Do people really think sex is needed to live?

[NickB79]

50. "People don't need to have sex to live fulfilling lives"

I can agree with you on this in a more detached, clinical sense, but also don't think I could agree on a personal level. Without sex, my daughter never would have been born, and I don't see myself living a fulfilling life without her in it. If we were unable to conceive a child, we would have adopted, but that's just using someone else's sex life to fulfill our needs. And honestly, if my wife had told me when we were dating that she didn't want children, that would have been a deal-breaker for me. I actually turned down the advances of a friend who wanted to be more than friends simply because I knew she was not interested at all in having a family.

And as I pointed out in my previous post, a great many marriages end because of a mismatch in the sexual desires of the partners. Either the couple divorce, or one or the other cheat. And now that we have drugs such as Viagra, we see older couples willing to shell out hundreds of dollars a month in order to enjoy sex again, even though they may have had happy, fulfilling lives before the advent of ED medication (ask my grandparents. I wish I did not know about that one). Clearly a great many people do place a healthy sex life highly enough in their hierarchy of wants and needs that they are willing to make great sacrifices to obtain it.

Basically, it's very hard to make the blanket statement you made, because everyone has a different definition of what they consider fulfilling lives, and what they need to live such lives. I'm sure a great many people could live fulfilling lives without sex, but at the same time I don't see any good coming from implying that those that say they do need sex to maintain a healthy mental state as being untruthful or mistaken.