Charged to steal your girdle... a gift from your sire, my hated brother Ares...
But once I saw your face...and you saw mine...
The only thought we gave to garments...
Was how fast we could remove them."
Sometimes, love (or simple lust) is more than a couple can take. No matter how important what they are doing was, how fraught with implications their relationship is, or how dangerous the location is, the moment they get alone, they begin to take off their clothes and embrace each other. It may lead to Sex in a Shared Room. All thought of consequences are forgotten: they are Overcome with Desire beyond all reason.
While this may seem like a lead-in to a porn film (and often is), in both Real Life and most fiction the consequences won't stay forgotten for very long. Depending on the circumstances, regret is the very least of the problems that are likely to result. If they are co-workers on the job, they may get caught and lose their jobs. If they are in a dangerous location, they could get hurt, or even set off a destructive sequence of events with larger effects. And then there are personal consequences: damaged friendships, pregnancy, STDs, etc. All in all, it would have been better to keep it in your pants, at least until you were in a more suitable location.
The consequences may or may not come to pass, but they are potentially there, and the lack of consideration for them, and/or the belated realization of them, is the key factor in the trope; the existence of the risks has to be at least a side plot or discussed at some point for it to count. Expect a third character to demand that the two Get a Room!.
Can become Can't Get Away with Nuthin' when applied Anviliciously, and/or repeatedly with dire results each time, and is sometimes used this way in Very Special Episodes and After School Specials.
A sister trope of both Making Love in All the Wrong Places (where the locale is problematic, though not necessarily due to risks or potential consequences) and Sex Starts, Story Stops, but whereas Sex Starts, Story Stops diverts attention from the plot, this trope becomes a driver of it. Looking for Love in All the Wrong Places, Love Is in the Air, or a Love Potion can all lead to it, and it is a common behavior for Insatiable Newlyweds (or Make-Out Kids in less explicit stories). Can result in an oblivious form of Coitus Uninterruptus if they fail to notice an urgent situation arising (aside from the one in their pants, that is), which may in turn lead to Sex Signals Death for one or more people, though not necessarily the ones making out. See also, Lust Makes You Dumb, which this trope can overlap with. Also see Mate or Die, if the consequences of not satiating the desire would prove fatal.
Examples
- The Incredible Hercules: In the Marvel version of Hercules' Ninth Labor, he snuck into the Amazon's domain and into the tent of Queen Hippolyta to steal her girdle and complete the labor. However, she woke up during the attempt and pulled a knife on him. However, they both fell victim to Love at First Sight and began having sex right then and there. This pissed off Hera, who then disguised herself as an Amazon and falsely raised the alarm that Hercules was assaulting the queen, forcing him to run away with the girdle and Hippolyta to become a broken-hearted Woman Scorned.
- Spider-Man and Silk are revealed to have very strong "spider pheromones" which affect the two of them the strongest since they were both bitten by the same spider. These pheromones are so strong that the two can't stop making out whenever they're near one another, regardless of what the situation is.
- This old joke uses it for both the setup and the punchline: "An engaged couple wants to be married in a particular church, but the preacher says he'll officiate and let them use his building only if they refrain from sleeping together until marriage and he has to do their premarital counseling. With a few weeks to go, in the counseling session he asks them how the abstinence is going and the man says "Well, last week at dinner she dropped her fork on the ground, and when she bent over to pick it up, the view I received overcame me and I swept all the dishes off the table and we made love right then and there." "Well then", says the preacher "you cannot get married at my church now." "I figured as much", says the woman, "we aren't allowed back at that restaurant either."
- In Fatal Instinct, Ned breaks into Lana's house in a parody of a similar scene from Body Heat where the male protagonist, driven mad with lust for the Femme Fatale, breaks down a door to consummate their affair. Turns out he just forgot his car keys.
- The "bodice-ripper" genre of romance novels are so called because their covers feature a man and woman so eager to get to the main event that he is literally tearing her clothes off.
- Atonement: Robbie and Cecelia having sex against the wall of the library. While they probably couldn't have foreseen all the suffering this eventually caused, they should have realized the possibility of someone, such as Cecelia's younger sister, walking in on them.
- A recurring trope in The Howling (1977):
- Inez - a former nun - and the novitiate she slept with experienced this; one moment the novitiate was crying in Inez' room and Inez was consoling her, the next they were embracing and kissing and one thing led to another. The way Inez describes the encounter implies she'd been suppressing her sexuality for a long time (both because of her being a nun and the general societal taboo against homosexuality), but their close proximity and emotional intimacy in an enclosed, private space brought the feelings to the forefront. They were both forced to leave the convent when they were discovered.
- Roy finds himself unable to resist Marcia; while searching for any sign of the wolf his wife Karyn shot in the woods, he encounters Marcia and they have sex right there and then. Later, when Roy goes to Marcia's shop to tell her that he and Karyn are intending to leave town and so they'll probably never see each other again, he ends up having sex with her for hours. Roy repeatedly tells himself that it's wrong to cheat on his wife, but he finds Marcia so desirable he can't stop himself. This proves to be his undoing, as Marcia ends up turning him into a werewolf so he can stay with her.
- The Magicians: During the Training from Hell that is the fourth year at Brakebills, the students are given a break from mind-numbing exercises conducted in single rooms with no socialization or even speech allowed, instead being given a fun practical lesson on how to transform into animals. Unfortunately, it's also designed to humiliate the students by allowing them to experience the logical results of combining animal instincts with several months without sex, and the young magicians all end up screwing each other senseless in the form of arctic foxes. Afterwards, the students gladly return to social restrictions rather than make eye contact with their former romantic partners... all except for Quentin and Alice, who actually find themselves inspired to start a relationship.
- Portals Of Infinity: In Book Two (The God Game), the team of Champions are portal-hopping through various worlds. These worlds all work through different rules and laws of nature which affect the Champions by turning them into creatures native to that world, and the changes are often alarmingly unpredictable. After passing into one such world, the Champions all suddenly descend into a feverish orgy where they all have sex with each other over and over and over again. and it's only after they've become physically exhausted that they finally gain enough self-control to turn back into their normal forms that they realize they'd been having sex for several days at that point, and that the world they're traversing turned the men into satyrs and the women into nymphs with an insatiable urge to mate with each other. They literally came dangerously close to killing themselves through sex.
- Skippy Dies: Within fifteen minutes of having a drink, Aurelie and Howard are so eager to sleep with each other that they have sex on a classroom desk, even though they're supposed to be supervising the Halloween Hop and are both in relationships...
- A Song of Ice and Fire: There are several moments when Jaime and Cersei go at it regardless of where they are or what they're doing. Sometimes even prefaced by an exchange of "Someone will see us" — "I don't care."
- Happens twice in Angel. The first time is in "Waiting in the Wings", Angel and Cordy are possessed by the spirits of ballet performers. They're interrupted before they can get past second base, but it leaves Angel in an uncomfortable position. The second time is in "Life of the Party" when an odd bit of phlebotinum causes Angel and Eve to have sex over and over and over until the phlebotinum is undone.
- Buffy the Vampire Slayer:
- This was the key plot point in the second season, as Angel's Face–Heel Turn was the direct result of him and Buffy making love (due to the particular curse Angel was under, him finding perfect happiness would cause him to lose his soul again).
- This leads to a Destructive Romance with Spike when Buffy gives in to her lust for him only to feel guilty in the morning and leave, only to end up in bed again whenever she's feeling down.
- In the Frasier episode "The Adventures of Bad Boy and Dirty Girl", Frasier's new boss comes into the studio to see him about the previous time their Belligerent Sexual Tension turned into sex (in her office). It happens again, and they go at it there in the studio, while Frasier's show is on the air.
- NCIS: Agent Lee would deliver something to Palmer and they would promptly sneak into a closet or something similar. While it never actually endangers them, it certainly could have, and everyone knew what they were up to anyway.
- In the Red Dwarf episode "Psirens", Lister immediately recognizes that "Pete Tranter's sister" is really a psiren in disguise, but he ultimately can't resist his lust for Pete Tranter's sister and gives in to the psiren's charms. If another psiren (disguised as Kryten) hadn't intervened to kill the first one and snapped Lister out of the illusion, Lister would be dead.
- Several of the stories recounted in Sex Sent Me to the E.R. involved two lovers losing their self-control in ways that endangered their health.
- In Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, Lwaxana Troi suffers Power Incontinence as part of a disease that affects "mature" Betazoids, causing her sexual desire for Odo to spread throughout the ship and awaken any latent sexual interests it might find. Dr. Bashir and Major Kira become so stricken that they barely manage to stay upright.
- Star Trek: Voyager: One episode had Tom Paris and B'lanna Torres seemingly unable to keep their hands off each other whenever they were in close proximity. Though they're not shown having sex onscreen, their actions do land them in hot water when they're caught by superiors. Later it turns out that a group of alien scientists had infiltrated the ship and were secretly conducting experiments on the crew. They chalk it up to aliens' interference since they never show such behavior again, even after they're married.
- The trope is present in its mildest form in a flashback to the Ramona and Jung's first time in Sticky Dilly Buns, but the crucial consequences turn out to have been comprehensively averted. The sudden passion kicked in in the privacy of Ramona's own home, and Jung, having anticipated the possibility, was well prepared; he'd been studying The Joy of Sex, and managed to get a condom on without Ramona even noticing. In any case, they subsequently realized that it wasn't required, as they were both virgins and Ramona, being intersex, is infertile.
- Darwin Awards
- At least one story involved a couple doing it in the middle of the road at night. No prizes for guessing how that one ended.
- Ditto for the numerous couples who fell off of a roof which they were getting intimate on top of.
- And the couple who decided to join the Mile-High Club — in the plane they were supposed to be flying.
- Daria: In the episode "Dye Dye My Darling", Daria is in a car with Tom (her best friend's boyfriend) when their Belligerent Sexual Tension, which had been building all season, overcomes them and they start kissing passionately. They don't do anything more than kiss, but repercussions affect the rest of the series.
