Sex can be the ultimate expression of romantic love and intimacy. It can be an emotional roller coaster, or a tension reliever. It can be all about procreation or simply a good time. It can be all of these things and more. It can mean different things to different people. And whatever it means to you isn’t necessarily constant either. It can mean different things at different points in your life, or even from one day to the next.
It seems that we all hit puberty and with it came, not only physical changes, but certain desires that were foreign to us. As a result; the patterns that have emerged mostly have been those of hookups. With the gap between puberty and entry into marriage getting even bigger, more “emerging adults” are turning to casual encounters as a way to express and satisfy their sexual needs. Kinsey Institute researcher Justin Garcia and his team from Binghamton University (2012) page 171 concluded that “Hookups are part of a popular cultural shift that has infiltrated the lives of emerging adults throughout the Westernized world”
Along with this pattern comes a plethora of emotional reactions ranging from regret, disappointment, confusion, embarrassment, guilt and low self-esteem. Other individuals experience feeling proud, nervous, excited, desirable and wanted.
However, the common pattern is that feelings tend to be more positive before and during a hookup, and more negative afterward. A study found that: For both men and women, true hookup sex- with a casual stranger rather than a romantic partner or “friend with benefits” – seemed to bode poorly for mental health and self-esteem. This study was not a correlation study and therefore couldn’t qualify causality. It was uncertain whether poor mental health caused individuals to be more likely to engage in casual sex or whether, as was shown in other studies, poor health resulted from casual sex. Other studies, on the other hand, have proven that proclivity towards certain types of sexual behavior is directly correlated to one’s self-esteem and personality amongst other factors.
“Researchers examining the mental health associations of hookup sex also report that participants who were not depressed before showed more depressive symptoms and loneliness after engaging in casual sex. People who engaged in more hookups had greater psychological distress. College students who recently engaged in casual sex reported lower levels of self-esteem, life satisfaction, and happiness compared to those who had not had casual sex in the past month” – Susan Krauss Whitbourne
Essentially, one needs to be able to think about how their sexual behavior might affect, and be affected by their psychological well-being. This means making decisions with the understanding that “I am making this decision because I’m a bit sad” or knowing “making this decision will result in me feeling sad”.
Every experience one encounters influences your psyche, the way you think of yourself and the way you view the world. A mentally healthy individual is one who is able to integrate all experiences good and bad into their conceptualization of themselves. Whether it is an experience you regret or one that you might have enjoyed, whatever the reason you need to be accountable for your own feelings and decisions when it comes to your own sexual experiences.
Ubusha Bami futhi yimi lo – My youth and this is me! ©