Emotions are a weird thing. They can drive us to crazy extremes, make us do things that are exciting and terrifying in equal measure. They can also make sex incredibly complicated
and, in some cases, downright weird. You would think that having a broken heart would drive you as far from sex as possible, but for many people just the opposite is true.
When your heart is broken, you experience a million different emotions. Maybe it was a break-up that was a long way coming or perhaps you learned your partner was deceiving you. Depending on the situation you can feel lost, alone and adrift or irate, absolutely seething and aching for a way to vent that anger and frustration. Hell, maybe you feel a bit of both.
So you meet up with some friends, you hit the clubs. You meet a girl, you make that connection and you go for it. Even if you’ve never been the kind of guy who makes a Big Move right away, this time you throw caution to the wind, take a deep breath and jump off the cliff.
When you seal the deal and make it back to her place, back to yours or wherever is just nearby and convenient, the sex is out of this world. It’s more than the fact that your performance is effortlessly stellar, that you’re responding perfectly and working your magic with aplomb. It’s simply perfect sex, a night that lives in your memory for a long time to come. No relationship develops or, if it does, it’s strictly as a friends-with-benefits situation. It’s the Revenge or Rebound sexual encounter and everyone knows – it’s the best way to get over a relationship.
This phenomenon was recently the focus of a study conducted by two researchers from the University of Missouri. Psychologists Lindsay Barber and Lynne Cooper followed the lives of 170 students in college over the course of an entire semester. Each participant had ended a relationship fairly recently at the beginning of the study and the research aimed to understand the emotions and actions people go through in the aftermath of a failed relationship. The results were tracked, in part, via online diaries kept by each participant and then analysed and categorised based on the participant’s gender, the cause of the breakup and how long it had been since the relationship ended.
They found that nearly two-thirds of the participants wound up having either revenge or rebound sex. This type of sex was categorised as a sexual encounter that happens relatively soon after the end of the relationship. It had to be an encounter with a new partner and couldn’t be a previous ex or the person with whom the participant had recently broken up with.
Various factors played a part in who as more likely to engage in this kind of sex and when people who had been in a serious and deeply committed relationship were less likely to have sex right after their breakup, but they often eventually did. People who had been dumped were understandably angrier and were often quick to have sex with a new partner as a way to affirm themselves and cope with their frustrations.
In the end, the duo determined that although revenge and rebound sex are a certifiable phenomenon, it is still an area that demands more research. Engaging in this kind of sex gave people help in a number of different ways. It acted as a coping mechanism, a way to grieve and even as a way to move forward. It also illustrates just how complicated – and sometimes counter-intuitive – human emotion and sexuality really is.
