The Lust of the Soul

I'm sorry I haven't been able to write about anything more interesting this month, but I'm not exactly Don Juan and I have a hard time writing about things that don't feel like they come from myself, if you know what I mean. So with this post I hope to try to summarize my own particular views on this month's topic. Because of the vastness of the topic and my own lack of planning, this post will probably be pretty scatterbrained and stream of consciousness. So bear with me, please. Also, I can't help but display my own particular brand of neuroses, so I do not pretend to write for everyone, but only from what I know from my own experience.

The key thing I want to tackle in this post, and what I've discussed briefly elsewhere, is the dynamic of strength and weakness, of power, that forms the basis of sexual relationships and the sex drive itself in humans. Of course sex feels great (most of the time) physically, but I want to tackle some of the deeper psychological insecurities and needs that come along with this unrelenting push to copulate before death. This sounds a bit cliched (and out-of-date) to say, but from what I've seen, sex and (fear of) death are the two strongest drives in our lives. The urge for creative output is also there, but I do not think it is as strong as these two. And any sense of "love" is mostly brought back to sexuality, or at least familial love, which is rooted in sexual relations. Perhaps there are some other ones I'm missing, and I'd be curious to see what others have to say. Because sex plays such a strong role in our consciousnesses, there are a host of issues that attach themselves to this ineffable need. I can only write about these issues from how I experience them in myself and others, because this is not a detailed study, but I will do my best.

No matter the transcendent nature of love (I'm not sure I'm ready to tackle that one at this point of my life), it must be admitted that a large part of the dynamics of sexual relationships are based on a cat-and-mouse game of strengths and weaknesses, of attractiveness and social skills and non-verbal signals. There is the notion that there is one person out there for us, and that we will one day meet them, but I think this is a romantic fantasy that even the most sappy among us don't really believe in. In a world approaching seven billion people, it seems pretty impossible that there is only one other person for us out there. It is more likely that there are a bunch of people (what size this group is, I do not know) out there who could mesh perfectly well with our own personalities. I feel like there is a sense of competition when it comes to relationships. We always want someone who is better-looking, richer, has a better job, better personality, etc. This is where the insecurity and the dynamics of strength and weakness come into play first. No matter how much we wish to talk about the beauty of our inner natures, sexual attractiveness plays a very large role in everyday life. It starts at a very young age, and if you feel that you were unattractive at a young age, it will affect your life somehow (in a multitude of ways that I cannot begin to summarize here). The same goes if you felt you were attractive. These factors all carry into adulthood. I see sexual attractiveness and competition as the root of so many things in life. Wanting a good job, dressing nicely, working out, having expensive possessions, eating at the right restaurants--the list is endless. There may be other purposes for many of these things, but at their base, I see sexual competition. It's always there, lurking under the surface sometimes, sometimes splashing over the top of the rim.

It is this constant quest to better oneself--to always appear attractive to the opposite (or same) sex--that fuels a large part of our lives. It also creates insecurity and a sense of masking who we truly are. Even when one is not single and is in a relationship, I feel that the dynamics of strength and weakness are present. Men and women are always trying to gain the upper hand, to not have their hearts broken. If on the other hand you are too satisfied and do not try anymore, complacency leads to loss of sexual attraction that can hurt the relationship. You always have to be on your game, and at least in my own relationships there was always a seesaw sense of one person being in power, being strong, while the other one is the needy, the weak one. This probably is not a very healthy view--and I do not view it as the ideal--but I do think that it is fairly common. The weak person always tries to deny their neediness, but it always comes out. The strong person acts disinterested (usually because they actually are disinterested, but I guess sometimes not), exudes confidence with members of the opposite (or same) sex, and very rarely is the footing equal in relationships. Of course that is ideal, but it's an almost impossible tightrope to walk. I can't speak for anyone else, but I have a very hard time in a relationship not longing for things I cannot have. I wonder if this ever goes away. I guess that is the hard part about relationships. You really have to put the work in, and I think ultimately being faithful and loving is a lot of work, but I believe it is worthwhile in the long run, and I look with envy on those who can make it work. Props to you guys.

Now, when you are single, the dynamics of sex are much more visible. I don't have much experience in the dating world, so I'm sure someone who does could write a whole lot more about these things, but I will do my best. What I find interesting (and depressing?) is the idea of people having "leagues" in which they can date. For instance, a lot of guys will say or think (if they are trying to be too confident to say it), "That girl is out of my league." We can only date people within our own sphere of perceived attractiveness. Most girls I know will say, "I don't think any guys are out of my league" or something similar--I've never heard girls phrase this the same way as guys. Do they actually believe this? Does a "plain" girl really think she can get an ideal guy? I'm not sure. They will have to answer this. Maybe woman really do have more confidence in terms of landing a guy, but certainly they fall into equal insecurity and uncertainty when it comes to keeping a guy. As I've stated elsewhere (and many times), the common narrative I see at play is this: guy is attracted to girl; guy goes after girl; guy grows attached to the girl and becomes needy; eventually they sleep together; indefinite amount of time passes (sometimes this is after only one fuck); girl gets increasingly attached to a guy; guy grows disinterested and bored; couple breaks up; sometimes the guy grows desperate for what he's lost and wants her back; girl may or may not go through an extended cycle of getting back together and breaking up with guy. There are many variations to this, of course, and this is highly simplified (oh noez, Edward can't write a blog post expressing all points of view at once!), but I think it's fair to say that men grow attached faster, and with women it takes a certain amount of time to grow attached. I wonder why this is.

But anyways, there is always a sense of wanting to date a person who is "better." If you're a guy, more often than not, this means she is sexually attractive or at least has a personality that you somehow deem attractive. I'm not sure what exactly women look for the most in men...surely it varies. And it does for men of course, too. I'm just trying to say that there is some kind of competition going on (both with ourselves and with others)--we want the best we can get. We also want to be the best we can be to impress those we are going after. I do think this leads to a sense of masking our true feelings a lot. Guys are constantly told that the one thing girls look for in a guy is confidence. So we deny how we really feel to put on an air of confidence. This denial is different for every guy, and some probably fail at this altogether, but I think as a guy there is a strong pressure to be confident. I'm not denying the importance of this, since it's probably good to be confident in all areas of your life, not just romantically, but at the same time, there is this sense of hiding, of denying, what we really are to put on a front to get someone else in bed. Take that as you will. It's all part of the game. And as much as we try to romanticize the idea of love, it really is a big game. I wrote about this earlier on the blog, but I really like Lennon's lyric in the Beatles song "I'm a Loser": "She was a girl in a million, my friend/I should have known she would win in the end," because it has that cynical reality to it that it is a game of winning or losing. I would say I'm a pretty big romantic at heart, but I also have that sense of melancholic longing for a world that doesn't really exist. And that world is a world where none of the insecurities and strengths and weaknesses and fears I discussed above don't actually exist. But they do. And that's life.

What does any of this mean? I guess nothing much really. I just want to point out that what we see in the media, what we boast about to our friends, the mask we put on--that isn't our inner subjective reality. There is a lot of fear there, a lot of doubt, and a lot of...awkwardness? Men obsess over their penis size to a degree I'm sure most would never let onto. Women of course worry about their bodies too. We all worry about our sexual performance. We fear that girls are faking their orgasms, that we are not as good a lover as her ex, that our dicks aren't as big. We worry that our partner is thinking about someone else in bed with us. Even if we don't do all these things all the time, we have some little seeds of this poison in our veins. Few things cause quite the amount of mental expenditure and irrationality as sex and its various facets. The only reason I can think of why that is is that the biological necessity of it creates such a strong impulse inside of us that it overtakes almost all other thoughts (beside basic ones like life or death) in importance. And as much as we all try to act like we are above its basic banalities, I think it's fair to say that most of us are not.

--Edward