Why I Don’t Understand Makeup Sex

The last thing I feel after an argument is horny

“He is such a dick!”

We all nodded in agreement.

I was sitting at the cafeteria table, listening to my friend run through the latest fight she had with her boyfriend.

He said some shitty things to her. She lost her cool a bit. Now they could barely look at each other without seething.

“He’s a dick,” my friend reiterated. “But at least you’ll get to have some amazing makeup sex!”

Everyone giggled and voiced their agreement loudly.

Everyone except me. I laughed a little nervously, mumbled “Totally,” and then took a long sip from my strawberry-kiwi juice to avoid making eye contact with any of them.

I had never had makeup sex. I didn’t even have fights — I had breakups. Sometimes, I had situationships so meaningless they weren’t even worth fighting over.

But I couldn’t understand the appeal, even in theory. Why would you want to fuck someone you just had a fight with? How could you even get horny after being so upset?

Some of my friends seemed to spend more time fighting than loving their boyfriends. It didn’t seem to bother them, because they’d all come out of it with stories about how a-ma-zing the sex was afterwards.

It’s like they could transform shouting into passion, and turn their rage into intense horniness.

The makeup sex comments kept coming and I just stayed confused.

Sixteen years later, I still haven’t really had any makeup sex and I still don’t see the appeal.

I Need Intimacy, Not Sex

I don’t fight with Mr. Austin very often. But you can’t be married for ten years — and spend most of those chronically sleep deprived — without having a few heated disagreements.

Whenever they happen, they play out about the same way. There are bitchy comments from each side. We get progressively louder as we try to talk over each other. Eventually, we both end up feeling huffy and needing to process whatever the hell we were fighting over.

It never ends in sex. It always ends with us in separate rooms, cooling off so we can come back and discuss things with a level head.

After a little while, we sit in bed together and discuss everything, figure out some kind of middle ground, and laugh or cry or both.

But still no sex.

I consider sex to be a very vulnerable act. And to be that vulnerable with someone — even my husband — I need to feel like we’re good. I need to feel like there’s trust, safety, and security.

To get there, we reconnect and rebuild our intimacy. We cuddle, we talk, we make stupid jokes over dinner, we remind ourselves a hundred times that we love each other.

After all that, we usually have sex — or maybe the next day if we drag it on too late. But it’s not makeup sex. It doesn’t feel like anger sliding into heat. It doesn’t feel like we’re reconciling through sex.

And it doesn’t feel special.

I mean, okay, it feels great. But it’s like the sex we always have. It’s the same sex we would’ve had without the argument. There’s no extra rush of pleasure and excitement. There are no added thrills. I’m not left panting into the mattress thinking “Wow… What were we fighting about again?”

It’s just sex.

Sex Was Never Tied to Connection

The closest I’ve come to makeup sex isn’t with Mr. Austin, though. It was with the last serious boyfriend I had before meeting him.

We didn’t have fights, exactly. It was more subtle than that. There was just a lot of tension.

That tension was like a wedge driven between us. And it all had to do with sex. Because I didn’t give him everything he wanted, he acted like he had lost interest in me.

The only way to get us back to a good place was to give him what he wanted. When I did, he’d warm up and act sweet. The tension disappeared. It felt like we were good again.

I was always relieved that he was showing me love. I felt reassured by his attention. But I didn’t care about the sex. It wasn’t mindblowing. It wasn’t intense. It wasn’t much of anything really. It was just how I got him to reconnect with me.

That might explain why makeup sex didn’t make sense to me.

Sex can be a big signal that everything’s okay. After you’ve fallen apart a little, fucking makes you feel like you’re bonded again.

I never experienced that.

Sex was never tied to connection for me. I’ve had one night stands who treated my body like a sex toy to stick their dicks into. I had boyfriends who kind of did the same. I had the boyfriend I mentioned, who used sex to make me feel guilty and inadequate.

Even though I feel closer to my husband when we fuck, my early experiences taught me not to associate the two strongly.

So, the idea of using sex to reconnect — to feel close, safe, and secure again — doesn’t really make sense to me on a gut level.

Makeup sex is still a big mystery to me.

It Comes Down to What Sex Means to You

Whether you like makeup sex or not seems to come down to the type of person you are. If you use sex as a way to connect (and reconnect), then makeup sex makes sense for you. But if you need a strong connection before you even think about getting frisky, it just doesn’t compute.

I’m in the latter camp. I won’t be aroused or feel safe enough to be vulnerable before I can rebuild that connection.

It’s kind of unfortunate. The way other people talk about makeup sex makes me wonder if I’m missing out on some intense, explosive experience.

But there are some advantages to not engaging in it.

My friends used to joke that they would start fights with their boyfriends just because they craved the makeup sex. They were kidding, but I think there was a little grain of truth to that.

Some of them used sex as a bandaid. They just wanted the fighting to be over. They wanted to be on good terms with their boyfriends again. And having sex was an easy way to achieve that.

They’d fuck right after a fight (or in the middle of one) and then everything would be okay again. But the issues that caused the fight in the first place didn’t get addressed. So, they’d be back to fighting within a week. And again, they’d fuck because it felt better than being mad. And the cycle would repeat itself again.

Obviously, that’s not all makeup sex. Some people just feel horny after a fight and that’s great. But I need other kinds of intimacy first. That’s what works for me.

In the end, it just comes down to what feels right for you. If you like makeup sex and if it brings you closer together, more power to you.

But if you have a fight with me, you can expect to cuddle my ass before you get to pound it.

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