those are merely a few examples of the general principle of the attempt to sever sex from love. But, the theory of romance as a combination of sex and love, contradicts this, that, if you are considering sex, and love, separately, you could define your sexual attractions differently than you love interests, but, if what you seek is romance, that will be what you are sexually attracted to plus what you are attracted to for love, and that will be one thing, which is a combination of the sets of both properties, because I have defined romance as sex plus love.
Historically, it was assumed that romance was the description of a long-term sexual relationship, and that, if you were having sex with someone on a regular basis, the moral and ethical behavior was to love them and be romantic with them. It is only modern times which has sought to separate love from sex, such as with the Friends With Benefits (FWB) relationship type, of a long-term friendship that includes sex, or the Poly, Polyamorous, Open Relationship type, where you are in a long-term open romantic relationship with one person or one set of people (the Polycule) but you then also have sex with other random lovers outside of your primary partner or primary relationships, in order to increase sexual liberation and set people free to have sex without love, or, in reverse, to set people, if they want to, to be free to engage in what they call romantic love but without sexual desire and without lust, as Platonic love. The FWB and Poly, I believe, evolved as a way to have a relationship but also be sexually satisfied, because, in modern times, it was understood that a horny person might want more than one lover in order to stay fully sexually satisfied, which they could never get with romance from one person, but they also wanted the ethical and moral aspect of romance with one person, so Poly (and, to a lesser extent, FWB) evolved as modern evolutions of how to balance the desire for sex with the desire for love.
But I assert my hypothesis, that, if you find true romance, if you find love with someone to whom you are deeply and intensely sexually attracted and who makes you horny, you could (for a period of time, at least) be sexually satisfied entirely by the one person you are dating, and so these are the set of conditions under which monogamous romance is possible. If you wanted romance, but you don’t care about sex, if you just want to marry your best friend and be married to your best friend and partner in life for 40 years and until such time as both of you are too old to have a libido or care about sex, for example, that, to me, is Platonic love, that is not romance. I have to admit that I think of Platonic love as friendship, not romance, although it an open question what the definition of friendship is, or what it means to be a best friend, and whether being a friend is a lesser included element of dating, such that romance includes friendship, or whether friendship exists in contrast to romance where friendship is love without sex and romance is love with sex.
What is the difference between friendship without sex and Platonic love without sex? I do not necessarily see any difference, myself. But someone else might say: The friendship is just a friend, but the Platonic love includes romance without sex. But here, “romance” probably refers to a set of acts, like buying someone flowers or chocolates on Valentine’s Day, which, in practical reality, are designed to seduce someone into sex or marriage or into a romance that includes both sex and love. Or someone else might say: the friendship is based on hanging out and having fun and doing things together, but the romance includes a deeper emotional connection, or, perhaps, a willingness to make sacrifices for the other person, in return for them making sacrifices for you in the future, or the hope that they will do so.
What is love? How do you define love? The meanings and definitions change throughout history, so you should make up your own mind about what to believe, and there are different things you can believe, but if you define sex as a physical connection and you define love as an emotional connection, then I define romance as sex plus love.
