We Learned How To Have Sex, But Forgot How To Love

After several years of liberal brainwashing and complete Europeanisation, I developed a very specific strategy for dating and dealing with men. I never sleep with a guy on the first date if I genuinely like him. But I can very easily “go over to check out his architecture book collection” with a guy who didn’t emotionally move me at all, but who seems hot, cute, and not particularly intelligent.

My personal experience shows that if you sleep with someone actually worthy after a first date, there most likely won’t be a second one. However, if you don’t do it, you may be rewarded with a long-term situationship and, in rare cases, maybe even a relationship.

In Paris and Milan, two cities where lovers are found at roughly the same speed as venereal diseases spread, this system works flawlessly. It turns out that passion and love have been living separately for quite a while now, each occupying its own stable and clearly defined niche. Sex no longer carries the sacred meaning of love, nor does it function as a stage in the development of a relationship.

So why did this happen? Has our generation become more cynical, or is this simply a predictable psychological evolution after a long series of failed relationships? Of course, it’s tempting to go into deep reflections about fast dopamine hits and compare sex to scrolling reels about AI-generated fruits or eating a tub of chocolate ice cream in bed. To talk about how, with one click, we can order groceries to our apartment, sign up for hot yoga, or cancel a Hollywood actor over an unethical comment. I could spend hours talking about how, in the rush toward results, we forgot about the process itself, and how the distance from point A to point B today is exactly the amount of time it takes for a signal to travel to the ChatGPT server and back.

Everyone loves using this as proof of what’s happening to us, but I think the real answer is different: we finally, although quite suddenly and unexpectedly, learned how to love ourselves. And it turns out that all these movements, like body positivity, wellness feminism, and hot girl healing, which subconsciously cultivated new values in us for years, really did affect us so deeply that today the thing standing on the pedestal is the “self”: with its career goals, deep self-definition, and self-positioning, and only after that come partners, lovers, and marriage.

We are no longer willing to settle for less, and we are no longer willing to waste precious time on dates with a 6/10. And honestly, why would we, if “I can buy myself flowers”? However, while we are still in our reproductive years, hormones continue to demand at least a minimal amount of love, and there is probably no faster or easier way to satisfy them than physical intimacy with that same six.

So we learned to value ourselves, our boundaries, and our time so much that emotional dependency itself started to feel like a threat to our inner stability. As a result, compared to long-term relationships, the kind you have to invest in, fight for, and communicate through, sex became our new comfort zone and personal island of safety.

There is no longer any fear of looking stupid, no real risk of becoming attached, no expectations. Sex becomes safe precisely because it means nothing. And that is perhaps the most interesting paradox of a generation raised on the idea of sexual freedom: we learned how to undress easily, but completely forgot how to be vulnerable.