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- Fantasizing about future sex and judging sexual experiences is unique to humans.
- The unhappier your childhood, the more unrealistic your sexual fantasies were likely to be to make up for it — and the more disappointed you may be with real sex as an adult.
- Evolution trains us to chase sexual pleasure as a reward for procreating, and so the sexual high will always feel transient.
As far as we know, humans are unique in the animal kingdom, as human sexuality appears to be significantly shaped and driven by our sexual fantasies. Presumably, other animals aren’t sitting around daydreaming about sex all day long as many humans do.
Animal sexuality is triggered by the smell of a sex pheromone or the sight of a bright red female chimpanzee rump signaling ovulation. Human sexuality also is triggered by a sexual stimulus: the sight of a pretty face or a hot body. Yet humans spend an awful lot of time from an early age fantasizing about pretty faces and hot bodies and what we would like to do with them or have them do to us.
According to Freud, such fantasizing begins in early childhood when we begin to show curiosity about naked human bodies and where babies come from. With the hormonal surges of puberty comes a dramatic increase in sexual and romantic fantasizing that appears to go on for the rest of our lives, though perhaps of diminished intensity with old age as our sex drive diminishes.
What also seems unique to humans is to judge the quality of our sexual experiences by how the actual experience compares with the fantasy. We rank order our sexual experiences from bad sex to great sex and all of the different gradations of sexual experience in-between, like so-so sex or good-enough sex. The quality of the sex appears to be roughly correlated with how closely aligned the actual experience is to our favorite sexual fantasies.
For example, many men who consume pornography find a type of pornography that becomes their favorite. They then become disappointed in real-life sex with a partner who doesn’t look or act like the actresses in their favorite porn. We are greatly disappointed and frustrated when actual sex doesn’t live up to the fantasy and we are blissed out when actual sex attains a close approximation to the fantasy.
It’s only natural that we are forever on the quest to achieve peak experiences whether it’s from sex, food, career achievement, or mountain climbing. During peak experiences, we feel most alive and that life is worth living, despite all the hardships we endure in order to attain those peak experiences. Wouldn’t it be nice if life were only one never-ending peak sexual experience after another?
Sexual Fantasies as Life Goals
A cognitive ability we possess that appears to be relatively unique to humans is to plan for the future, be it a day later, a month later, a year later, decades later, or even after we are long gone. Animals pretty much live in the present moment or with some fleeting anticipation of the near future.
Daydreaming is aspirational. It reflects how we wish our life will turn out in the future and how happy we will be when things go our way. It motivates us to work towards long-term goals. When it comes to sex, we plan when we will lose our virginity, the type of person with whom we will seek casual sex, the type of person we want as a long-term partner, how many sexual partners we would like to experience, when we might get married, and when we will have procreative sex to make babies. We’re happy when things seem to be going according to plan and unhappy when they don’t.
Our sexual goals, like any other type of life goal, can be more or less realistic given our life situation and abilities. When we enter puberty, most of us have some sense that the celebrities we fantasize about or the hot high school teachers aren’t realistic options. Especially when we are young, what’s the harm of striving to win someone who might be a bit out of our league if we are open to adjusting our sights to what is more realistically attainable as we mature? After all, we don’t want to settle for less when we could do better. We basically learn in the school of hard knocks which of our sexual goals are or aren’t realistically attainable. That’s a tough life lesson.
Trauma and Our Sexual Fantasies
What determines how realistic our sexual aspirations are? Clearly, with age and maturity, we become more aware of who is or isn’t out of our league and which sexual behaviors, like infidelity, get us in big trouble. What is often unrecognized is how childhood adversity and trauma affect our sexual fantasies.
Sexual fantasies are not only action plans to help us achieve our future goals. Sexual fantasies are also escapist daydreams that provide comfort and hope when we are feeling low. It is only natural that when we are suffering an unhappy childhood that we fantasize about a future when we are finally grown up and everything will be just great. Escapist daydreams compensate for an unhappy present by imagining a happy tomorrow. The worse your childhood, the better your adulthood better be to compensate for your miserable childhood.
That means that the unhappier your childhood, the more unrealistic your sexual fantasies are likely to be. That also means that your unhappy childhood sets you up for greater disappointment in your sex life as an adult.
Unfortunately, your adult sex life isn’t going to fully compensate for your unhappy childhood, though you wish it would. In fact, it will be quite the opposite because of your unrealistic expectations (i.e., that you can win someone way out of your league, that you can get away with infidelity, that you can fix an emotionally unavailable man like your father, that you can make a controlling and critical woman like your mother happy, etc.).
Learning From Sexual Disillusionment
Part of growing up is becoming more realistic. That means adjusting our sights to what is realistically attainable and not letting our insecurities and self-doubts get in the way of striving for what is realistically attainable. If nothing is ever good enough because it doesn’t meet our high expectations, we end up with nothing; only disappointment and bitterness. Reasonable expectations result in reasonable satisfactions that are good enough to make us happy. Even the best sex can leave us slightly depressed because that peak experience doesn’t last forever, and it is always kind of sad to have to return to the real world. We can try to repeat that peak sexual experience but it’s never quite as good the second, third, or fourth time.
Learning to accept the transience of peak experiences and of the hedonistic pleasures that life affords is always challenging. We can enjoy the fleeting sexual pleasures that life affords while learning to sadly accept the unreality of the longed-for sexual pleasures that exist only in our imaginations that are just not meant to be.
To some extent, our sex lives are a lesson in transience. We have excited anticipation followed by a climax. We wish we could extend that heightened moment before climax into eternity, but climax finally comes, and we must return to mundane reality. We are forever seeking an erotic bliss that will last for an eternity, but it always turns out to be but a fleeting pleasure.
This is how evolution has programmed us. Evolution doesn’t want us to become complacent. Evolution gives us a memorable reward for a job well done (i.e., whatever advances survival and reproduction), and then it’s on to the next life challenge in search of another transient shot of ecstasy. Happiness is learning to accept this sad fact of life.
Facebook image: BLACKDAY/Shutterstock
References
Josephs, L. (2018) The Dynamics of Infidelity: Applying Relationship Science to Psychotherapy Practice. Washington, D.C.: American Psychological Association.
