I was just reading a show recap of Oprah about Wives Who Don’t Want Sex. Don’t ask. I like how they talk about how this is a problem that ruins marriages and lives. Your whole life will be ruined because you lose your sex drive, even more so than by hitting a kid with a car, by letting your baby drown in the bathtub or by shooting a cashier in the face in the middle of an armed robbery. I hate how the media tries to freak people out. I did like how the site mentions how current society makes sex almost a strictly physical thing, with the widespread promotion of things like Viagra. It’s another way that Western Medicine misses the point and only deals with surface issues.
So what is sex and does it change over the course of a person’s life? I don’t mean the maturity swing where one settles in and prefers a steady, monogamous partner versus casual sex with strangers. I mean, how you view it and your relationship to the connection, another person and yourself.
Can it be, the more content you are, the less you want? Sex reminds me of how ephemeral things are. You have a spiritual connection with someone, it transcends time, space and boundaries. You have sex with someone, it escalates to a desired peak and then it’s gone, and you are left thinking, “I was so caught up with chasing something, I totally lost track of the present. And it all seems a bit…disappointing when you come back and look at it.” Does closeness only come by way of sex? I feel like sex shows me why it’s not the answer to intimacy. You sleep with someone and afterwards, it’s the emotional/spiritual bond that brings the feeling of closeness, not having done an act that leads directly to it. It’s like people who think that once they’ve made a lot of money, they’ll be fulfilled, but when they’ve finally amassed a fortune, they realize they still feel the same and have to find other, deeper ways to attain personal fulfillment. I’m usually disappointed with sex in terms of looking for what I love, deep intimacy, connection and spiritual closeness. My disappointment is no fault of my partner, but I think the ideal partner has to approach intimacy the same way, and to also value the same type of deep spiritual connection that I desire and need.
I think one night stands are fine for physical exploration. But if I’m looking for a relationship, then sex loses its importance and appeal to me because I’m looking for something that transcends sex, a greater high, so by searching for it through sex is disappointing and blatantly unfulfilling. It actually has the power to make me unhappy in a relationship. Or perhaps it’s not sex itself, but the type of sex it is. It’s almost like having a conversation–if you’re talking with someone who doesn’t “get” you, your ideas where you come from, so that you find yourself having very surface conversations, you are kind of aware of how unfulfilling the conversation is. It’s probably not a big deal because it’s just a conversation and there are probably other people you can go for stimulating conversation at a level that fulfills you.
But in a monogamous relationship, you only get to sleep with one person. If each person looks for something different out of sex, ie one person looks for spiritual connection while another looks for physical pleasure, it’s like having a conversation where two people are talking to each other, connecting to some degree, but not to the degree where both are on the same page and getting what they need out of it. And you can’t go and say, I sleep with different people and get something different out of each relationship so overall, I have my needs met. Therefore, that one person has to fulfill you in the way that you need, otherwise, perhaps this person isn’t a good match for you.
So often it’s not about good or bad people. It’s just about needs and compatibility. When I cast a project, I see a lot of amazing actors and actresses and I wish I could use them. But sometimes it’s about the right look, about how well they fit into that role, if they slip into it like a second skin, a second soul.
Isn’t that process how we find a partner though? We audition people for a role we have in mind where we have an idea of who the character is, and then we see how well they “fit” into that role where we can truly see them as an integrated component in our universe? It’s about believing, where we can believe that this piece of the puzzle was always part of the puzzle all along, even if it wasn’t always in the box. I don’t think things always fit perfectly with people and you work at it, but I feel like the underlying feeling, is that no matter what, you can still believe that this “actor” IS truly the character who owns this role.
Or maybe it all comes down to fear. And how the hell do we untangle that big ball of enormous emotional mess if we can’t even figure out if it has a beginning or an end?