Erotic and sexual contacts: what is the difference between them?

When they talk about love in the language of cinema, they often show situations in which there is no transition from social distance to close. A sudden flash of passion is more spectacular, more erotic and seductive for the viewer than a long journey of rapprochement. But passion is an affect, people captured by it lose themselves.

In popular culture, this format of relationships is considered an ideal. But this ideal does not imply a proper relationship: a bond between two persons in which there is room for mutual interest. Therefore, in real life, after quenching passion, these two, who have just entwined in their arms, experience awkwardness, shame, sadness, dissatisfaction with themselves, a desire to leave and quickly forget everything that happened – not always, of course, but much more often than in the movies.

Erotic and sexy

Relationships between two adults don’t just happen out of the box and usually don’t immediately become sexual. They develop gradually – and this development is very similar to the stages of human maturation.

Sexuality, intimacy and eroticism are not the same thing. The erotic appears in our lives long before the sexual. And only as the child grows older, sexuality will arise in his life, which is associated with the genital area. And first comes creativity, self-expression, pleasure from the contact of the child with his mother and with himself – and all this has nothing to do with sex and sexuality.

With the first erotic experience, the child meets at the age of 3 months to 1,5 years, while the oral stage lasts. We get the first pleasure from the contact of our mouth with the mother’s breast and experience this contact with the whole body. Look how the child sucks milk: it is clear that his whole body is involved in this process, waves of pleasure go through the whole body. The mouth is our first erogenous zone, but it has nothing to do with sex.

The first need of a child is the need for satiation, for satisfying hunger. This is followed by the need to make eye contact with the mother. Even when the child cannot yet focus his eyes, he has a need for his mother to look at him.

What happens next? The mother strokes the child, gives him a massage, aunties with him – they have a lot of contact on the physical and psychosomatic level. And the child learns that there are other areas besides the mouth, touching which brings him pleasure.

The baby lives with two emotions: pleasure and displeasure. Pleasure evolutionarily means that needs are met and he survives. And dissatisfaction means that the need is not satisfied and there is a threat to survival.

When a mother strokes a child, he learns that he has a body, he feels her touch with his whole skin, reacts to them. By establishing eye contact with the mother, the child learns that contact, even if it is not physically satiating, can bring pleasure, nourish in a different way – a feeling of closeness, warmth, a feeling that someone is next to you.

At this moment, the mother does an important thing – she helps the child to relieve tension through the skin. And this moment of release of tension for us is associated with pleasure, this is what eroticism is: the experience of pleasure from the closeness of another. Later, the child introjects this experience – he will learn to enjoy his body, muscle activity, touching himself.

Even later, he will begin to enjoy social contacts, creative activities. And only in adolescence, when he has sexual needs, erotic experiences will merge with sexual ones.

Stroking with hands and words

In adulthood, when we approach each other, we again go through all these stages (although not necessarily in the same order) – we meet, we look at each other, we understand that contact with this person is pleasant for us, his company gives us pleasure .

All our experiences are colored by the primary division into pleasure and displeasure, but adults have much more emotions and, unlike children, we can make decisions about how to deal with our feelings. In particular, we choose whether we want to keep the pleasant contact only friendly or want to make it sexual.

We go through the touches that we like, then move on to strokes (both physical and verbal: we compliment our chosen one or chosen one). We can stop at this stage or go further – and then there is an erotically charged oral contact: we kiss, literally tasting the other.

What happens when we hug another? Body-oriented psychologists believe that the hands are connected to the chest, and the palms are connected to the heart. By touching the other with our palms, we express our cordiality. When we like someone, we want to hold them close to our hearts.

In relationships, sometimes cordiality precedes sexuality, sometimes vice versa. If sexuality appears earlier, then what happens is what we talked about above: two relieve tension in the pelvic area.

If cordiality precedes sexuality, then first there is an intimate contact, but not sexualized, and then it gradually develops towards sexuality. When cordiality and sexuality unite, a strong embrace is obtained: the two are in bodily contact both in the chest and in the pelvis.

The transition to sex is different for everyone. Most often, at first, two embrace, and then the same hands that participate in the hug touch the other in the abdomen, back, and pelvis. There is simultaneous recognition of the other and recognition of one’s body in the touch of the other. And the contact gradually turns into a sexual one. At the same time, in mature relationships, friendly sympathy does not disappear in sexuality, but develops in it.