In which there’s an incoherent brain dump on love, desire, and the mind.

I am surrounded by human beings who appear to be quite infatuated with romantic love and/or the frequency and quality of sexual intercourse they are (or aren’t) experiencing.

As I’m currently seeking neither romantic love nor sex, I end up watching behaviours and parsing sentences and thinking thoughts I often can’t voice because they’d be tangential or inappropriate, but here are some of the observations I’ve been mulling over:

Romantic love hurts you because it’s false, not because you’re unworthy of it.

I’ve wasted a lot of time recovering from gut-wrenching break-ups, and I’ve seen a lot of friends waste a lot of time grappling with intense emotional and psychological pain due to failed romantic entanglements.

Romantic love isn’t a universal human experience; it was invented in or near the 12th century. Before that, we didn’t have a way to think about it or express it, so it effectively didn’t exist. People knew about love and sex and partnership and family and raising offspring together, of course, but they didn’t have some kind of nebulous, Disney-fueled desire to meet a prince or princess and live happily ever after, nor did they experience the crushing pain of disappointment and self-doubt associated with failing to achieve or maintain it.

Marriages based exclusively on the concept of romantic love fail, because one cannot achieve any kind of intimacy with an objectified entity. Romantic infatuation is by definition false love, and false loves will die rather than grow because objectification isn’t love.

Note that sexual attraction, companionship, and mate-selection do not equal “romantic love.” They are separate entities and understanding that distinction is immensely useful in the pursuit of psychological balance.

You don’t “deserve” a “satisfying sex life”; that’s just advertising.

Have you read the covers of Cosmo or Men’s Health lately? Ye gods.

Prior to the 1950’s, people didn’t think that an active, athletic, intimate, and/or kinky sex life was part of their birthright. (Some people were doing it, of course, but only because they cared enough to put forth the effort required: it wasn’t yet the universal baseline it has become since the sexual revolution.) Couples didn’t have Masters and Johnson’s research figures with which to compare their own frequency of coitus. Fringe kinks weren’t commonly discussed by the public–one could live an entire lifetime without overhearing a conversation about fisting at the grocery. It wasn’t considered abnormal for a person not to pursue sexual gratification; recoiling from strange, difficult-to-understand, or unusual sex acts wasn’t looked down upon as prudish or frigid. People knew about sex and naturally they liked it, but they weren’t constantly bombarded with porn and ED ads and HBO series about sex addicts. Sex for non-procreational reasons was an aspect of the human condition, but not the point of it, nor was identity so closely tied to it.

Sure sex can be fun, and sure it can reduce your stress level, but so can checking off the last item on your to-do list, or exercising, or taking a nap. There’s nothing wrong with sex, but there’s nothing profoundly right with it either. Being sex-positive is not the same thing as abdicating other aspects of life to the act of fucking.

In other words, it’s not that important. Nobody promised you earth-shattering sex; you only think you’re missing out on it because your culture has invented this alleged “right,” just as it invented the notion of romantic love. If you didn’t expect to find a “deeply rewarding” sex life, you wouldn’t be disappointed that you haven’t got one.

“Sex is about intimacy.”

Bwahahaha! Where’d you read that, son?

Libido is purely subjective and no matter how interesting it is to you, your libido ain’t never gonna find the cure to cancer. It’s an internal state similar to hunger or fatigue: it has nothing to do with anybody else. Just as two people eating together are having wholly separate internal experiences, so are two (or more) people having sex together.

Intimacy is about intimacy. Sex is about sex. (If you’ve ever observed canines breeding, you know sex isn’t inherently intimate.) Feelings of intimacy during sex are not due to the sex, but to higher human cognitive/emotional states like trust, intellectual understanding, and shared goals. Sex is the carrier of intimacy, not the cause, and before the notion of romantic love we were much less likely to conflate the two.

Watch your mind.

I think it’s extremely important to examine the ideas of one’s culture to see if the “things that everyone knows” are true. For instance, “everyone knows” that dietary fat is unhealthy, and yet research shows that dietary fat is not implicated in weight gain or heart disease or anything else it has been accused of. “Everyone knows” from nearly their first moment of consciousness that they’re meant for a Great Love, and yet who among us has known it? Few.

The lack, pursuit, acquisition, and loss of romantic love and sexual intimacy causes an immense amount of turmoil in our lives. The longing, pain, self-doubt, feelings of unworthiness, heartbreak, hatred, rage, and loss can be debilitating: this has to be examined.

Perhaps our error is confusing the Great Love we all know we were born to experience with our modern notions of romantic love and mind-blowing sex? I have yet to meet a person who isn’t loved; but I’ve met so many who mourn the lack of a relationship matching the Disney standard. Could the problem be there? Are we defining love improperly?

We really need to watch our thinking if we want to escape unhappiness; we need to look at the beliefs of our cultures and our times, and we need to pay close attention to language and meaning. It seems to me that bemoaning the lack of something – romantic love, passionate sex, or even satisfying low-fat whipping cream – is an endless source of suffering.

In order to escape, one must ask uncomfortable questions: what is romantic love and why do I want it? Does it even exist? Can I produce a clear definition of it? Is my belief in the importance of sexual expression really my own, or a habit of my culture’s shared beliefs? (Do I trust the intentions of the authority that wants me to buy turkey bacon or that damned blue water they call fat-free milk?!)

After a horrific break-up, you feel fine during the few moments after you wake; it isn’t until you remember that your heart is broken that it begins to hurt again. In other words: your mind is the agency causing your suffering, but it is also the only tool you have to make such suffering stop. Use it! Examine your expectations! Think. Be skeptical. Follow your desires back to their origins and question them endlessly. You don’t have to want what you’re told to want; you don’t have to hurt for failing to achieve something that might not even exist; you don’t have to carry a burden of disappointment or self-doubt.

Observe! Think! Question! But above all, don’t become jaded. Believe in the notion that you are meant for a Great Love (because I think – due to its universality – that that one’s really important). It’s just that your definition of Great Love may expand a little, during your closely-examined pursuit of it, and that’s where the Disney-style magic comes in: there’s no prince/ss, but there is your endless capacity for ever-greater and more loving understanding.