I think they are meant to be united – that true love should be wild and passionate and full of intense experiences and pleasure. I see the relationship with one’s mate as the ultimate and intended vehicle for living out and experiencing the intensity and range of life experiences, and in reality, the only vehicle that can be used for accessing the most intense experiences life has to offer because that was the design. Who better than one’s partner and soulmate to help one explore the great experiment and party that is life?
Yeah, I agree with this concept. I think you can live out a life of intensity alone, and I have more complex feelings about mates being by design or not than is useful to go into here, but I do believe that having a constant romantic partner gives you an opportunity for longer, deeper, more complex bonding than almost any other scenario. I am also very much an idealist, and I do have a rosy view of romance that I really can't deny. There is something infinitely beautiful and biologically
right about two humans coming together in a synthesis of being to create more than what they are alone, both philosophically and in terms of physically creating (or nurturing) new life.
Personally, I am sx-dom, and I do have an addictive personality, which I believe is very intimately tied to the sx-first nature, but I am not a fast-paced person and I generally dislike abrupt intensity. And, being NF, I live out a lot of my fantasies in my head moreso than I'm inclined to seek them in real life - plus, being an enneagram 6, I am generally quite wary and caught in my head - hence lack of real promiscuity or external physical thrill-seeking behavior.
Most of all, I like to linger and prolong safe, deep bonding experiences for as long as possible - this includes breathtaking moments out in nature, intense loving sex, savoring the scents and flavors and textures of foods, comforting sensory experiences such as warm thick blankets and cushy memory foam and even heavy soft sweaters, being immersed in water, and, most of all, deep-tissue massages. I am a "deep sensation" junkie.
So I think the implications of all that for this division is that your romantic leanings versus your impulsive, thrill-seeking behavior - in other words, how sexual instinctual variant dominance manifests - is going to have a lot to do with your enneatype, your cognitive preferences, your second variant, and numerous other external factors. It can easily range all the way from a very conservatively religious INFJ 2w1 sx/so who is all about the romantic bonding side of the sexual instinct to a very hedonistic exhibitionist ESTP 7w8 sx/sp who is all about the thrill-seeking sensation side of the sexual instinct.