Why the Best Sex is With the Worst People

How desire can thrive in dysfunction, why we have the best sex with the worst people, and what that reveals about us.

Words by Shante Cosme

There’s this moment in “Fleabag” where Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s character explains what drives her to have sex. "I’m not obsessed with sex, I just can’t stop thinking about it. The performance of it. The awkwardness of it. The drama of it. The moment you realize that someone wants your body… Not so much the feeling of it." She delivers the line while sitting on the toilet.

It wasn’t just chemistry she was seeking, it was chaos. And she’s not alone. Our dopamine-addled brains are biologically primed to interpret danger as attraction, creating an undeniable pull toward inconsistent lovers over devoted ones.

Love is nice, sure. But have you ever had soul-scathing sex with someone who was objectively terrible for you?

Or someone who kissed you on your forehead one night, and left you on read the next?

Instability often leads us to mistake longing for passion. Psychologists call this intermittent reinforcement, and it’s why affection or validation that is given inconsistently makes us crave it even more. It’s why “bad” lovers keep us hooked. It’s not just the sex, it’s the tension, the high-stakes fantasy. It’s the same mechanism that keeps people addicted to slot machines: the thrill of an unpredictable win. Except in this case, the jackpot is a late-night text, a hand on your throat, a reminder that, for a moment, you were wanted.

It’s hard to want what you can easily obtain. The tender warmth of a stable partner can’t always take you to where you need to go. Our bodies and minds want to be overwhelmed and unprepared. We think we want consistency and comfort but what we truly crave is madness and escapism.

I have always been acutely aware of this tendency in people, in myself, but the understanding alone couldn’t release me from its gravitational pull. I remember leaving my house at 2 a.m. wearing only a trench coat, thinking, I know this man will be the death of me.

Sometimes, I have found myself keeping new partners submerged in novelty, holding them at arm’s length, trying to purposefully conjure this feeling in myself, what Emily Dickenson called “the maddest joy” in her 1896 poem:

“Within its reach, though yet ungrasped

Desire’s perfect Goal—

No nearer—lest the Actual—

Should disentrall thy soul—”

Desire is sustained by anticipation, not fulfillment. It feeds on tension. It lives in the realm of fantasy, a place suspended in time where our wants and needs take the floor and the doldrum of daily life is never contended with. Or worse yet, the sobering reality of who is really sleeping in our bed.

Writer Sherry Ning explains this inclination toward the intoxicating grip of wanting and what drives it:

“You carefully bring that fantasy out from the shadow … so your infinite capacity for illusion can get to work, beautifying it until your nerves can no longer tell the difference between love received and love imagined. The itch of yearning comes from self-deception.”

We don’t need to trick ourselves to maintain the magic required to have the sort of sex that burns into our brains, or has us second-guessing whether we have a brain at all.

Longing plays its part. But the power? That’s yours. Having sex that's all-consuming requires us to give ourselves permission to be consumed. And so long as we're aware of the dynamic, we can harness our horniness, cultivate it, and even use it for good.

Sex is an energetic force, after all. So, embrace the madness. Wring the thrills dry. But don't let it last forever.

The chaos will fade. The fantasy will crack. And when it does, be sure to slip away before it swallows you whole.