Trees, buildings, pieces of furniture, musical instruments, cars. The list is long when it comes to people directing their sexual desire towards an object. The Swede Eija-Riitta Eklöf married the Berlin Wall in 1979 and thus laid the foundation for all objectophiles or object-sexuals, as they call themselves. After her marriage, the Swede appropriately called herself Eklöf-Berlinmuren. So the wall is already taken. But that's only important for all monogamous people. Polyamorous people will certainly be happy to share the wall. But joking aside. What is behind it when people have a relationship with an inanimate object?

Perverse or completely normal?

Perversion? Fetish? Sexologist Volkmar Sigusch, who has an answer to pretty much everything, also addresses this question. In his opinion, love for objects is not a fetish. He wonders whether it could be seen as "something (perhaps excessively) normal". And there are a lot of people who develop special feelings for objects:

1. think of how lovingly and caringly many a car owner washes their car, running a wet sponge over the paintwork and then devotedly polishing it. Many a car is given more attention than their partner. Caught out?

2 And what about the more or less lifelike rubber dolls? There seems to be a growing number of mostly male relationship partners who share their lives with an artificial replica of a woman. There was also an article about an interview in which the voices of the interviewees had to be lowered so as not to disturb the doll's nap.

3. what about the man who falls in love with an artificial intelligence in the movie Ex Machina? Every little robot seems human as soon as we give it arms and eyes.

4 And what about shoes? And I'm not talking about men who get starry-eyed when they see women's feet in high heels. No, I'm talking about the women who have piles of shoe boxes or shelves that display their shoes like paintings. The women who lovingly say goodbye to their collection every night before they go to bed.

I, too, once found a construction crane erotic. It was huge, black, frosted and had something very masculine about it in my eyes when it was erected in front of my kitchen window in the morning for its day's work. In the evening, it was lowered again and had something of a sleeping dinosaur about it. Yes, I have a very strong imagination, I know. And nobody could understand that.

We can eroticize anything

But does that make me an objectophile? No. We actually have the power to eroticize anything and everything if we want to. Objects. And even our partner, whom we think we no longer find attractive. Ultimately, it's in our own hands. It's a matter of the mind. Most people are not interested in objects. They prefer to hold something alive in their arms. Me too. Nevertheless, the boundaries are blurred, as I tried to illustrate with the examples.

Where is the boundary?

Nobody knows where this object-centeredness comes from. It simply hasn't been researched yet. But where do you draw the line? When is it "normal" and when is it no longer? Perhaps we need to broaden our concept of sexuality. In sexology, it's no longer just about sex when we talk about sexuality. Most of the time, when we hear the word "sexual", we still think of practiced sex.

But that's not the point at all. It's more about who we turn to in our need for love. Homosexuals, heterosexuals, sapiosexuals, we can all love without fumbling and orgasm. To be caring, to be tender, to cuddle, to kiss: You can also do that with a Boeing, a rubber doll or a pair of shoes. Being proud to hold the object of desire in your arms. Some people continue to set the table for two and hold conversations years after the death of their partner. Others breathe personality into their doll. In a world in which we have seen almost everything, we are literally looking for special features. And completely overlook the fact that we are not that much different.

Anja Drews - qualified sex educator for ORION