Understanding Our Motivations is the Key to Having Better Casual Sex
Science explains how to make your hookups the best they can possibly be
In his infamous work Amores, the ancient Roman poet Ovid sought to explain all the secrets of mastering sexual attraction and finding love. Eloquently, he rattles off verse after verse of knowledge bombs, explaining to young lovers how they might find and secure both sex and love (and how to get over it when love stings).
Ovid didn’t discriminate. To him, sex and love were both valuable and valid parts of the human experience.
He considered sex an art form to be cultivated and cherished, much like many of the ancients did. From the Greeks to the Romans, sex was seen as a natural part of life to be explored with wonder and curiosity, not a prison that should condemn us to a dark world of sadness and confusion.
Instead of being a means of control, a method of captivating people, so we can claim them like the objects we buy off a shelf in today’s modern world, ancient Greco-Roman culture viewed sex like they viewed music and wine, something to be shared with others.
Written in 16 BCE, he was writing in a period long before strictly enforced monogamy was the norm and shortly before Augustus Caesar mandated monogamy within the Roman Empire. But still, his words ring true to millions of hearts, even today.
He speaks of nourishing the mind to become a more interesting partner.
A sweet form is fragile, what’s added to its years lessen it, and time itself eats it away. Violets and open lilies do not flower forever, and thorns are left stiffening on the blown rose. And white hair will come to find you, lovely lad, soon wrinkles will come, furrowing your skin. Then nourish mind, which lasts, and adds to beauty: it alone will stay till the funeral pyre.
Such beautiful prose is difficult to ignore. Skipping forward more than 2,000 years, we come to our modern times, and we’ve made significant progress since Ovid’s time.
Today, we have the scientific method on our side to help us tease out the best ways to engage in racy romps, debaucheries flings, and even the pursuit of courtship.
Sticking with Ovid’s theme, that sex and love are arts to be mastered, let’s dive into what science has to say about making a hookup the best experience it possibly can be.