Sex: The New Miracle Drug

“Sell your cleverness and purchase bewilderment with it.” Rumi

If you always thought that sex was just for pleasure, yours and your partner’s, Think again. Recent studies seem to be indicating that sex has an affect on your health. Dr. Paul Pearsall, Director of Behavioral Medicine at Detroit's Beaumont Hospital, writes “the joys and pleasures of living life and loving may provide us with something called an "intimacy inoculation" that actually protects us from disease.” So when you are making love you can also be helping your immune system to fight illness.

Balance in our lives is important, especially between our health and healing systems. One way to help achieve this balance is to establish and maintain a deep, intimate relationship with your partner. Intimacy does not always equal sex, although it usually heightens the experience. Holding hands, snuggling and casual loving touch, quiet conversations can all be very intimate and very fulfilling.

This type of intimacy often leads to a feeling of connectedness, where you feel that deep, loving bond between you and your partner. When we experience these intimate, moments, researchers have said that we may experience a measurable change in neurochemicals and hormones throughout the body that help promote health and healing.

It is not just the sex act of intercourse that starts us on the path to health and healing through sex but it is the closeness that making love brings that is the clincher. “Psychologist and author Gina Ogden, Ph.D. notes in her book, Women Who Love Sex, that sex has everything to do with openness, connection to and bonding with a partner, feelings about what is happening to us, and memories.”

As couples we need to practice safe sex. Not the kind that the world thinks of to prevent STDs and pregnancies but safe sex that relates to our emotional security. The very act of making loves is one of the most vulnerable things there is. We open our selves up and trust our partners to love us and not hurt us. Most women feel that warm, loving connections between themselves and with their partners is “essential to and inseparable from the experience of sexual ecstasy.”

And not just for women. Research seems to be suggesting the same for men, especially those younger men. Our society is now deeming it an acceptable thing for men to notice and talk about their feelings. This trend leads to men also being able to admit that what they crave the most about sex is the same as women, they want the closeness and connection that making love brings.

Older men really want it as well they just have not put the two together. Dr. Anthony Fiore, a leading sex therapist and counselor says that these older “men were taught, as youths, that males showed love by doing, not by talking or ‘connecting’ with girls.” The good news for the older couples out there is that anyone can learn to become close. It will take patience and understanding on the woman’s part and commitment and desire on the man’s.

So if you want to be a little healthier and increase your chance of living longer try this new medical prescription. Take a long walk together, hold hands and talk about your innermost thoughts and feelings, laugh and giggle together, make that connection then go home and climb into bed and set the world on fire.

Dallas Munkholm, B.A., B.Com., R.P.C.
Professional Counselor & Life Coach

Co-author of Marriage Prep: Beginnings a downloadable marriage preparation course

Co-author of Intimate Sex: Manual for Lovemaking, a sex manual for couples

Offers a free Nurturing Marriage Ezine