Lust-Balance

Abstract

The concept of the lust-balance refers to the social organization and accompanying social codes (ideals and practices) regarding the relationship between the longing for sexual gratification and the longing for enduring relational intimacy. It thus draws attention to the balance between emotive charges in the desires for sex and love, and to changes in this lustbalance. For, although the two types of longing are clearly interconnected, these connections change in both the biographies of individuals and the histories of peoples. Nor is the interconnectedness unproblematic. Moreover, the attempt to find a satisfying balance between the longing for sex and the longing for love may be complicated by many other longings; for instance by the longing for children or by the longing to raise one’s social power and rank. Therefore, the lust-balance concept draws attention to relationships between sex and love that are polymorphous and multidimensional, just as Norbert Elias’s (2000) concepts of a power balance and a tension balance. Thus, it offers a wider theoretical framework that opens the possibility to integrate many different threads of long-term developments as is demonstrated in Sex and Manners: Female Emancipation in the West (Wouters, 2004), a study pioneering with the lust-balance as a central concept. What follows next, leans on this study. Other studies into the connections and the tensions between sex and love are rare, and historical studies into this area are even harder to find. Studies of sexuality usually do not pay much attention, if any, to the kind of relationship in which it occurs; and vice versa, studies of loving relationships usually do not take a systematic interest in sex.