Much the same way as Nietzsche embraces the death of God to celebrate existentialism as a liberating force, so Sharon Olds embraces the death of romantic love to celebrate the liberation of honest sex. After a philologistic examination of Olds’ poem Sex Without Love, a profound question one must ask is the same question asked by the poet in her first line, “How do we make love without love?” Man is alone in the universe. We all have our own identity, but we are born alone and we must die alone. Communication through words is a flawed system of communication because both speaker and listener have a unique perception and may posit different meanings in the words they choose to speak and the ways in which they understand the words being spoken to them. With our present rate of divorce and the large number of unwed mothers, we understand that romantic love is a myth created to bond people together socially throughout history. No matter how much this bond is affected between two believers in romantic love, there are still no guarantees associated with it. One of the individuals may die unexpectedly. One of them may fall in love with another individual. One of them may change and develop while the other does not, thus forcing them to separate because they are different than when they first made their pact based on romantic love. Therefore, we are all still alone even if we could take comfort from such empty promises or pacts. Thus, since sex is often linked with romantic love, and has been historically, how do we make love without love? The question has to be asked, because in order to make love without love a new definition of the relationship two people can attain must be redefined. We must ask the question because so many individuals in society are obviously able to make love without being in love. How does a person make love to another person without love? We must ask this question be
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