Summary:
• Sexual desire exists for two purposes. One purpose is biological, to help produce healthier children. The other purpose is spiritual, connected to love, creativity, and personal growth.
• Biologically, sexual desire encourages people to choose healthy partners for mating. The offspring of that mating mixes different genes, creating more variety in future generations, which helps the offspring to adapt better to their environment. Humans are often drawn to partners who look healthy and somewhat different from the people they usually associate with. Those differences can add valuable variety to the gene pool.
• Lust is not the same as love. Lust can start a relationship, but only genuine love can last for a very long time.
• Throughout history, different cultures have treated sexual behaviors in very different ways. Beware not to judge others for their sexual behavior without trying to understand their circumstances.
• Your body, your sexual desire, and your very existence, come from countless ancestors whose genes physically shaped you. The powerful emotions linked to sexual desire—infatuation, longing, and love—also help us to appreciate art, music, literature, and beauty.
• Sexual desire can motivate lonely or unhappy people to change their lives, improve themselves, and seek meaningful connection. How you respond to that desire is not only a physical choice but also a spiritual choice.
Sexual desire exists for two general reasons. One reason is biological, the answer to how? The other reason is spiritual, the answer to why?
The biological reason is complicated, but its purpose is simple. The biological purpose of your sexual desire is to improve the health of your prospective children. To encourage that outcome—healthy children—sexual desire is actually a good desire, not a bad desire.
This biological reason involves natural evolution. Your body is made of trillions of tiny cells, and within each cell is a chemical called Deoxyribo-Nucleic Acid, or DNA. Your DNA contains biological instructions that determine your body’s physical traits, instructions based on the biological history of your ancestors. DNA consists of a long code of tiny groups of information called genes. The total number is called a genetic code. No single gene determines an entire trait, such as your intellect or skin color. To determine the color of your eyes, for example, more than 150 genes are involved.
If you and a sexual partner produce children, those children will contain your genetic code and also your partner’s genetic code, a combination called a gene pool. The variety is just as important as the total number. If the gene pool has relatively little variety, then the offspring will have relatively little variety, at least physically.
Some species, such as plants and some types of fish and reptiles, do not need sexual mates to produce offspring; one parent is enough. That is called asexual production. With a lone parent, almost no variety in the species is possible because the gene pool is limited to that lone parent, which is the same genetic code as the parent’s parent, and the parent before that, and so forth. If the environment of the species does not change much, the species survives. However, if the environment changes radically, then the entire species becomes vulnerable because it cannot adapt—because its gene pool lacks enough variety to produce different offspring.
By contrast, mammals can adapt to a variety of environments. Mammals include humans. Their behaviors can adapt rather quickly to the terrain and the climate. Later, if a group remains in the same environment for many, many generations, then eventually the bodies of their descendants will physically adapt—born with specific traits that improve their likelihood of survival. That is natural evolution. Africa, where the human species originated, contains several environments. Over many thousands of generations, our distant ancestors migrated all over the African continent and later all over the planet, and they settled in various environments: deserts, jungles, plains, forests, and mountains, each with various climates, seasons, animal predators and other risks, including diseases. Their bodies gradually adapted to the specific regions they settled in, due to evolution. Particular humans whose physical traits gave them an advantage in the local environment tended to survive long enough to produce children. Other humans without those traits were more vulnerable, and they tended to die without producing children.
These changes can occur when the gene pool increases in variety: two parents combine their genes, and that creates more possibilities in the traits of their children. Additional variety occurs when the parents come from different families, increasing the gene pool within each new generation. Good health is encouraged by a good variety of genes because more combinations become possible, because some of those combinations of genes can resist local diseases.
However, these health benefits from evolution are prevented when incestuous couples produce children, as when brothers and sisters make children together, because their combined genes have less variety. If future generations are also incestuous, the variety may never increase because all the genes come from the same family.
The point is that sexual desire encourages you to find a healthy sexual mate. The body of a healthy person tends to look physically beautiful. That person may also look somewhat exotic, perhaps foreign, because a little difference can attract your fascination. A very interesting personality can also attract your fascination, but sexual desire adds another reason: if the person is considerably different in appearance from the usual people you associate with, then that person can add more variety to the combined gene pool of your prospective children.
Sexual desire is intense. If humans lacked any sexual desire to drive us to mate, then our mating activities might not happen—and no children would be born. Sexual desire can feel so intense that a feeling of lust, including fantasizing about a sexual relationship, is a feeling we sometimes mistake for the deeper and more permanent emotional feeling that we call love. Lust is not love. Lust can encourage starting a relationship, but lust between a couple does not endure if the couple never really falls in love. By contrast, love holds a relationship together, with or without lust.
Sexual desire can feel so intense that many people worry about it overwhelming a person’s self-control, encouraging a fear that sexual desire itself is immoral. (If sexual desire itself were immoral, then the entire human species would be guilty.) Adding to that fear are various sexual behaviors including infidelity, fornication, homosexuality, bisexuality, pedophilia, and incest. Those are sometimes called sexual behaviors but they involve more than sexual desire. And they are not equal to each other. Does a particular behavior violate someone’s rights and dignity? How so? And to what extent? Such questions must be asked and the answers deserve to be considered very carefully.
You might be surprised to learn that, historically, various human cultures have encouraged each one of those behaviors. Incest, for example. In some royal families, incest occurred for centuries because it was sometimes favored. The reason was to protect the supposed purity of the royal family by avoiding marriage with non-royal “common” people whom the royal family was ruling. So, members of the royal family married each other (especially in ancient times) or they married into other royal families. With so much incest occurring for so long, the result was too little variety in the royal gene pool, sometimes causing birth defects in princes and princesses. Sometimes a woman in the royal family would secretly add more variety to the gene pool by committing infidelity. Worried about the health of her future children, her options were either incest, which was unhealthy but legal, or commit infidelity, which was healthier than incest but not legal. If she were celibate, she would be condemned. If you were in her situation, which option would you choose?
In some cultures, husbands have multiple wives. In other cultures, wives have multiple husbands. Even in cultures that favor monogamy, many of those cultures also have divorce—and that means people who believe in monogamy can still have multiple sexual partners over their lifetimes.
The point is that sexual desire and person’s decisions about it are rarely as simple as a society might prefer. There could be factors which you or other people are unaware of, so beware of judging anyone too quickly. Seek to learn not only what happened but also why.
Natural evolution is not a substitute for morality, but natural evolution did help our distant ancestors to survive and prosper before humans invented farming and civilization. You exist as a person because your ancestors existed. Your body was formed from their genes, your sexual desire is part of their legacy. Most of their names are lost and most of their graves are lost, but their physical legacy survives as you. Consider that long history. It can feel spiritual.
Sexual desire has other spiritual reasons as well. Most forms of art, music, and literature are created to trigger our emotions. The emotions we associate with sexual desire are among the most intense a person can feel, and they are relatively easy to trigger: infatuation, excitement, fantasizing. The strongest emotion we can feel is love, especially in a relationship without someone else, but love may not feel as exciting as sexual desire unless the two are combined in the same relationship. If humans never felt sexual desire mixed with love, we might not appreciate art, music, and literature as much as we do. Sexual desire is not the only emotion they refer to, but human relationships are the most popular theme portrayed in art, music, and literature.
We also appreciate aspects of our physical environment, such as a magnificent landscape, or birds singing, or waves of water washing over a beach. Our ancestors knew those aspects represent a natural environment where people can survive and prosper. They knew this because they felt it, and we retain that same feeling. Today, we can emotionally enjoy the appearance of a beautiful landscape without wanting to hunt anything there or to grow crops there—but if our survival depended on finding some place where we could hunt and grow crops for food, we would know what landscape to look for. Sexual desire is related to that. Sexual desire encourages us to produce children and, therefore, to have families. Love for our families encourages us to care for them, which includes finding a physical environment where they can prosper. That form of love is spiritual, and sexual desire helps to encourage that.
Finally, sexual desire adds some variety to our lives. When a person’s daily situation feels lonely and miserable, sexual desire can motivate that person to try to change that situation instead of pretending to be satisfied with it. The thought of having to change can feel scary, but sexual desire can overcome that fear. When sexual desire hits you, you may feel it more intensely than you thought possible. Sexual desire encourages us to improve ourselves—physically and psychologically—to become more attractive to somebody else. Romantic love is not easy. Life is not easy. People make mistakes, and sometimes the results are tragic. The ultimate tragedy, however, is a life without love.
Sexual desire is your body sending you a message. How you respond to that message is a spiritual choice.