Intimacy, sex and why we marry.

Continuing on the topic of marriage.

Sex is central to the definition of marriage -- a marriage without sex is not a marriage. Why is that?

When I was 18, I met an Iranian guy who would one day become my love interest. We ended up getting married eleven years later, and wanting to have sex with him wasn't my main objective -- but I'll get to that later. When I first met him, an aunt warned me not to fall for the Shi'a "trick" of entering into a short-term marriage with me in order to have sex. This is called muta'ah marriage, and it is not valid in Sunni Islam. Mostly, my aunt's advice amused me, because persuading someone to have sex is not as complicated as that. All you need to do is ask, "Do you want to?" and the other person says, "Okay," and then you do it. Or they say, "I don't like you in that way," and you slink away, broken-hearted and feeling slightly foolish. (Another part of me was offended by what my aunt said, because being tricked into having sex would require a huge level of dumb, and dumb as I can be, I'm not that dumb.)

My aunt's assumption was that if someone was attracted to me, it meant they wanted to have sex with me, quickly. My boyfriend wasn't like that. When we were alone, off of our friends' radars, we became very intimate with each other, doing a host of things that was a proxy to having sex: going grocery shopping, cooking together, doing laundry, watching the Olympics on TV in my dorm room, and so on. Maybe that was the right way of doing things -- because we're still together, doing those very things with each other still to this day. Maybe I shouldn't think as those acts as a proxy to sex at all. Maybe the reverse is true, that having sex has become a proxy for those very mundane acts of intimacy that are what truly binds two friends together for life.

In so much as sex is pleasurable, I am a fan of it. But I'm not a big fan of sexuality and being sexy in the pursuit of sex. In fact, I hate the pursuit of sex. I hate how it inconveniences my relationships with men, who are so central to my success in my career (to whatever extent I have one). Sex also gets in the way of being friends with men. It's also annoying to me that sex is held by society as being central to marriage. I'm pretty sure I did not marry for sex -- but nevertheless, something made me want to get married. And I don't know what it is.