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Comment by thwayunion | Hacker News Reader

The article correctly identifies that lack of intimacy and relationships are serious problems, with sexual loneliness being a related comorbidity (if you will). The comments, so far, predictably drift toward "how do we get everyone laid?"

Giving everyone access to sex will not solve sexual loneliness. And, solving (a lot of) sexual loneliness can be achieved without giving everyone access to sex.

Anecdotally, I spent several years as part of the 5% mentioned in this article (lots of regular sex with several different women, most of whom I had very little in common with). After that, I spent several years having very little sex because my wife and I were living on opposite coasts. My experience of sexual loneliness during those two periods of my life were inversely correlated with the amount of sex I was actually having.

Intimacy and relationship matters. Proposals like prostitution or nonmonogamy fundamentally misunderstand the problem.

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Yeah everyone seems to be very focused on sex whereas to me the problem is not fostering intimate connections in the first place. We don’t have an epidemic of relationships that aren’t having sex, we’re having an epidemic of people who aren’t fostering those relationships and as a downstream byproduct they aren’t having sex. Pay a prostitute is a bandaid patch on the downstream problem, but it will never makeup for the loneliness hole of the upstream problem

I'm single and male, and personally I don't feel a "need" for sex. I do wish other less intrusive forms of intimacy e.g. hugs could be more legitimized between single people, though.

Sometimes I see pictures of cats cuddling and just wonder why humans are so bad at engaging in simple, consensual comforts like that.

Most animals are in heat just a small part of the time, humans are in heat all the time. Animals in heat behave a lot more like humans do regarding these things. Humans still have the genes to populate the earth, we haven't adapted to having a stable population yet where we don't optimize for maximum kids.

I would like to add that humans are in heat only when they are healthy and feel safe (emotionally, financially, physically). The traumatized modern western society tends to get in the way of this.

Humans are in heat approximately a quarter of the time max, far from "all".

Though a fair bit closer than dogs, who are in heat around a twenty fifth of the time.

Kids are good at it. Adults less so, because of… well, sex.

Its also quite cultural. Its normal for men to hold hands when walking in India, Nepal for example. At first it looked ridiculous to me...having grown up since then I think its Western civilization that's a bit ridiculous in that aspect.

Perhaps. But it's also "weird" that it only exists with same-sex. Why is it a cultural taboo for single men and single women to say, hold hands, if they aren't in a monogamous relationship with anyone else, and are doing so consensually?

I feel like traditional culture is the only thing that says "you shouldn't do that", which seems equally ridiculous to me.

Because there is a potential underlying motive, and it presents danger for one of the parties due to them being physically weaker. The risk of sending (or the other party assuming) the wrong signal is probably not worth it.

> Because there is a potential underlying motive

But that underlying motive could be mutual, it could not, the key is consensuality, at any point one party isn't on the same page they can and should say no, this applies to same-sex and opposite-sex configurations, no?

> and it presents danger for one of the parties due to them being physically weaker

That's also true of same-sex configurations, though.

> But that underlying motive could be mutual, it could not, the key is consensuality, at any point one party isn't on the same page they can and should say no, this applies to same-sex and opposite-sex configurations, no?

Hence the purpose of flirting to ensure both are on the same page and accepting of the risks. Consensual-ity and motive may not be easy to objectively establish in the moment, so I am guessing this is one area where societies have evolved to play it safe.

> That's also true of same-sex configurations, though.

The low probability of this, as well as the relative strength differences between an average man and the weakest man versus an average man and an average woman make it not worth worrying about, evidently.

Anecdotally, I have found this to depend on cultural norms. Southern European cultures appear quite a bit more touchy-feely than North American ones.

There are professional cuddlers that you can hire for, non-sexual, cuddles.

Also, cuddle parties!

I don't think I would enjoy a cuddle party, though.

For me having an emotional connection with someone (e.g. long term friends who have gone through struggles together, or people I haven't known for long but we've done something out of compassion for each other) is a prerequisite for touch to be desirable. I'm averse to being touched by a bunch of strangers and people I don't know well, especially in a group setting where I know everyone to different levels. I have a more cat-like personality than a dog-like personality in that regard.

Given favorable circumstances, it might be possible for you to form enough intimacy with someone during a single party to enjoy cuddling with them. Or it might not; people are very different.

(I think a lot of people take MDMA in order to be able to enjoy being touched by a bunch of strangers if they normally wouldn't, and it seems to be effective, but I haven't tried it myself, and although the risks are relatively low, they're far from insignificant.)

It seems so weird to me that one would pay for something like that.

Why isn't it something that friends engage in, like animal counterparts? I mean, it seems like an artificial cultural norm we've set upon ourselves -- The idea of no extended touching unless with a sexual partner is one that exists only in my mind, but it's certainly not what my body wants.

Yeah, but I've never understood the appeal. I am no more interested in professional cuddling than professional sex. They are natural parts of a relationship and to me have no value outside that context.

I totally agree. In no way is it helpful to see sex as a need. I prefer to see it as a strategy (and sometimes fixation).

There's more than one problem. Trust me, being in a loving marriage where your partner just wants sex with other people and not you, but is jealous of your sexual fidelity, is corrosive. Especially if you have a high sex and intimacy drive.

While that certainly sounds like an awful partner, to my knowledge it doesn’t happen to the same extent as we see lonely people

While I agree that nonmonogamy doesn't solve the problem of heterosexual members of gender A having almost sex almost exclusively with a small group drawn from gender B, I think it can be helpful in ameliorating a different aspect of the problem of loneliness, and in particular sexual loneliness.

If you're in a monogamous relationship with someone with a permanent major sexual incompatibility with you, your options are to stay together (likely creating sexual loneliness for yourself and possibly both of you) or to break up and try to find a different partner (creating sexual loneliness for your ex-partner which may, depending on circumstances, last a long time). Non-monogamous relationships are a lot more flexible with this kind of thing: you can have sex with a different partner without blowing up the relationship that contains the sexual incompatibility.

By "major sexual incompatibilities" I mean to include things like impotence, vaginismus, vulvodynia, fetishes that are a turnoff to the other partner, same-gender couples where one partner is nearly heterosexual, opposite-gender couples where one partner is nearly homosexual, extreme mismatches in preferences of frequency of intercourse, serious illnesses interfering with sex, and some constellations of asexuality.

Of course some people have vulvodynia, or frustrated fetishes, or whatever, and both they and their monogamous partner have a satisfying sex life anyway. But, as you can easily imagine, these situations often do lead to big problems with sex, and I think monogamy tends to amplify that into big problems with intimacy and relationships. (But if you're in a monogamous relationship that's struggling with this, and you try to solve a problem like this by going non-monogamous, you're probably going to have an extremely hard time with it.)

I largely agree.

My point was not to criticize non-monogamy per se or to suggest that it should be completely avoided. To wit: the human experience is infinitely varied and consenting adults should be free to address the special circumstances of their own lives in whichever way works for them.

However, non-monogamy isn't a reasonable solution to the epidemic of sexual loneliness characterized in the article. With respect to the issues you raised this is nearly tautologically true because the epidemic is amount single people rather than sexually incompatible couples.

Further, the hypothesis that non-monogamy (or prostitution) can solve the epidemic of sexual loneliness merely by virtue of increasing the supply of sexually compatible partners is misguided.

I concur, and I find the quasi-economic formulation of the problem somewhat repellent; I think it tends to inhibit the kind of thinking that's needed to form meaningful and intimate connections with other people.

> I find the quasi-economic formulation of the problem somewhat repellent

Totally agreed. I'd even go so far as to assert that, for people who use this language and are sexually lonely, the very best thing they can do to end that loneliness is to stop thinking of other people as economic goods.

Most people crave intimacy and are repelled by objectification.

I think that something that is part of this and poorly understood is female health and the feelings of guilt, shame and resentment that pop up in relationships.

Hormonal cycles are very different in women, and are affected by age, factors like weight and inflammation and stress. Doctors tend to look at acute problems and miss the more holistic or secondary affects.

My wife and I have a pretty awesome relationship, but we went through hard patches that were ultimately caused by medical conditions that neither of us knew existed.

I think people pursue “other options” sometimes because they don’t know how to cope with things. As a male, these things are simpler.

Even a simple compliment is rare. We could start there.

Does the following meme resonate?

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EcNQvJwXgAEqCLI.jpg

I mean to be fair a lot of this is because men don't compliment each other.

I'm a lesbian and I've been out for 22 years and I still have to be careful giving men compliments because they think 'I like your shirt' means 'I want to suck your dick'.

Kind of a facetious question, but does adding an emphasized 'bro' at the end of the sentence change the meaning and their response?

Like, if you said 'I like your shirt bro', and you put just a little bit of tude to the bro - would that decrease the risk of unintended signals?

Not really, the 'Girl Next Door' and 'Gamer Girl' have been sexualized so I'm just slotted into that category. Most of it is a function of what you look like and unfortunately for me my appearance just screams feminine and I tick a lot of physical boxes that are attractive to men.

My understanding is once you're like...55 or 60 you can start complimenting men under 40. Then men put you into 'nice grandma' instead of 'she wants to nail me'.

"inversely correlated with the amount of sex I was actually having"

This.

Not just that but also lean heavily towards entitlement of one sex and exploitation of another.

Weird flex bro, people who can't get sex usually have neither sex nor intimacy

> people who can't get sex usually have neither sex nor intimacy

That's exactly what "comorbidity" means in my original post.

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