The Differences Between Hook-Up Sex, Marital Sex, and Making Love

Did that title get your attention? No, this isn't a "bait and switch!" It really is about the differences between "Hook-Up Sex," "Marital Sex," and "Making Love." I've found that confusion about those differences play out in many of the conflicts people experience in their sexual-romantic relationships, no matter what their ages or kinds of relationships.
First, some clarification about what I mean by each term. "Hook-Up Sex" refers to just plain f***ing; that is, a purely physical encounter. "Marital Sex" is the kind of sex life that most committed couples tend to have -- married or not, straight or gay. And "Making Love" is a different kind of experience that transcends both of the other two kinds.

That is, the three kinds of sexual relationships occur on different planes, different levels of integration between your physical, animal being, and your relational and spiritual beings. The kind of sexual life you have - and its conflicts - are embedded in the overall relationship you learn and how you "practice" it with your partner. I've described some of these connections in my previous posts on our adolescent model of love, the soul mate, and the positive power of "indifference." Most relationships limit the capacity for "Making Love."


Hook-Up Sex
"You know how there's good sex, great sex, and then really great sex? That's what it was like with her!" With gleaming eyes, Ken was telling me about his latest sexual encounter. He was a 44 year-old trust fund guy who lived with his mother and had never married. He entered therapy because he wanted to learn why he hadn't been able to form a lasting relationship.
In Hook-Up Sex you and your partner use each other's bodies for your own pleasure. It can be extremely intense and arousing, especially when you feel lust towards a new partner. There's a place for this kind of sex, but it's also the most primitive, least evolved form of sex. It reflects the purely animal part of being human -- our physiological needs and impulses. We share those with other animal species. From a human standpoint, though, it's mostly void of relationship beyond the physical connection; a form of playing through using each other's bodies.
Aside from Ken's deeper emotional issues that he'd never faced or dealt with, another barrier to his forming a relationship was that he had turned sex into a technique-dominated sport. He saw himself as a great lover and, in fact, had become very proficient in Tantric sexual practices. Handsome and charming, he was able to find women eager to participate. Tantric and related practices are, in fact, part of "Making Love," but they can also be misused. Ken's mastery of them had become an end in itself, and they were entirely divorced from human connection, beyond pure sex.
He was like a character in Nobel laureate Doris Lessing's novel, The Four-Gated City, a man who had become a master of Tantric sex, but had devolved as a human being. He had no soul-to-soul connection with any of the women he drew into his serial sexual relationships.
Marital Sex
"Dr. LaBier," she said, "I read that women require an average of 14 minutes of sexual stimulation to reach orgasm. Maybe that's the problem - that Tom's just not a good lover."

Julie and her husband had descended into what I call a "functional relationship." They didn't have sex much anymore, and when they did it was pretty uninspired. They remained committed to each other, though, and wanted to improve their sex life. Their sex life was an example of what most long-term couples experience, as research and surveys have documented.
"Marital Sex" reflects a higher plane than "Hook-Up" sex because it includes some degree of emotional connection and intimacy. At least it does at the beginning of the relationship. But what tends to happen is what this couple experienced: Their sex life became entangled with the conflicts and disagreements that had accumulated over the years. They brought all of that into the bedroom with them.
For example, Julie didn't talk very openly with Tom about what she wanted, sexually. She carried the residue of shame about revealing her sexual desires, shame that originated in her relationship with her mother. She was dealing with that in therapy, but that shame had joined with a still-existing view in our culture that a woman who expresses herself sexually must be a slut/whore. Moreover, Julie and Tom had descended into the low-level, adversarial power-struggle so typical of the functional relationship. So, learning new sex techniques or acquiring new sexual knowledge wasn't going to elevate their sexual relationship beyond Marital Sex.
Sometimes Marital Sex includes a Hook-Up sexual experience - perhaps when on a vacation, or aided by ingesting substances, legal or illegal. And it shares with Hook-Up sex what sex therapist Joseph Kramer calls "balloon sex:" Building up tension, followed by release, mostly focused on the genitals. Nevertheless, Marital Sex is further along the continuum because it includes some degree of emotional, relational connection, in addition to sex. Couples who have Marital Sex like something about each other as people. Or at least they did at one time, when they first got together.
That relational connection is both good and bad. The good part is that your relationship is more humanly evolved, and contains the possibility of evolving towards Making Love. The bad part is that all the feelings, conflicts, non-mutual behavior, hiding out and manipulation characteristic of the adolescent model of love can seep into your sex life like a growing virus. For example, withholding sex as punishment, or using it as leverage for manipulating your partner in some way. Or projecting and reenacting all sorts of unresolved family, parental, and sibling issues in your relationship. Michael Vincent Miller described much of this in Intimate Terrorism, about the sex lives of modern couples bound by struggles for possession and power over the other. All of that usually leads to diminished sexual connection over time.
In short, couples that have Marital Sex play out in the bedroom everything unspoken and unresolved from outside the bedroom. Julie may have learned how long it takes to reach an orgasm, but she didn't know much about what she and Tom need to do along the way to build a heightened, fulfilling and energized sexual relationship.

Making Love
For most people, their "normal" development into adult relationships cripples their capacity for moving beyond Marital Sex. But integrating what I call Radical Transparency and Words-Into-Actions with specific sexual practices can heighten energy, connection and excitement between partners on all levels of their relationship. Doing that is the path to the most evolved, integrated mind-body-spirit relationship: Making Love.
You might think of this as "spiritual sex," but I think that term is too easily equated - mistakenly -- with only ecstatic physical experience. And some recent research indicates that seeking just the experience of transcendent, physical sex can also increase the likelihood of unprotected sex. Instead, envision two partners whose sex life is interwoven with heightened mind, body, and spiritual connection.