Sex Is Important For Love, But Will That Alone Help Sustain A Marriage?

Being a huge fan of Lust Stories (2018), I was eagerly waiting for the four-segment anthology to release. And bam, it landed on Netflix on Thursday afternoon. I started off with R Balki’s Made for Each Other, the first segment starring Neena Gupta, Mrunal Thakur, and Angad Bedi. While I loved Neena Gupta as an unconventional Daadi, I found myself having conflicting thoughts about the message of the movie.

To give a little introduction, Made For Each Other is about a recently engaged couple, Veda (Mrunal Thakur) and Arjun (Angad Bedi). Veda’s Daadi (Neena Gupta) staunchly believes that strong sexual compatibility can help a couple survive all the odds of a married life. So she encourages the young couple to go on a "test drive" before marriage to check if they are "compatible in the bedroom."

Daadi Ma insists that only when "Mount Fuji" erupts does it count as great sex, referring to both the man and the woman experiencing orgasms.

Lust Stories 2 Neena Gupta On Sex

While I loved to see Daadi Ma passionately talking about the great sex she had with her late husband, encouraging her middle-aged son and daughter-in-law to rekindle their sex lives, and openly having sexual talks with her granddaughter, her statement that having a strong sexual life will help a couple survive all the challenges of married life doesn’t sit well with me.

Sex is an important part of marriage, and it’s vital that a couple share good sexual compatibility. However, is great sex alone enough to make a marriage work against all odds?

"If the base is strong, you’ll withstand all kinds of quakes," says Daadi Ma, and she refers to sex as the base. Again, sex is important, but sex cannot and should not be the base! While it’s vital for a couple to be sexually intimate and keep the passion alive in the bedroom, how can marriage depend on that alone? How can that be the base that holds the marriage together? Isn’t marriage much more than sex, let alone great sex?

Daadi Ma goes on to say, "There will be things that might pull you apart, but if you have the best sex life, then you guys won’t leave each other." This one dialogue ruined it for me. So, if sex life begins to degrade or cease to exist because of some unavoidable reason, like a health issue, will that be the end of a marriage? Can a couple not be addicted to each other without sex? What about sharing successful intimacies in other aspects of life, such as having exceptional physical, emotional, intellectual, recreational, aesthetic, creative, communication, and several other such intimacies?

Sexual intimacy is just one of many types of intimacy. There’s so much more that holds a couple together than sexual intimacy. At the end of the day, we all crave intimacy, not just sex. If sex is the only thing that maintains a marriage against all adversities, then isn't that more of lust than love? How can love be dependent on sex alone?

For instance, pregnancy is a phase when women crave more intimacy than sex. So, will a woman turning down her husband’s sexual advances during pregnancy or postpartum take a hit on the marriage? What if one of the couples cannot have sex any longer due to physical or emotional health reasons? Will that kill the marriage? Shouldn’t that be a point where emotional intimacy takes over and helps the marriage survive?

What is the whole point of being in a relationship that is solely dependent on sex? Isn’t marriage more about love, commitment, loyalty, understanding, and respect? To reiterate, sex is an important factor in marriage, but it can and should never be the glue that holds a couple together.

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Views expressed by the author are their own