What are we searching for? – young college students struggling for money struggling for good grades, simultaneously searching for a sports bar and a sex partner on the weekends and looking toward the future like it’s a golden key. When we get that key, what will it open?

Will we be successful, wealthy, respected? Are those things that everyone wants? Quite possibly. But underneath it all, humans want love.

This isn’t a novel statement Oprah informs us of it at least three times a week. Love: a warm body to lay next to, the smell of his or her shampoo, someone who gets us, and can lift weight from our heavy heart. But if Oprah and I are right and everyone wants love, people certainly go about it in a strange way.

Think of all the things you’ve used as temporary love: meaningless sex, one night stands, abusive or addictive relationships, obsessions, drugs and alcohol. It leaves me questioning whether or not we want love, sex, or we’re just trying to fill a void inside ourselves. Because these questions would not stop burning in my mind, I did an experiment.

Once I became sexually active I had sex to have sex because it was sex not because it was an experience that meant anything deeper than skin on skin.

I’d have sex because after half a bottle of vodka and two hours of rambling conversation regarding our tortured childhoods, you’ve got to do something to lighten the mood. I rarely asked myself if this was what I truly wanted, or who I truly wanted. Half the time I’d have to ask myself if I even knew this dude’s name.

Sex for me was a filler, a cigarette, a drunken cry for attention at times. As a women I’d laugh and call myself a slut, as if it were cute, as if I thought it was funny, like I was some sex-pert that made all the boys go wild. I’ve had bathroom romps in New York City VIP clubs with some fine male model/actors, me dressed up like Little Kim in wigs and six inch heels. Stories like that get you street cred, some recognition, some respect, or so I thought. I’d laugh over cocktails, pretend I was Samantha Jones from Sex and the City.

But on the nights that I went home to my bed alone I’d pray not to have my conscience kick in, not to admit to myself what I knew I was doing: ignoring my heart, my soul and my mind. I had to realize that I threw integrity out the window years ago! And my God – for what? For men who don’t remember me, who don’t know me beyond my breasts, who’d rather shove a sock in my mouth than listen to me speak? I could no longer handle one night stands. I wanted to be loved.

Giving a decent blow job doesn’t guarantee love, it only guarantees drunken phone calls at 2 AM. (And by the way if a man only calls you after 11PM, don’t for a second think it’s for anything but booty, because it ain’t. Actually, I can’t lie, I’ve been the one making those calls.)

For eleven months I gave up meaningless sex and one night stands, which meant I gave up sex completely. It was difficult for certain, but I listened to my heart and to the woman inside who wanted respect and admiration.

I told men “no, sorry, I’m looking for love.” Men are shocked (and strangely challenged) to hear that; see how fast some of them become little slugs begging you to “not look for love for just one night”, or to give them “an early birthday present.”

Over the course of that year I learned what I was looking for in both men and sex. I met a man and fell in love with him. I I wasn’t acting like some porn star and throwing him up against a wall, but allowing real chemistry to flow. And that turns people on more than any costume ever could. I felt like a virgin again. It was well worth the wait. Sometimes you just have to look inside yourself, because we aren’t all porn stars or Paris Hilton, our bodies dangling like carrots before men, detached from our minds – sex is heart and soul and spirit – we are far more than the sum of our parts. So, I say wait on sex and make Love.