Where There's No Sex in Sex Anymore | Marriage 3.0 | Big Think

Casablanca, kissing, the giddy exchange of bodily fluids, the pressing of the flesh?It?s all so 20^th century. Today there doesn?t need to be sex in your sex anymore.

The ?virtual,? cyber, or mental affair, variously named, is one of those new frontiers of online social media and the Internet. These are intense relationships that happen in an online medium, where the participants might never touch, kiss or meet each other.

One of the most interesting curiosities of the cyber affair is that sex or physical contact has now become an optional feature of a romantic relationship or an affair.

As in Correggio?s Jupitor and Io (see picture), the nymph is caressed by a phantom, incorporeal lover. Physical contact of some kind has always been the litmus test that distinguished flirtation from a relationship; the fantasy from its realization, but not anymore.

Maybe with the online world of incorporeal romance, a sexual bond is about how we think about each other and not about what we do to each other. The ethical weights and measures are in disarray. What?s more intimate: the one-night stand with contact and no mental connection, or the exchange of hundreds of pages of emails, with no contact? People have different views.

Jennifer Schneider is a prominent researcher of online sex addiction and the cyber affair. She?s found in her research and therapeutic practice that many patients grappling with infidelity feel that the mental affair hurts ?just as much? if not more than a physical affair. In some cases, the betrayed spouse felt that the meeting of minds was a more searing intimacy than the meeting of bodies. Cheating is as cheating thinks.

Other couples don?t see it that way, and maintain physical contact as a definitional barrier between harmless flirtation and something more serious. So long as the contact remains virtual, they don?t feel that it?s a betrayal, or any worse than a flirtation by the virtual water cooler.

I talked to two people who viewed a cyber relationship as akin to a couple that ?writes pornography? together, and just for each other. Most married couples don?t have profound objections to the?Sports Illustrated?swimsuit issue or a porn flick, so how is it different in an online exchange when the couple crafts erotic material for each other, but never meets?

These are dilemmas of meaning that a fair number of relationships grapple with. Arguably, the intimacy in an exchange of letters and correspondence, even erotic letters, is in some ways more like a deep friendship. There?s no bright-line boundary. In my book I talk about how we're undergoing an ?intimacy blur" today. Different kinds of relationships resemble each other and merge together. A marriage can feel like a friendship, a colleague can feel like a workplace spouse, and so on.

Source: http://bigthink.com/ideas/42477

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