When you expose your feeling to someone who doesn’t love you back the way you want, love hurts and it sucks. But that doesn’t mean you have to give up having great sex, especially if you can separate love from sex. Think of them as light and dark chocolate, while one has more intense flavor than the other they both taste good together or apart.

In the game of love and sex, you risk getting hurt when you reveal your emotional and sexual vulnerabilities. But if you don’t risk getting hurt, you won’t learn how to give and receive true love or sexual intimacy.  So here are some steps to help you fall in love and have great sex.

Start by treating yourself as if you are madly in love with you. That means valuing and pleasuring yourself,  rewarding and accepting yourself, validating and loving yourself unconditionally. Then losing love won’t hurt as much and you can learn to grow from all of your experiences.

Next, be willing to let someone go when the bad outweighs the good. In other words, if you’re not getting the attention, appreciation, respect or sexual satisfaction that you need to make you happy, it’s time to say “Bye Bye.”

On the other hand, if you have great sexual chemistry with someone who knows how to turn you on, but doesn’t fulfill your emotional needs, don’t deprive yourself of mind-blowing orgasms. There’s no rule that says you have to be in love to have great sex or that having great sex will destroy the possibility of having true love.

The greatest irony of having sex without love or love without sex is that most people focus on what is missing as opposed to holding on to what they have. Love won’t hurt when your heart is filled with gratitude and you feel complete as a person with or without a partner.