What is the difference between having a husband or wife and having a roommate? The two overlap, and it’s easy for one to slowly become another, especially as the passions of youth cool and life becomes more stable and predictable, as our daily lives become more about the regular effort required to maintain life than to generate it. How do you prevent your lover from becoming merely your roommate?

I once heard a middle aged comedian discuss this very question. And his answer, which had a certain humorously raw quality, was that you got to f#@$. All jokes aside, that is what makes the difference on the most basic level, what distinguishes the romantic relationship from mere friendship or cohabitation. When you have a roommate, you both inhabit the same space. When you have a spouse, you inhabit each other.

Sex isn’t the limit of this kind of inhabitation, but it is symbolic, emblematic, and endemic. It’s a ritual of maintenance, it’s a fulfillment, it’s a reminder, it’s a means. It has significance across multiple domains of your life together, fulfills your past, and creates and reinforces your future. And children, as the exclusive result of sex, are themselves significant across multiple domains, symbols as well as literal representations of your attempt to inhabit one another, to inhabit a shared identity, and create both the future power and possibilities of that union as well as bringing together your literal genetic and personal and historical pasts to a single meeting, resulting in a present responsibility for that new creation.

In other words, sex has significance. That’s why it makes such a big difference between having a roommate and having a husband or wife. So if you want to keep having a spouse, and not a roommate, I have to agree with that comedian. You do have to f@#$. But is it really that simple? Well, no, and yes.

Sex has significance across all these many domains of meaning. But you can have it without engaging on all those levels. You can engage in sex as a shared meta-phenomenon (the joining of two into one shared identity, a romantic economy) without actually activating or going through all those channels. And this is both a strength and a weakness. It’s good because it means you can participate in the romantic economy of sex, some part of what sex means, even absent actual physical contact. You can participate in other parts of the overall process and exchange and living dynamic. And often you will need to, if you want the physical part to work out as well.

Men tend to focus on the climactic physical fulfillment as the key moment of significance and reaffirmation of the bond, whereas women may focus more on the rituals that lead up to it. The bits of kindness and foreplay, the preparation of the romantic enclave and giving of gifts of attention and insight that show this person has something worth receiving. And if a relationship bears fruit, such as children, providing for them, providing care, caring for and providing for the shared home; all of these are meaningful acts within the romantic economy and are useful for maintaining it. They’re aspects of the fully extended dimensions of the sexual union across a complete, united human life.

Still, it’s also easy to get bogged down in all these other ways of supporting the romantic economy and not remember to actually do the deed. Or maybe you might attempt to do the deed but forget or skip all these other things. Because the system exists across so many levels, it’s easy to cheat, to try to interact only on the level that matters most to you. To get in and get out, so to speak, instead of remaining and paying the price of engagement across multiple levels. Why do you think it’s called an engagement? Because you’re buying into, engaging with, the whole relationship in all its dimensions.

Now, this is a problem for everyone. Because the thing, the total sexual relationship, is so big and complex, it’s easy to focus on one part we’re good at or care about most and ignore the other parts. Men’s focus on the highly tangible aspects of nakedness, intimate touch, and orgasmic release is, to them, a focus on the things that truly embody and fulfill the concept of the romantic economy for them. They encapsulate special aspects of its nature that hold great power for them, and that do accurately represent what is special about the romantic relationship. You can’t take that away from them and not deprive them of the primary way they access and reaffirm the significance of the romantic relationship across the dimensions of their lives.

If you do take it away, you can expect the other dimensions of the relationship to suffer, because that window into it, that point of access to the full meaning, is so important for men. This is the easiest way to get a man to inhabit you and your shared identity, to get him excited about it and reinvested in it. To keep him as a husband rather than just a roommate. It’s really just one entry into a very large mansion that the romantic relationship creates, but as far as he’s concerned it’s the grand entrance and the front door. And if it’s shut too often he won’t feel welcome inside that shared space of identity.

As I’m not a woman, I don’t feel that I can speak authoritatively about them, not having been inside their heads. But if I had to describe what matters for women, based on my own experience, the answer would be: everything else. Yes, sex to some degree. But often sex as a function of everything else. Men in general, even neurologically, are more singular and tend to specialize into narrow bands of development and focus, whereas women are more distributed. I’ve written elsewhere about applying accelerants vs removing brakes.

I think it’s fair to say that it’s just more obvious to women that all the other stuff is also part of what sex is, what the romantic economy is, what the shared relationship is. It’s less easy for them to chop sex out singularly from all its levels of prismatic meaning and maintenance. And they have a greater connection to symbols of romance that are just as tangible for them, but might mean less to a typical man. The rituals of mating: the dance, the affection, the presentation, the display, all those behaviors we see arrayed so richly in nature. Those are just as tangible a part of sex, for them, as the physical revelation, the removing of the barriers between, that nudity and penetration present.

It’s fairly easy to remind a man what is so wonderful about their partner and why they desire access to them; just show them their partner with their clothes off and that will generally do it. It’s clear to them, it’s obvious and tangible and actionable. But men generally need to reveal more than their mere physical nakedness to arouse their wives (and let’s be honest, most of us aren’t amazing in that regard). How many men have attempted revealing themselves physically, only to be greeted with indifference, amusement, exasperation, or even disgust? Quite a lot. It hasn’t stopped them from trying, however.

Women do, I think, want men to reveal themselves to become aroused. They just have a different and more complex idea of what that means. It needs to be done across multiple levels of meaning, so that the value is revealed to them in ways that make it tangible and desirable for them. The somewhat dubious physical attraction of men can be “good enough” as my mother once put it, because it becomes inhabited by the meaning and attraction men possess at these other levels. And this explains a lot of the differences and misunderstandings between male and female sexual behavior.

One problem that couples can really struggle with is not keeping up their end of the reciprocal economy. The romantic economy is a miraculous thing, because it generates an excess. It produces more in result than what you put into it. Quite literally. You can put two people into it and get four back, or seven, or eventually dozens or hundreds or thousands, as it works itself out down the generations. It’s one of the few truly creative systems that we have access too. It is actively anti-entropic. But it only works as long as the exchange is kept up, the cycle of giving and receiving and recombining, of risk and sacrifice and welcome and protection. It isn’t a one and done thing. It’s a living, growing entity, this shared identity. It puts out roots and brings things under its shade and bears fruit that spread the organism further. But if it doesn’t keep up the process of respiration, the romantic exchange, the sexual krebs cycle, it fails to unleash the energy contained within its elements. It weakens, goes dormant, maybe even dies.

If a man attempts to extract the energy for the sustenance of his part of the organism by focusing only on the physical aspect that is tangible and desirable to him, and doesn’t contribute the materials necessary to maintain and make tangible the experience of the woman, he will starve that half of the cycle, and likely also his own half. Why? Because you can’t starve half of a symbiotic organism without harming both halves. You can’t deplete the resources available for one half of a chemical reaction and expect the other reagent to receive enough back to unleash its transformation. By the same token, if a man is investing in the romantic economy, but his partner keeps holding back her contribution to his ability to unleash and access that living energy, if his point of tangible access to it is blocked, he will starve, and likely will have less to contribute on his side, gradually empoverishing both halves of the equation.

This can lead to the most dreaded result, the reverse process cycle, the process of unlife, the consumptive metabolism. Where lack of available nutrients leads the organism to start burning its own parts for fuel. In common parlance it’s what we call a race to the bottom, a negative feedback loop. Each partner gives less and less, generating a loss instead of an excess that the shared romantic identity gradually absorbs, burning up its own strength and integrity, until it gets so sick it starts to die.

Now, maybe this system seems unjust and demanding. You’re being asked to do and care about things you don’t want and don’t care about so someone else can get what they want, in the uncertain hope that as a result you’ll get back what you need. That’s a pretty wild and uncertain arrangement, and a terribly demanding one, too. It’s a tangle of byzantine complexity out of which it isn’t at all clear that we will get what we want or be in any way able to navigate it and work things out to our satisfaction. It provides no guarantees, makes many demands, and carries enormous risk.

To all that, to all these perfectly true and reasonable objections, all I can say is, that’s love for you. You can resent the romantic economy and how it works, you can resent your partner’s inadequacies and failures, and just flat out differences. But all you’ll really get out of doing that is that you’ll lose the romantic economy and the shared identity and what it can produce. And that’s a pretty big loss. If you’re not willing to give it what it requires to be sustained, then it simply won’t be sustained. It’s a certain kind of thing and has certain things it requires to function. And when it is functioning it can do some amazing things. But if you can’t come to terms with it and see the value in it and love it and embrace it, all you’ll really get instead is its absence.

And for some people maybe that’s preferable. It’s certainly not easy putting up with the needs of someone whose demands and contributions don’t match your own but exist in a complex interplay with them. We would prefer to possess the whole means of generation and production within ourselves. To be self-sufficient, to have it all without having to rely on another or have them rely on us. But this is the curse of the system and the price it extracts. To admit something alien, to become something more than what we are. Some unity, some recombination of the elemental aspects of humanity. And somehow that recombination produces life, in every sense of the word, across all the prismatic dimensions of being. And frankly, that’s a f@#$ing miracle.