Love

As a typical E7, the Sexual subtype has an overdeveloped sense of erotic love, with admiring love being less active but still present, and compassionate love being the least developed. Compared to other E7s, the Sexual subtype has specialized the most in erotic love, with their primary orientation being toward enjoyment. A manipulative use of eros to achieve their desires is characteristic, as we will explore below.

This Enneatype is connected to desire and linked to the inner animal and the reptilian brain. In other words, they are someone who focuses on their needs and offers a rather egocentric form of love: the love of a child, focused on enjoyment, laughter, sexuality, and play. This corresponds to filial love, which is more concerned with receiving than giving. Therefore, the Sexual 7 often appears to be in love with life itself—passionate and sensual. They love everything that generates bodily pleasure, such as theater, music, and the arts in general.

The desire for pleasure is experienced primarily through the mouth, as this character is deeply focused on orality. They seek pleasure not only through sex and physical activity but also through food and talking for the sake of talking. They find enjoyment in touching their

lips, biting their nails, placing objects in their mouths, sucking on them... in short, they look for ways to pleasure themselves at all times.

They are very greedy. Their desire for pleasure is irresistible, particularly when it comes to tasting everything, though they are not prone to overeating. In fact, it is rare for a Sexual 7 to develop compulsive eating habits, and it’s uncommon to find a fat or overweight Sexual 7. They are generally slim and slender, moving from one excitement to the next, like butterflies flitting from flower to flower. Although erotic love is the most active in the Sexual 7, it is, in reality, a false form of eroticism—a fantasy version—because it confuses true erotic pleasure with the excitement of novelty. What matters to them is the conquest.

This compulsive pursuit governs all forms of eroticism—pleasures in life beyond just the strictly sexual ones. While the Sexual 7 may seem highly erotic, they are, in fact, incapable of experiencing true eroticism: enjoying relationships and situations. They are the "premature ejaculator" of the enneagram, whether male or female. In this context, premature ejaculation refers not only to a literal sense but also to how they experience life: not enjoying the pleasure itself but getting swept up in the excitement of the moment, which quickly fades into boredom, sadness, and a loss of meaning—a dreaded void.

This void will be filled with a new emotion: new love conquests, new intellectual influences, new projects (often unrealistic and unattainable), new physical activities, new foods, new languages, new countries. Life becomes a vast supermarket, full of all kinds of goods, none of which can satisfy a hunger that grows incessantly, like a hole that widens the more they try to fill it.

“...getting hooked on pleasure, believing that more of the same would give me more pleasure, until I became dissatisfied again when I didn’t get it.”

“The fundamental orientation of my need is pleasure. I am addicted to pleasure. Where there is no pleasure, I make it or invent it. I realize I don’t do things for money or prestige (though I do that too) but to enjoy myself. I can't stand boredom. I can't stand emptiness or ‘little,’ and I always need more, never the same.”

This predominance of erotic love originates from very permissive childhood experiences. A child who asks and receives everything builds an omnipotent adult, one who struggles to differentiate themselves from the world, who feels entitled to everything—a world that is there to provide for their needs. Everything is easy, and they only have to reach out and take what they want.

“...and I knew that by pretending, acting out, and manipulating, I would eventually get what I wanted.”

“I longed to be small for a long time because I didn’t like the adults.”

“I tend to ‘not need’ anything, and one way of not feeling need is by not showing it. So I never usually express my need. In relationships, I don’t ask, I take. This leads to having little respect for others and for the environment. It’s as if the world is mine, and everything and everyone is there to be used by me.”

Regarding the discovery and evolution of sexuality, there is a strong tendency toward arousal and erotic activation from childhood, although, due to biological development, this is initially not linked to genitality.

“I started looking at pornographic magazines when I was eleven, with my older brothers—first stealing them from newsstands, then came the videos, the fantasy, because biologically, I hadn’t even had erections yet.”

“My experience of sex and pleasure, as far back as I can remember, was like the force of gravity: a sweeping impulse that destroys everything. Around the age of ten, I already remembered with pleasure the contact of hands with my classmates during gym classes and mutual masturbations during excursions.”

The sexual impulse is experienced as uncontrollable, accompanied by guilt typical of a society that criminalizes pleasure. The need for jouissance is so strong that it is experienced internally, in the mind, rather than outwardly, where physical contact and communication would typically help.

“I went into an obsessive masturbatory convulsion that marked my sexuality. For me, sex was something mental, and I had many difficulties understanding it from a physical perspective. So, with all my potential in my thoughts, I went out into the world to enjoy and escape as much as possible, which I succeeded in doing daily.” (GEORGE)

“I had my first formal girlfriends, the first disappointments, but almost always with a feeling of little satisfaction, not knowing how to satisfy myself or the other person. I enjoyed relationships more in my imagination, in my head—coming up with strategies to fall in love, imagining witty conversations, irresistible looks that would end up seducing the lady. In sex, I was very concerned with doing it well, with satisfying the other person. If I gave her what she needed, she wouldn’t leave me, and so my pleasure became her pleasure. If I gave pleasure, I was loved, which also created anxiety: ‘I have to do it right, I can’t fail; if not, they won’t love me.’ Sometimes, sex seemed more like a chore than enjoyment.”

Much of the excitement that drives the Sexual 7 is, therefore, more fantasy than reality. They are mentally stimulated by imagination, where agility and freedom exist, unlike in actual, live situations with a partner.

“Imagine instead of sharing and doing. There is no frustration in imagination. Shared sex doesn’t exist. Lots of masturbation, lots of magazines, lots of imagination.”

Exposure to others forces them to confront the fear of rejection and the phobia of intimacy, where they cannot hide or falsify themselves so easily. This fear may delay their first full sexual relationship.

“At the age of nineteen, I had my first relationship with a girl. It was a new experience because up until then, they had always been idealized, platonic loves, but I had never even kissed a girl. I remember being scared and feeling insecure, thinking that at my age, I was very behind. There was real fear of being rejected by them. I fantasized, afraid that when the girls found out I had never been with anyone and saw my inexperience, they would laugh at me and leave.”

“As a teenager, I was always a good bullfighter but a very bad matador. I liked the conquest but then lost interest and soon turned my attention to another girl. I’ve always gotten along very well with them, but what’s called sex, I only started having when I met my wife, and that was at the age of twenty-four.”

“As I got older, I noticed fewer and fewer friends accepted mutual masturbation. X cinemas with pornography appeared. I became a regular (weekly) attendee of those rooms, in which I masturbated a couple of times. I didn’t start having sex with women until I was twenty-two or twenty-three.”

The Sexual 7 adolescent is more interested in falling in love, passion, and conquest than in engaging in full sexual relations or having a relationship with a partner. They are often more focused on self-satisfaction, masturbation... The erotic thrill of excitement is more attractive than the act of consummating sex. Their motto could be: Maximum excitement with the least possible effort.

“The desire came from fantasy, not so much from physical desire itself. I fantasized about what it would be like to practice what I had seen in magazines for years. I fantasized that if I lost my virginity, I would be more accepted by my friends and finally become a man.”

“One more step was to start mutual masturbations with other men in X theaters. The combination of pornographic images and someone touching me was very pleasurable. The darkness, the anonymity, the speed, and the movie, which I liked a lot, made these acts the most pleasurable sexual practice. When I began a relationship with a woman, I stopped visiting the cinemas. Although I soon realized that the meetings in X cinemas were more pleasant than relationships with women. I now see that my visits to have sex with men there had a lot to do with the ease of pleasure. I could get pleasure without cost, without effort. There were no words. It was so cheap. With no obligation. And varied: I could be with whoever I wanted and reject anyone. Pleasure drove me. Sometimes, I felt an overwhelming urge to go. I remember the joy and excitement when I walked into the dark theater filled with warm hands eager to caress me. I felt: ‘This is my kingdom.’”

All this excitement, however, is experienced with great guilt and remorse. In his idealization of pleasure, he can fall into addictions of different kinds, as he is focused on enjoyment and experiencing "trips" of all kinds.

“At the age of sixteen, the debauchery increased, and I began living non-stop on the streets, experiencing the best of each house. So, I educated myself between alcohol, joints, and all kinds of drugs. [...] At eighteen, life warned me through my body—how could it be otherwise for an E7? I had severe hepatitis (almost a hepatic coma). I was leaving home, addicted to acid—it was much better than alcohol. I immersed myself in painting and playing the guitar. Since sex was complicated, even though I had friends, I decided to rent a house in the 'Chinatown' of Palma. I made friends with some prostitutes, with whom I learned and playfully practiced all the things that occurred to me and more. They were very productive years of vice and debauchery.”

Erotic love is accompanied in Sexual 7s by a clinical picture marked by two well-known symptoms: hedonism and early frustration. The search for pleasure leads him to take an irresponsible attitude, prolonging leisure time and delaying duties, tasks, and responsibilities as much as possible. Frustration intolerance is well-known to those who have lived closely with a Sexual 7. If the world is a big tit, any plan that goes awry awakens tremendous anguish in him and unleashes the Mr. Hyde inside.

Although it is a "sexual" character in the Enneagrammatic sense, meaning prone to intimate contact and to showing himself in short distances, one-on-one, the Sexual 7 fears emotional intimacy, where he enters the danger zone. His favorite intimacy is him talking, gently tricking his partner, while affective intimacy—from heart to heart—makes him uncomfortable and activates his strategies. A deficit shared by E7s in general is compassionate love. More specifically, Sexual 7s show difficulties in developing this benevolent love, tenderness, related to a mother's love, which we share with the rest of the mammals and which has its anatomical seat in the limbic brain.

Such a deficit brings with it a lack of compassion, primarily manifested in their inability to stay in the face of human pain, to stop and feel, to genuinely support and seek support. Faced with the needs of others, he leaves. A Sexual 7 does not pay attention to the sick, deserts funerals, and does not take care of children, the weak, the needy, or the poor. He is not empathic, paradoxically due to an excess of empathy: he identifies completely, merging with the pain of others.

Although he seems incapable of feeling compassion and appears cold, detached, or absent, he is actually hypersensitive to pain and emotions, which he perceives as heartbreaking. The fear of feeling pain, perceived as immense, is such that he moves away as much as possible, putting distance in the middle as soon as he senses any eventual contact with it.

He feels too much, and in his autosuggestive fantasy, he anticipates that emotion intensely—hence his aversion to pain.

His typical attitude toward pain is to normalize it, resort to light jokes, or laugh at misfortune, not letting it weigh him down. Getting in touch with that pain is, in fact, a fundamental part of his transformation process. His life is marked by the crazy idea of having had a happy childhood, a fantasy instilled partly by his family and which fits perfectly with our consumer society—a gigantic factory of happy babies who miss nothing, with toys and fun for children from zero to ninety-nine years old.

It is common for him to be fed as a child in his family environment with the belief of “how lucky he has been,” in a home where “he has never lacked for anything” and similar phrases. As if pain didn’t belong to that realm, as if there had almost been no suffering for him—whose rights did not include feeling pain or frustration. The Sexual 7 feels that he has no right to suffer. "The world is full of pain, but in my life there is none; I have not even touched it," is his mantra.

It can be said that the first interference with compassionate love arises from the force of erotic love, which contaminates it (with its manipulator) and blocks the capacity for surrender. The neurotic needs for total freedom and hyper-security stop even the projects of building a family.

“It costs me that time, to which I have always fought, is no longer mine. And that love that flows from me toward Ricard, my son, also saddens me. It saddens me to know that one day he will leave. I still feel stingy. I still don’t dare to give myself up because I don’t dare to hold the farewell. Love, if I do it, it hurts.”

“It’s hard for me to commit: marriage, children... Crazy idea: Are they going to take everything away from me? If I ask lawyers and they assure me that, even if we know each other, I’ll have a flat to protect myself, it helps me say yes.”

“There may also be confusion between the experience of sex as something purely genital, oriented toward orgasm, and a more tender, shared sexuality, which is displaced in this subtype—the result of the same process of atrophy of compassionate love. Madness of thought and sexual energy as a substitute for tenderness. I confused sex and love, so when the passion was over, I thought the relationship was over.”

Another important interference in the development of compassionate love arises from hyper-attention to the outside, from the insatiable need for recognition, which falsifies generous giving.

“The continuous search for acceptance and love from my parents, giving up my aggressiveness, sensitivity, independence, and energy, I later carried into my daily life,

becoming a 'love beggar,' doing a thousand things and giving up a thousand others to achieve success that they wanted for me. Being kind, caring, attentive, and not getting angry, being available and caring was my strategy for gaining acceptance and love from others. Although deep down, I was never satisfied, feeling false and suspicious of the appreciation and praise of others. But I was so terrified of rejection, of not being loved, that I didn’t show who I was, for fear of not being accepted.

When someone seemed especially interesting to me, I poured all the power of my charm on them, flattering them, taking an interest in the topics that interested them, to get their full attention and be someone special to them. And if I managed to get that person to take me into account, I felt even more special. I needed reinforcement from the outside to be able to believe in myself.”

The strategic hypervigilance of the Sexual 7 in order not to feel pain and get what they want is another added difficulty for the proper development of benevolent love. It leads him to bury his feelings because, in his eagerness to plan, he can come to see the other as a rival who eventually tries to prevent him from getting away with it. So, disconnecting from his emotions is essential. If he cuts off his emotions, he stops the emotional resonance box with the other and can exercise seduction and develop his strategies coldly, without guilt or pain.

It can be deduced that an interesting way of working for this subtype is through experiences of generous giving, such as fatherhood or motherhood—a path of selfless, tender, and compassionate love that awakens the heart and opens the floodgates to experience one's own and others' emotions, leading him to discover true empathy and compassion.

“We have a beautiful son, Ricard. He drives me crazy and upsets some of my most ingrained habits (like not being able to waste time by saying nothing). I learn with him and with the different relationship that is established from his birth. Especially because of the ever-real feeling of selfless love that I feel. That makes me dare to hold the pulse with what I have committed to: family and work, fundamentally. As a father, I begin to understand mine: their parental love.”

Finally, it cannot be said that the Sexual 7 fully lives this type of love—looking up, adoration, recognition, respect, affirmative towards the divine and the mystery; this fatherly love that has to do with the neocortex and is exclusive to human beings. The origin of this insufficiency can be traced back to the relationship with the father figure. A father's deficit is observed—failure both to get closer, often due to absence, and to face him face-to-face, perhaps due to an excess of alignment with the mother.

“That was the first time I felt, or allowed myself to feel, that I recognized that I hated my father from the bottom of my gut. The relationship with my father changed after I allowed myself to admit that I had a lot of hate toward him, to take it out, to express it, even though I was ashamed of it.”

“The attachment to the figure of the father suffocated me. I realized that I could not detach myself psychologically from him; a ballast that, although I was in India, I had taken with me—the feeling that my almighty father wouldn't let me grow up.”

The Sexual 7 tends to be suggestive also in admiring love, developing a great admiration for his love reference figures, to which he positions very high and places enormous expectations. Since he generally feels more intelligent and sensitive than the people around him, he believes that he needs teachers capable of appreciating and improving his talents. His high expectations with all father figures (teachers, professors, institutions) are proportional to those he has for himself, implemented by an overflowing imagination.

The Sexual 7 tends to be suggestive even in matters of admiring love, developing a deep admiration for their love figures. They place these figures very high and set enormous expectations for them. Since they generally feel more intelligent and sensitive than the people around them, they believe they need teachers who are capable of appreciating and enhancing their talents. Their high expectations for father figures (teachers, professors, institutions) are proportional to the expectations they have for themselves, fueled by an overflowing imagination.

The grandiosity of these expectations becomes too heavy a burden and is consequently compensated by a series of disappointments. Parents and teachers are systematically labeled as inadequate, lacking, and disappointing. The result is a strong sense of frustration, misunderstanding, and, above all, mistrust. The seemingly rebellious attitude of the Sexual 7 is their way of expressing disappointment and anger toward a father figure who is always perceived as unreliable and treacherous—a father who cannot be trusted, who does not offer support, who does not instill confidence in themselves or in others, and who does not encourage them to believe in their own ideas and work.

Beneath their hidden defiance of authority lies the wound of a sad child who has never felt truly heard or recognized by their father or father figure, which hinders their growth. Making fun of authorities behind their backs is reflected in defensive self-mockery. As a result, they adopt a sarcastic stance toward life, which prevents them from taking things (or being taken) seriously. This leads them to retreat into their imagination, sometimes substituting fantasy for a reality they find uninhabitable.

Imagination distances them from admiring love, as fantasy becomes the projection horizon for their frustrated desires. The more frustrated they feel in real life, the more they lose

themselves in the madness of projects, political utopias, imaginary loves, travel plans, sports, cinema, literature, philosophy, or spiritual practices.

Their ability to express themselves and captivate others interferes with the development of admiring love. They can appear committed to a specific cause, driven by an intense initial fervor, even to the point of becoming its spokesman. However, this enthusiasm deceives both themselves and the group, hiding a commitment that is short-lived. Another difficulty with admiring love arises from their fickleness, which is rooted in the neurotic equation of maximum recognition for minimal effort. The awareness of making minimal effort leads them to project self-criticism onto authority, often viewing it with fear or feeling they’ve done something wrong when a police car or boss approaches for a conversation. Their internal judgment is projected outward, making it harder for them to respect and look up to authority with affection, as the feeling of alertness is triggered.

Beneath this fear lies a deeply hidden insecurity, barely recognized and even less discussed. The Sexual 7 covers up what they do not know—both cognitively and emotionally—where they struggle to cope. In action, they have difficulty accepting their physical limitations, clumsiness, or lack of motor skills. This insecurity is sometimes concealed by a contemptuous attitude. On the other hand, the prevalence of erotic love also complicates their ability to admire others. Their excessive focus on their own needs makes it hard for them to place themselves in the shoes of others, especially in matters of authority. They struggle to see life from the "father's" perspective, to assume their approaches, emotions, and rules.

“I feel that I am part of a coordinated international effort to change society. I truly believe it. There is a model for a fair society... You just have to imagine it, raise it, and people MUST ACCEPT IT. Sometimes I feel that my transformation process is an unacknowledged battle against others. The progress of others can hinder my own. I am searching for a method (meditation, therapy, etc.) that is easy. When problems arise, I don’t ask myself what is wrong with me, but rather that I haven’t found the right method.”