1. “For me, having sex with someone you love feels like you’ve ‘found’ something. There’s a real sense of discovering something that was missing before, a completeness that you don’t get from random hookups or even with long term lovers that you’re not in love with.”

—Luke, 27

2. “It is different. It’s so different that I actually think it might be the best way to tell whether you’re in love with someone or just in lust with them.”

—Oliver, 26

3. “The thing I noticed the most about having sex with someone I loved for the first time was that there was real humor and happiness involved. Like, we joked and smiled the whole way through. The sex was super satisfying of course but I remember afterward saying ‘that was fun’ and actually feeling joy instead of worrying about how I’d performed, etc. That was a real shock for me.”

—Nathan, 22

4. “Technically, I’ve had better sex with women that I wasn’t in love with than I have with women I have been in love with but at the same time I generally enjoyed it less. I’m still kind of getting my head around that.”

—Jonathon, 23

5. “People are always talking about how sex with someone you love is better but I don’t really see how that can be true. Sex is sex, either you have chemistry and know how to do it or you don’t. I don’t know how love could magically grant anyone mystic sex powers that suddenly make it better.”

—Ian, 24

6. “I’ve wondered about this a lot and at the risk of trying to explain something that probably has to be experienced to be understood I think that when you love someone you’re just more likely to trust them and when you have mutual trust you have better sex that’s mostly stress free.”

—Leo, 27

7. “This is really something men don’t talk about when it’s just ‘the guys’. I think that we’re told by society that A) Sex is dirty and awesome and that B) If you’re in love then you should never say so. Sex with someone you love can be actually transcendental and by that I mean you transcend your ‘self’ and become emotionally intwined with the person with whom you’re sharing that love. It’s a miracle if you ask me and we’d all be better off if we admitted how wonderful it is to feel that way.”

—Marc, 33

8. “The first time I had sex with someone I was in love with it scared me. It was just such an intensity of feeling that I immediately kind of freaked out and literally started shaking. The way I grew up and having the parents I had really explains this. There wasn’t much affection in the house. We were always emotionally on our guard. There wasn’t any trust. It took me some time to figure out what I was feeling and love making sort of ended up as a kind of reparative therapy for me. We’ve been married five years now and I feel like meeting her rescued me from what might have been a very sad and loveless life.”

—Jack, 28

9. “The first thing I noticed the first time I was with someone I was in love with and that was in love with me was that she seemed to really be into my pleasure in this really free way. I’d never come across that before.”

—Charlie, 25

10. “There’s definitely an isolation I’ve always felt during and after hookups, even when I really liked the person, that’s definitely showed me the meaning of ‘la petite mort’ (the little death). When I’ve had sex with someone I really loved I never felt that.”

—Tyler, 26

11. “For the most part, I’ve always enjoyed sex with someone new because you get to find out all about this new person and what they like and don’t like. There’s a lot of excitement in it but it’s definitely different from sex with someone you’re in love with. The best way I can describe is that it’s like you’re doing something with someone else instead of doing something to them.”

—Julian, 29

12. “It’s 100% possible to still have bad sex with someone you’re in love with. What I’ve found in my own life though is that bad sex with someone you love is still way better than good sex with someone you don’t love. For one thing, you don’t feel the need to leave right afterward.”

—David, 28

13. “They’re different, yeah, but as long as you’re not expecting love where there isn’t any then I think both can have their place. Where a lot of people go wrong and, I think, especially girls, is that they expect to feel love during hookups when that’s not what hookups are about. Making love is about being with someone you love, hookups are about sex or alleviating loneliness.”

—Jake, 30

14. “Sex is better with someone you love for the exact reason that literally everything is better with someone you love.”

—Tom, 22

15. “One thing I notice about casual sex is just how little effort people really put into it. If for no other reason, sex with someone you love is better because both of you are trying.”

—Jeremiah, 26

16. “Sex with someone you love is really different than sex with someone you’ve just met or haven’t known very long. There’s nothing like the adrenaline that comes with the sort of rowdy, casual sex you have with someone you just met at a club but there’s also nothing like sex that’s deeply intimate and that can be just as rowdy. The difference is that the former doesn’t have any meaning to it. The latter does.”

—Mark, 26

17. “The sex is different, yes. Is it better? It can be and when it is better it’s a lot better and when it’s bad it’s just okay. However, some of the best sex I ever had was with people I wasn’t in love with.”

—Evan, 24

18. “Sex with someone you love doesn’t have any of the ‘locked inside your head’ self consciousness that hookups have, in my experience.”

—Anthony, 23