I love the NBA. It surprises everybody, but I really enjoy basketball. I love playing it (not for that long because I am woefully out of shape), watching it, studying the stats of it, playing video games of it, Charles Barkley. All of it. I love it, yet people refuse to accept that I like it because it is so out of character.

I feel bad for those who like sex. People assume they don’t want a relationship. Or if you are me, and you can and do go long periods of time without sex, people assume you love relationships. This thought process is absurd. Sex and relationships are intrinsically linked, not diametrically opposed. Yet, I constantly see women who enjoy getting their rocks off, getting their hearts broken as well and nobody understanding why. “If you want to get laid, that must be your only motivation.”

Relationships are about stability. Relationships are about consistency. Relationships are about making sure that you have someone to bone with often. I don’t like relationships because I enjoy masturbation too much. If you need the sex of another, you probably also want the sex of another on a consistent basis – you probably want a relationship.

This is the the destructive thought process that has created the Christian Right’s stronghold grip on America’s “moral values.” Bear with me here, this makes sense. We’ve decided that sex and love are diametrically opposed – that sex is one thing and love is another, and sex with someone you love is very different than sex. We’ve decided that love leads to sex, when the very opposite is more often the case – sex leads to love. When we separate sex and love and decide they are in opposition, we can’t define them as equal – Jim Crow taught us that. Therefore the Christian Right has championed love and therefore downplayed the importance of sex. They’ve created abstinence only education, a xenophobic society frightened of sexual experimentation, and, most importantly, labeled sex as the devil’s work if love is god’s work. This makes people who like sex the devil – especially women. And the devil goes by a different name in our society: “Slut.” Now, if you like sex, you hate love, and you must be evil.

I hate love. I also am not ridiculously sexual. I respect those who like sex – and like it in weird ways, but I also assume they are much more likely to fall in love. That makes more sense to me, and if we all understood that, then maybe we’d stop demonizing sex because it’s not the opposite of love, but rather the embracing of it.