Thank you. So I have another question. Since this course has really been focusing a lot on relationships, romantic relationships, I thought. Within those relationships we, I feel like there's this idea that sex is kind of this very necessary predictor of whether or not a relationship is good. And I wonder if you can comment on that. Is there any demerit to that? >> Well, I think when we talk about sex within a relationship, it is pretty obvious or self-evident to say that if you have a better relationship, a high-quality relationship, it's more likely that you'll be able to experience higher-quality sex. But then I think it is only true to some extent. Because it depends on how important sex is to either or both of the partners, right? We can easily imagine there are people who go on in a very satisfactory relationship in which sex doesn't really play an important role. And then there are couples who can tell us that they have good relationship but they don't really have a very active sex life. So that's imaginable, and then I think it happens in real life. The other thing is that some people believe that if the quality of your sexual relationship is good, it will also contribute to the overall quality of the relationship. And I think that is also true, but again, it depends on how important it is for some people. So generally, you would imagine conceptually that there should be a virtual cycle, almost, that high-quality relationship contributes to better sex, and better sex feeds into a higher-quality relationship. But I don't think the two are just going on like this in a simple, straightforward manner. We will always go back to people's N3C, the needs, circumstances, the characteristics, and the capacity. And sex can be really central in one context, but can be peripheral in another context. The other difficult part of this formula is the question that we haven't actually asked, right, [LAUGH] which is? >> What is sex? [LAUGH] >> Sex, yeah, exactly! Yeah, so to some people, sex is genital penetration. >> Right. >> Some people only regard that as sex, all right? We have this famous Bill Clinton denial, [LAUGH] right? That he had never had sex with Monica Lewinsky because he was, deliberately, I would say, narrowing the definition to penetrative genital sex. But to a lot of people, right, sex can be just holding hands or looking at each other intensely. And it's a form of communication and mutuality. And some people just get that there's something sexual going on.
>> right. Some people can have that happening even without touching each other. So what is sexual, I would say, to a very large extent depends on the reality that is co-constructed by the participants themselves. And when a group of participants or a couple are saying that this is sexual, I don't think we can go in and say that no, it is not, right? So it actually varies across different social contexts. So I think it is important to understand that by the end of the day, it would be the participants themselves who one, define what is sexual. Two, determine how important it is in their relationship. Having said that, then I would say, well, generally, I would say better sex and better relationship probably are correlated in some manner
