OK, so you met this fantastic woman down the pub, and one thing led to another, and well… whatever the circumstances of your meeting, now she’s offering you sex.

The one night stand – to love or not to love?

 Probably this means sex with no-strings, probably you’ll never see her again. Question is: what do you do? Oh, by the way, you’re in a relationship. So: to cheat or not to cheat, that is the question.

There’s no doubt that many men do think about having casual sex if they believe they can get away with it.

But the facts about how many do it are harder to establish. An ABC News survey in the USA suggests that while 16% of men have actually cheated on their partner, a much larger number – 30% – have fantasized about it, suggesting many more men would do it if the circumstances were right. (Presumably meaning, if they believed they could get away with it.)

Video – faithfulness in relationship

What’s also been established is that when men have a one-night stand, their selection standards are much lower than they are when they choose a long-term partner. (This is not true for women who are cheating on their partners.)

This suggests that men like casual sex, and relish the idea and the execution of a one-night stand so much that they don’t really care who they pick up.

It’s not hard to imagine why we like casual sex so much – we’re programmed for it. Eons ago, the men who had the most sex partners would leave the most offspring, many or all of whom would inherit the desire to have the most sex partners….and so the genes for sexual promiscuity would spread.

Women wanted a faithful mate to help rear the kids, so they would develop strategies designed to test the faithfulness and persistence of their potential mates – hence courting behavior.

But even so, it’s still to the reproductive advantage of the species that men desire to spread their genes around, and presumably we still have that desire. What’s more, sex with a new partner can be very arousing – potentially much more exciting than sex with a partner you’ve been having sex with for some time.

This is because our senses habituate to the same old stimuli – a new partner brings a whole new range of stimuli and excitement to spice up the senses.

And even more rewards come from the thrill of the chase and the sense of prowess that a man gets when he beds the woman he’s been after. Yes, it’s a powerful combination.

But it’s a mistake to think that all men will jump into bed with any woman who proposes sex. Many men turn women down – most often because the man is in a faithful, monogamous relationship. The next most common reason for turning a woman down is that she’s in a relationship! A common reason is that cheating breaks the guy’s moral code and so on.

There are plenty more reasons why people turn each other down: one or other of the couple have been drinking, or there’s no emotional connection, for example. (Sex without love can be just as empty an experience for men as it is for women, though as Woody Allen remarked, “As empty experiences go, it’s one of the best!”)

But what if you’re unhappy and there’s the prospect of some emotional connection from an affair? I hate to say it, but I doubt there are many guys who wouldn’t cheat on their partners if the right set of circumstances came along.

And what if it happens to you? What if you wake up the morning after the night in the pub and find yourself next to someone you met over a drink? Do you tell your partner? On the one hand, if it was a horrible accident and you’ve resolved never to do it again, why make everyone suffer by a confession?

If you can’t handle the guilt, that’s your problem. On the other hand, if you carry the secret there’s some strain and loss of intimacy. If your relationship survives, then it might be stronger and better. Yeah, right.

But how many sexual partners do men and women have in a lifetime? The table below shows the % of men and women who reported each of a certain number of partners.

What this appears to prove is that women are less promiscuous than men, though it offers no explanation of why: women may fear social exposure, shame, or violence and disease more than men. Or they may just be less sexually motivated to seek out new partners. That in itself could be because they have a lower sex drive or because they are genetically programmed to stick to one mate.

Update (2022): In fact the statistics above are simply wrong. When you allow women to complete the survey in private, with no possibility of being overlooked or identified, the numbers of sexual partners they report goes up dramatically.

And when you ask them to complete the test in situation where they believe their answers may be checked for accuracy by means of a lie detector, they report numbers of sexual partners almost equal to those reported by men. 

To see how a one night stand might feel, read this piece. If you can’t relate to it, you’re either naive or you’re getting a lot of one night stands.

Arousal and desire

We’re led to believe that sex is always supposed to be a wonderful experience, so how can it be that sex without mental arousal turns out to be an empty experience?

Maybe before I look at that question I should try to define what I mean by arousal and desire. I’d say that mental arousal was a state of high sexual excitement, where one feels turned on in a kind of primal, urgent way. Physical arousal I see as the hard evidence of being aroused – the penis is erect in men, the vagina is lubricated in women.

So what, then, is desire? I see this as the product of one’s arousal – it’s effectively what one wants to do when one is highly aroused: in other words, the way in which one wants to get sexual satisfaction. To put it another way, arousal is about feeling sexual and desire is about wanting sex.

There’s no doubt that being in the presence of a highly aroused woman is extremely arousing for most men. It’s not hard to see this in evolutionary terms, because a female mammal “on heat” is ready to ovulate, ready to mate, ready to produce offspring.

It’s natural that a male needs to be stimulated quickly and intensely, so that he can impregnate her and increase the likelihood of passing on his genes successfully to the next generation.

But as a human male, we can discharge sexual arousal in many ways. We have mate with a willing sexual partner, or resort to masturbatory fantasy.

The advent of Viagra has emphasized the difference between physical arousal and desire in men. Medics who prescribe Viagra for impotent men always emphasize that it isn’t going to increase their libido or desire.

Another insight into arousal and desire comes from a study where a group of women were asked to watch porn films and their resulting physical arousal – as defined by vaginal engorgement and lubrication – was measured.

The women were found to be aroused physically, but they all reported that they didn’t experience any mental arousal or desire for sex.

In other words, there is a pretty strong sexual filter operating in women at the mental/emotional level which determines the stimuli they allow themselves to experience as sexually attractive.

This fits with the biological model found in many animal species, where the female chooses which male(s) she will mate with.

The cunning scientists at Pfizer, makers of Viagra, eager to increase women’s sexual responsiveness, and, no doubt, sell more Viagra, tried to establish how their product could be used to increase female sexual desire.

Needless to say, they have encountered the same results as the scientists in the study mentioned above: Viagra does indeed increase blood flow and stimulates the physical responses of a woman’s pelvic tissues, but it does not make her feel horny – she does not feel more sexual desire.

After many years’ research, the scientists gloomily concluded that women often don’t have any desire for sex until they are physically in the act of lovemaking, and that getting a woman to connect arousal and desire requires exquisite timing on a man’s part and a fair amount of coaxing.

I’d suggest that any man’s experience just doesn’t bear this out. Women have just as much desire as men – they just show it differently.

And it’s promoted by different things – love, romance, sensuality…..

So – back to the question I posed in the first paragraph: why can I be physically aroused and yet not find sex satisfying unless I am mentally aroused as well?

Is it that my brain works in a more feminine way than most men’s sexuality? I don’t think so. I prefer to believe, based on how hard it has been in the past for me to say “no” to my partner when I didn’t want sex but she did, that we’ve become so stereotyped by popular culture.

We’ve swallowed whole the idea of the ever-ready penis, willing and able to penetrate female flesh on demand, so much so that men don’t feel they can say ” no” even when they don’t want sex.

In other words, it’s an illusion that when a man’s in bed with a naked woman and gets an erection, he will always want to have sex.

 It’s also an illusion that we will always be able to be a powerful, dominant lover, and give a woman fantastic sex – life isn’t like that – sex goes wrong, with low desire, or other sexual dysfunctions of one kind or another, and so on…..

I think that unless a man is so flush with testosterone that he simply cannot help but feel horny, he will sometimes find the same things that turn his partner on are necessary to turn him on: intimacy, freedom from stress, relaxation, the absence of anger or tension in the relationship, and, perhaps, more than anything else, love.