Friends with Benefits or Lovers without Rights?

25 November, 2016

Recently, an ad circulated around the internet which promoted an unusual product: a pheromone-based perfume. The ad indicated that it was 100% effective. “The members of the opposite sex will be dazed by you”, it promised. There was a “scientific” description of why nobody would be able to resist the powerful effects of the magic scent.

The idea that love might have more to do with biochemistry than with the world of emotion is becoming more and more popular. It has also been suggested that there is one basic problem that has to be resolved. Within the field of love, we have to learn to “catch” or “entrap” others with our charms. Not one person, but many members of the opposite sex.

“Sex without love is as hollow and ridiculous as love without sex.”

-Hunter S. Thompson-

Nowadays, a contradictory desire seems to be making a breakthrough in the field of love. That is, having many successive partners that feed our ego, our need for experimentation and our solitude. Simultaneously, we are leaving a special place that can only be filled be the arrival of a certain extraordinary person. The arrival of “the love of our lives”.

Friends with temporary benefits

In this scenario, friends with benefits fit us like a glove. We will explain this to the few of you who might not know what this term means. Friends with benefits are people of the opposite sex that maintain a friendship in which they have occasional sex. The key lies in having both people understand that having sex doesn’t mean they are no longer friends. Nor should their friendship make them exclude sex from the relationship.

The agreements made between friends “with benefits” have certain implicit rules that both members have to follow. Otherwise, this “relationship” will not be able to work. Friends with benefits have a basic pact of “not falling in love”. Neither of them want to deal with commitment. For this reason, sex simply has its most basic function: satisfying a purely physical desire.

There is another rule both people have to follow, and which their agreement to not fall in love depends on. It is to not be intimate and not intervene in any way in the other person’s life. That is to say, the “benefits” have a very precise limit. They have the benefit of touching and looking. But, they don’t let the “friend” claim or demand time, attention or understanding.

The golden rule of friends with benefits, in any case, is that there is no exclusivity. Each one of the friends can have any other type of relationship with another person. Under no circumstance can the members of the “friendship” feel jealous. Nor can they question the other person for ending their bond unilaterally at any time they please.

Friends with benefits or lovers without rights?

Much to the disappointment of fans of friends with benefits and the producers of pheromone-based perfumes, the human brain is an extremely complex organ in which there can’t be a dissociation between the body and feelings or emotions. Occupying the top of the pyramid on the evolutionary scale has its consequences.

There is no way for a person to have sex with someone and not associate that experience with an emotion. We tend to associate it with what it is, what is has been and what will be. There’s also no way that the other person in that relationship will become a simple “piece of meat”. One that is easy to get rid of or toss aside when the act has concluded.

The other person always leaves something behind. An echo that resounds, sometimes timidly, and which speaks of self-affirmation or self-denial. Of expectations and fantasies, of emotional needs and deficiencies.

A friendship with benefits seems to be an extreme source of fear or desperation. Or maybe both. The fear of love and the multiple possibilities of suffering that lurk within it.

Of desperation, or the act of giving up expecting more from life than fleeting and inconsequential experiences. Those who opt for this type of relationship are under the influence of an impossible desire. They want to play with fire, without getting burned.

Thus, friendships with benefits tend to often end badly. Generally speaking, it doesn’t work out. One of the two people usually ends up hurt or both people end up feeding their insecurities.