Emotional health
Thoughts on Love and Intimacy - Part 5 - Love and sex
06/05/08 23:40 Filed in: Psychology of Love
These thoughts on love and intimacy are strange things. As I looked back I realised that they charted my own recent feelings life reflecting my concerns at the time of writing. This piece has taken longer, much longer to write than any before.
Sex and emotional health
I have talked a lot about healthy loving in adults where love is based on wants and desires rather than the dependency needs of childhood. I believe that sex is different in a way in that is far more of a basic human need, something we need to maintain our mental and emotional health.
Earlier this year, I wrote erotic fiction, not because of any voyeuristic tendencies but because my own sexuality had been shut down tight in a hurtful and destructive marriage. I pushed it down in a place so deep so that I could not be hurt or damaged further, so deep in fact, that it was hard for me to recover it. So writing this fiction was my own story-telling emotional and sexual therapy. I knew how to do that even if I was not fully conscious of what I was doing at the time. It was my way of recovering myself as a fully functioning being with all my bits working. I am glad to say that all those parts of me are back and alive and well. I published the work on an amateur writers’ website. Its popularity astonished me. To-date, the first five chapters of this long, sometimes humorous, tale have had more than 130,000 reads according to my web statistics and that is impressive, almost in the class of a best selling novel these days. But looking at what I wrote now, I am deeply dissatisfied with it. I feel it is shallow and lacks the loving sensitivity and passion that I am able to feel now. More of that later.
I’ll change the tone from my usual pedantry here and just let the two protagonists of my erotic story do the talking. They are new lovers, John and Rosie; ironically they are both qualified psychotherapists! The “I” in the tale is John speaking. Here is their discussion on sex and emotional health:
“Isn’t it amazing?” she said. “How healthy good sex makes us feel.
“I feel like I’m glowing with wellbeing this morning. I feel happy, healthy and complete. I haven’t had sex for years and last night I had the best sex of my entire life. It made me feel so good…like a whole person again.”
She paused for thought.
“You know, I’m sorry to sound like the shrink-wrap I am, but Freud had it absolutely right. Living in some void of sexual repression does us no good at all. It makes us sick. If it doesn’t drive us to do crazy things then it just makes us sick at heart. So what goes wrong?” she said.
“Rosie, I’m with you on that one. It’s what I believe too but all sorts of things go wrong,” I said.
“Either we live in aloneness like you, or else we get caught up in emotional double binds and twists and turns with our loved ones that just do us harm. We lose the plot, I suppose,” I added.
“Have you lost the plot?” she asked.
“Yes, me too,” I replied. “I’ve got caught up in that world where money and material stuff controls what I do both in and out of my marriage.
“And by the way, you weren’t the only one to have the best sex of their lives last night. I did too.”
I caught Rosie’s eye and returned her smile.
“Sex is a basic human need, as basic as food, drink and sleep,” I said. “Denying it makes people crazy. It not only causes social disease, but makes for a lot of perverted and crazy people out there too. Freud was right on the mark in my view.
“So you see we’re both a pair of shrink-wraps leading lives that are opposed to what we believe, and there lies the rub!” I added.
ENDS
That was a very light-hearted way of making the point, but denying and repressing our sexuality makes us sick, it makes for a sick world too. I have a lot of issues with Freud and Wilhelm Reich, his student, but I’m with them all the way here and a healthy loving sexuality makes for a healthy person and a healthy world. We do some repression necessarily to make civilisation possible, but we have taken it far too far in my view. Repression is a dangerous and damaging thing, it makes for perverts, rapists and murderers.
But I have something very much more important to say here now.
Sex and love
So that was all very sweet, or was it really? It’s mine, and I’ll own up to it here. My erotic fiction was pathetic. It had nothing or little to do with love. It had everything to do with a man (me) finding and facing his brokenness, of looking his big life’s mistakes, errors, pain and despair square in the face.
What the story is about is two people who try and use sex to mend that brokenness, to ease their pain. It does not work! After 140 pages of this stuff and about 55,000 words I stopped writing the story since I knew it had to end in tears and that my masturbating readers were just looking for more and more sexual titillation that I had given them in large measure already.
As the pain in the story increased chapter by chapter, so the readership decreased generally by decrements of fifty per cent. Had I gone on to tell the whole truth I may not have had a readership at all.
The love that Hollywood and our consumption-based society tries to sell us has little to do with love at all and everything to do with profit. Sorry, but this time I’m going to tell it how it really is, no holds barred, so if you’re looking for fantasy here, stop reading now. Some of you who carry on may find what I have written to be very difficult and painful. It is, I know, I have felt that pain too. If you feel that “Pretty Woman” is a great love story, then you had probably better stop here to avoid disillusionment, since as an account of love I find it about as satisfying as a gastronomic feast of warm blancmange and overcooked cabbage. It appeals to me that much!
Let’s look at sex and love then. First they are not synonymous. They are not one and the same thing and may have little to do with each other. I have every belief that sex within real love may be like heaven on earth. I do not know as I have not found it yet.
A friend once said to me recently and I’ll paraphrase her words, that sex only provides temporary relief from emotional pain, that people use it to escape their feelings and that sooner or later they would find emptiness.
I need to use another word here and that is perversion. The word pervert is not too popular in our culture today but it does mean “to misdirect” or “to lead astray”. Perversion in this context means an act of that leads a person away from a psychological goal or the pursuit of true fulfilment. To quote another eminent psychologist “we can say that a perversion leads you away from the true depths of your emotional pain - and from the psychological healing that could happen if you were to work therapeutically with that pain - by distracting you with something apparently pleasurable.”
As my friend perhaps knows, the connection between sex and perversions is often found in idealised romantic or erotic love. So I’ll talk more about love here to be clear about what I’m saying.
But let’s hear this lesson again:
- As long as you pursue sexuality out of a need to be loved – as a form of something you need or want – you will be disappointed. You will be led right behind illusions straight into perversion. You will find nothing but emptiness.
- I’ll say that again a different way. As long as you try to fill your inner, psychological and spiritual emptiness with another person through romantic, erotic love or sex – you will remain unconsciously broken and empty.
Back to the pain for a moment: Without facing and healing our past pain we cannot truly love. We may need and want to do all sorts of other stuff to avoid doing this and I’ll say more about that too. But to move towards love is to perhaps to treat yourself as one might need to treat others. True healing involves seeing and knowing what is wrong and having the compassion to call it into change.
This means that you need to take responsibility for yourself and the world around you. It also means that you don’t beat yourself up mercilessly for your past mistakes. Love also means finding responsibility and compassion.
To heal means that you have to see your life for what it truly is. It is being honest about your emotional pain and all the dreadful mistakes and errors that you have made in trying to hide from your despair. Then you have to listen to that despair with compassion and tenderness and let it tell you its own whole story. Only then will your heart be transformed. Only then can you move freely towards love. My friend already knows this wisdom, running from your despair into some dark corner of your unconscious to be seduced by sex and perversion will only result in even more emptiness, despair and pain.
I know someone is going to ask me sooner or later where my earlier piece on intimacy fits into all this. Perhaps it should have been a later piece as it talks about intimate behaviour within love but not love itself.
Now this gets worse, first I want to talk about what love is not, then I’ll go on to say what I feel it is.
I’ve already said that love is not an escape route from past pain, mistakes and despair. I cannot say that enough times so here it is again. It’s the stuff of the rebound and transitional relationship where people bounce from one person to the next acting out their fantasies and their toxic emotions. Sooner or later, this person will face drown in a sea of complete desperation and lifelessness when the burden of the past becomes too much to bear.
It’s not about finding some comforting sense of absolute belonging and acceptance; that’s what we give to babies. We all have to face feelings of mortality and human isolation sooner or later and there is no escape from them. As unpleasant as it may seem eroticism is based on infantile needs to be received, accepted and satisfied. When a person feels all of these needs have been met then he or she may feel that she is “in love”. But sooner or later this intensity will be broken when the need to deal with real world pressures and difficulties breaks into a relationship.
It’s not about material wealth and the sharing of objects. Material goods and structures have nothing to do with love.
It’s not about moulding yourself, your body, your dress or appearance to meet the expectations of another’s desire.
And it’s not about receiving anything, nothing at all.
Real love is an act of giving unconditionally. To offer true love, to will the good of another, is to accept one’s own vulnerability, weakness, insignificance and humility. Love is a responsible act of will and of choice. As I wrote in “the myth of falling in love” it is not something that one falls into! You might fall into the swimming pool, but not into love. You can fall into fatal attraction, and you can fall into desperate desire but you cannot fall into love. Love requires courage as in a way it’s a sacrifice of what our modern culture believes to be valuable. It means standing up for love, leaving the pack, not as a terrorist or subversive, but with something better than what others may see in their blindness.
Love is the expression of profound emotional qualities such as patience, forbearance, belief in the other, compassion, understanding and forgiveness.
The difference between romantic or erotic love and true love is the difference between receiving and giving. A lot of us do not give generously of our hearts at all nor do we give that selflessly either. Instead we are addressing a covert desire to avoid being abandoned. This apparent generosity is not love at all; it is emotional bribery.
The hardest part is about giving. True love is about giving and nothing less. It is about giving love rather than desperately searching to be loved. It’s the only attitude that can begin to carry you through the agony of human limitation and mortality. Love that is based on giving, not receiving, is true and lasting. It is never fleeting and can never fly off into despair and hate.
It is a pity that true love is feared by most of us, and is hardly ever taught to anyone, children or adults.
Acknowledgements: My grateful acknowledgements to the late French psychologist, Jacques Lacan, whose work and ideas inspired this piece.
Sex and emotional health
I have talked a lot about healthy loving in adults where love is based on wants and desires rather than the dependency needs of childhood. I believe that sex is different in a way in that is far more of a basic human need, something we need to maintain our mental and emotional health.
Earlier this year, I wrote erotic fiction, not because of any voyeuristic tendencies but because my own sexuality had been shut down tight in a hurtful and destructive marriage. I pushed it down in a place so deep so that I could not be hurt or damaged further, so deep in fact, that it was hard for me to recover it. So writing this fiction was my own story-telling emotional and sexual therapy. I knew how to do that even if I was not fully conscious of what I was doing at the time. It was my way of recovering myself as a fully functioning being with all my bits working. I am glad to say that all those parts of me are back and alive and well. I published the work on an amateur writers’ website. Its popularity astonished me. To-date, the first five chapters of this long, sometimes humorous, tale have had more than 130,000 reads according to my web statistics and that is impressive, almost in the class of a best selling novel these days. But looking at what I wrote now, I am deeply dissatisfied with it. I feel it is shallow and lacks the loving sensitivity and passion that I am able to feel now. More of that later.
I’ll change the tone from my usual pedantry here and just let the two protagonists of my erotic story do the talking. They are new lovers, John and Rosie; ironically they are both qualified psychotherapists! The “I” in the tale is John speaking. Here is their discussion on sex and emotional health:
“Isn’t it amazing?” she said. “How healthy good sex makes us feel.
“I feel like I’m glowing with wellbeing this morning. I feel happy, healthy and complete. I haven’t had sex for years and last night I had the best sex of my entire life. It made me feel so good…like a whole person again.”
She paused for thought.
“You know, I’m sorry to sound like the shrink-wrap I am, but Freud had it absolutely right. Living in some void of sexual repression does us no good at all. It makes us sick. If it doesn’t drive us to do crazy things then it just makes us sick at heart. So what goes wrong?” she said.
“Rosie, I’m with you on that one. It’s what I believe too but all sorts of things go wrong,” I said.
“Either we live in aloneness like you, or else we get caught up in emotional double binds and twists and turns with our loved ones that just do us harm. We lose the plot, I suppose,” I added.
“Have you lost the plot?” she asked.
“Yes, me too,” I replied. “I’ve got caught up in that world where money and material stuff controls what I do both in and out of my marriage.
“And by the way, you weren’t the only one to have the best sex of their lives last night. I did too.”
I caught Rosie’s eye and returned her smile.
“Sex is a basic human need, as basic as food, drink and sleep,” I said. “Denying it makes people crazy. It not only causes social disease, but makes for a lot of perverted and crazy people out there too. Freud was right on the mark in my view.
“So you see we’re both a pair of shrink-wraps leading lives that are opposed to what we believe, and there lies the rub!” I added.
ENDS
That was a very light-hearted way of making the point, but denying and repressing our sexuality makes us sick, it makes for a sick world too. I have a lot of issues with Freud and Wilhelm Reich, his student, but I’m with them all the way here and a healthy loving sexuality makes for a healthy person and a healthy world. We do some repression necessarily to make civilisation possible, but we have taken it far too far in my view. Repression is a dangerous and damaging thing, it makes for perverts, rapists and murderers.
But I have something very much more important to say here now.
Sex and love
So that was all very sweet, or was it really? It’s mine, and I’ll own up to it here. My erotic fiction was pathetic. It had nothing or little to do with love. It had everything to do with a man (me) finding and facing his brokenness, of looking his big life’s mistakes, errors, pain and despair square in the face.
What the story is about is two people who try and use sex to mend that brokenness, to ease their pain. It does not work! After 140 pages of this stuff and about 55,000 words I stopped writing the story since I knew it had to end in tears and that my masturbating readers were just looking for more and more sexual titillation that I had given them in large measure already.
As the pain in the story increased chapter by chapter, so the readership decreased generally by decrements of fifty per cent. Had I gone on to tell the whole truth I may not have had a readership at all.
The love that Hollywood and our consumption-based society tries to sell us has little to do with love at all and everything to do with profit. Sorry, but this time I’m going to tell it how it really is, no holds barred, so if you’re looking for fantasy here, stop reading now. Some of you who carry on may find what I have written to be very difficult and painful. It is, I know, I have felt that pain too. If you feel that “Pretty Woman” is a great love story, then you had probably better stop here to avoid disillusionment, since as an account of love I find it about as satisfying as a gastronomic feast of warm blancmange and overcooked cabbage. It appeals to me that much!
Let’s look at sex and love then. First they are not synonymous. They are not one and the same thing and may have little to do with each other. I have every belief that sex within real love may be like heaven on earth. I do not know as I have not found it yet.
A friend once said to me recently and I’ll paraphrase her words, that sex only provides temporary relief from emotional pain, that people use it to escape their feelings and that sooner or later they would find emptiness.
I need to use another word here and that is perversion. The word pervert is not too popular in our culture today but it does mean “to misdirect” or “to lead astray”. Perversion in this context means an act of that leads a person away from a psychological goal or the pursuit of true fulfilment. To quote another eminent psychologist “we can say that a perversion leads you away from the true depths of your emotional pain - and from the psychological healing that could happen if you were to work therapeutically with that pain - by distracting you with something apparently pleasurable.”
As my friend perhaps knows, the connection between sex and perversions is often found in idealised romantic or erotic love. So I’ll talk more about love here to be clear about what I’m saying.
But let’s hear this lesson again:
- As long as you pursue sexuality out of a need to be loved – as a form of something you need or want – you will be disappointed. You will be led right behind illusions straight into perversion. You will find nothing but emptiness.
- I’ll say that again a different way. As long as you try to fill your inner, psychological and spiritual emptiness with another person through romantic, erotic love or sex – you will remain unconsciously broken and empty.
Back to the pain for a moment: Without facing and healing our past pain we cannot truly love. We may need and want to do all sorts of other stuff to avoid doing this and I’ll say more about that too. But to move towards love is to perhaps to treat yourself as one might need to treat others. True healing involves seeing and knowing what is wrong and having the compassion to call it into change.
This means that you need to take responsibility for yourself and the world around you. It also means that you don’t beat yourself up mercilessly for your past mistakes. Love also means finding responsibility and compassion.
To heal means that you have to see your life for what it truly is. It is being honest about your emotional pain and all the dreadful mistakes and errors that you have made in trying to hide from your despair. Then you have to listen to that despair with compassion and tenderness and let it tell you its own whole story. Only then will your heart be transformed. Only then can you move freely towards love. My friend already knows this wisdom, running from your despair into some dark corner of your unconscious to be seduced by sex and perversion will only result in even more emptiness, despair and pain.
I know someone is going to ask me sooner or later where my earlier piece on intimacy fits into all this. Perhaps it should have been a later piece as it talks about intimate behaviour within love but not love itself.
Now this gets worse, first I want to talk about what love is not, then I’ll go on to say what I feel it is.
I’ve already said that love is not an escape route from past pain, mistakes and despair. I cannot say that enough times so here it is again. It’s the stuff of the rebound and transitional relationship where people bounce from one person to the next acting out their fantasies and their toxic emotions. Sooner or later, this person will face drown in a sea of complete desperation and lifelessness when the burden of the past becomes too much to bear.
It’s not about finding some comforting sense of absolute belonging and acceptance; that’s what we give to babies. We all have to face feelings of mortality and human isolation sooner or later and there is no escape from them. As unpleasant as it may seem eroticism is based on infantile needs to be received, accepted and satisfied. When a person feels all of these needs have been met then he or she may feel that she is “in love”. But sooner or later this intensity will be broken when the need to deal with real world pressures and difficulties breaks into a relationship.
It’s not about material wealth and the sharing of objects. Material goods and structures have nothing to do with love.
It’s not about moulding yourself, your body, your dress or appearance to meet the expectations of another’s desire.
And it’s not about receiving anything, nothing at all.
Real love is an act of giving unconditionally. To offer true love, to will the good of another, is to accept one’s own vulnerability, weakness, insignificance and humility. Love is a responsible act of will and of choice. As I wrote in “the myth of falling in love” it is not something that one falls into! You might fall into the swimming pool, but not into love. You can fall into fatal attraction, and you can fall into desperate desire but you cannot fall into love. Love requires courage as in a way it’s a sacrifice of what our modern culture believes to be valuable. It means standing up for love, leaving the pack, not as a terrorist or subversive, but with something better than what others may see in their blindness.
Love is the expression of profound emotional qualities such as patience, forbearance, belief in the other, compassion, understanding and forgiveness.
The difference between romantic or erotic love and true love is the difference between receiving and giving. A lot of us do not give generously of our hearts at all nor do we give that selflessly either. Instead we are addressing a covert desire to avoid being abandoned. This apparent generosity is not love at all; it is emotional bribery.
The hardest part is about giving. True love is about giving and nothing less. It is about giving love rather than desperately searching to be loved. It’s the only attitude that can begin to carry you through the agony of human limitation and mortality. Love that is based on giving, not receiving, is true and lasting. It is never fleeting and can never fly off into despair and hate.
It is a pity that true love is feared by most of us, and is hardly ever taught to anyone, children or adults.
Acknowledgements: My grateful acknowledgements to the late French psychologist, Jacques Lacan, whose work and ideas inspired this piece.
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