Blog Post
There Is No Sexual Relation
30th November 2025
There is a model of sex that speaks of a mystical union — two bodies made one, a co-created erotic experience in which the couple dissolves into something larger than either. It sounds transcendent. But it quietly does something troubling: it erases the individual.
Esther Perel puts it well when she says that sex is not something you do, it's somewhere you go. The question, then, is where you go — not where we go together. Because desire, whatever else it is, is not shared. It is stubbornly, irreducibly individual.
This is not a failure of intimacy. It is its structure. Desire does a specific job of work for each of us — counteracting shame, reprocessing old emotional wounds, negotiating anxieties that long predate the relationship. Michael Bader captures this in his account of arousal: the edginess we sense in fantasy is not incidental, it is the point. Fantasy is a solution, individually crafted, to a problem only the subject fully knows. Perel's phrase — from tragedy to triumph — names the same movement. The erotic is where we go to work something out.
This is why Lacan's provocation lands with such force: there is no sexual relation. Not because sex doesn't happen, but because
the two desires in the room never fully meet. Each partner brings their own unconscious agenda, their own symbolic coordinates, their own elsewhere. The bodies may be together; the desire is always, in some sense, alone.
Far from diminishing the erotic, this reframes what genuine intimacy might look like. Not the fiction of perfect merger, but something more generous: two people allowing each other to go where they need to go, holding space for a desire they cannot entirely follow or fully know.
That, rather than "making love," might be what loving actually is.