LOVE: THE STORY OF LOVE

What would it say about me if I was willing to marry someone who I know is in love with someone else? It would say that I don’t think that I deserve to have the real thing. And that’s not good enough for me—not anymore. I can’t settle for marrying someone who thinks of me as a second choice. Someone who’s on the rebound. Someone who, I’m always wondering if they’re thinking about another man when they’re making love to me. If every time you close your eyes, you’re fantasizing about the other guy. I just don’t think I deserve that. I’m a smart, strong, attractive man,and I deserve to be with a woman who thinks of me as her first choice. I wanna be with a woman who loves me as much as I love her. A woman who only wants me. And if I can’t have that, I would rather be single. I would rather spend the rest of my life alone. And I’ll be happier. Because I’ll know that I didn’t settle for less than I deserve.



Cheek by cheek on our pillows, we promised to love until green mountains fall,and iron floats on the river,and the Yellow River itself runs dry;to love until Orion rises in the day and the north star wanders south. We promised undying love until the sun at midnight burns the sky.

In the loving calm of your arms: “the gesture of the amorous embrace seems to fulfill, for a time, the subject’s dream of total union with the loved being”—Besides intercourse, there is that other embrace, which is a motionless cradling: we are enchanted, bewitched; we are in the realm of sleep, without sleeping; everything is suspended: time, law, prohibition; nothing is exhausted, nothing is wanted; all desires are abolished for they seem definitively fulfilled.

We are all a little weird and life’s a little weird, and when we find someone whose weirdness is compatible with ours, we join up with them and fall in mutual weirdness and call it love. You would not believe it; I sat at the table with my family, with my father saying grace, then solemnly passing the bowls of corn, of beans, the heavy platter of turkey and dressing. I filled my plate and lifted my fork to my mouth, but no matter what I put in, it wasn't what I tasted, not the creamed potatoes, not the smooth brown crust of bread. It was you my mouth remembered, the familiar musk of your sex, its smooth heat, its quick fullness. My mind was a reel flashing pictures inside my skull, and there was no detail missing. I sat like a drunk trying to act sober. I chewed and swallowed while in my thoughts I knelt; I gave thanks for you.

My sexuality stems from an emotional connection so someone’s soul. You don’t have to make a gender choice and stick with it. The naked promise in a glance, the electricity in a touch, the delicious heat in a kiss…I would like to watch you sleeping,  I would like to sleep with you, to enter your sleep as its smooth dark wave slides over my head and walk with you through that lucent wavering forest of bluegreen leaves with its watery sun & three moons towards the cave where you must descend, towards your worst fear.  I would like to give you the silver branch, the small white flower, the one word that will protect you from the grief at the center of your dream, from the grief at the center. I would like to follow you up the long stairway again & become the boat that would row you back carefully, a flame in two cupped hands to where your body lies beside me, and you enter it as easily as breathing in I would like to be the air that inhabits you for a moment only. I would like to be that unnoticed & that unnecessary.



Civilized people cannot fully satisfy their sexual instinct without love.Finally the only one I want to caress is you.You watch the changing light across the sky. I watch your eyes.You know, when sex is good, when it’s really, really good, I feel as though I’m disappearing, being pulverized, being fucked into oblivion, so that I’m nothing, just particles of air pollution, debris, smog, particles of soot and skin floating through the air and settling on the city. Nobody makes love. Love either happens or it doesn’t. And if it’s just a euphemism for fucking the arse off someone, then what’s that all about? Why can’t we be more honest, more graphic about our animal urges? Let’s drop all the crap, we thought. We all fuck, we all like it, so why wrap it up in tissue paper and call it making love? Real love always has something hidden—some loss or boredom or tiny hate that we would never tell a soul. Those among you who have been rejected or ignored, you’ll know what I mean. Because when she comes to you at last, though joy may burst in wet seeds inside you, still there’s a bitterness that it took so long. Why did she wait? You can never quite forgive. The way to love anything is to realize that it might be lost.

Don’t think that I belong to that vulgar race of men who feel disgust after pleasure, and for whom love exists only as lust. No: in me, what rises doesn’t subside so quickly. Moss grows on the castles of my heart as soon as they are built; but it takes some time for them to fall into ruin, if they ever completely do.Talking about the chemical changes that make a body in love shine, or even, for months, immune to illness, you pick a grub from the lawn and let it lie on your palm-glowing like the emerald-burning butt of a cigarette. Love begets love. This torment is my joy. Love is an attempt at penetrating another being, but it can only succeed if the surrender is mutual.

Why…do we so crave romantic love as if it were our destiny—our private, secret, individual fate? As if romantic love, yes let’s be candid and call it sexual love, the real thing, might define us in a way nothing else (our families, our hard-won careers) can define us. The hours I spend with you I look upon as a sort of perfumed garden, a dim twilight, and a fountain singing to it…you and you alone make me feel that I am alive…I kiss your hands and kneel before you…to assure you that my whole mind, all the breadth of my spirit, all my heart exist only to love you. I adore you… So beautiful, so perfect, so made to be cherished, adored, and loved to death and madness. To love is to take the greatest risk of all. It is to give one’s future and one’s happiness into another’s hands. It is to allow oneself to trust without reserve. It is to accept vulnerability. And thus I love you. –Helen Thomson

Erotic love. Deep sexual pleasure. Those sensations you can’t speak of without sounding absurd and so you don’t speak of them at all until at last you cease to experience them and in time you can’t believe that others experience them, you can only react with derision. You’re anesthetized.

And when he came into her, with an intensification of relief and consummation that was pure peace to him, still she was waiting. She felt herself a little left out. And she knew, partly it was her own fault. She willed herself into this separateness. Now perhaps she was condemned to it. She lay still, feeling his motion within her, his deep-sunk intentness, the sudden quiver of him at the springing of his seed, then the slow-subsiding thrust.and the butting of his haunches seemed ridiculous to her, and the sort of anxiety of his penis to come to its little evacuating crisis seemed farcical. Yes, this was love, this ridiculous bouncing of the buttocks, and the wilting of the poor, insignificant, moist little penis. This was the divine love! After all, the moderns were right when they felt contempt for the performance; for it was a performance. It was quite true, as some poets said, that the God who created man must have had a sinister sense of humor, creating him a reasonable being, yet forcing him to take this ridiculous posture, and driving him with blind craving for this ridiculous performance.

I am crying about the elusive nature of love, the impossibility of ever having someone so completely that he can fill up the hole,  I understand why people sometimes want to kill their lovers, eat their lovers, inhale the ashes of their dead lovers. I understand that this is the only way to possess another person with the kind of desperate longing. Come, let us hide closer to each other,
life lies in all our hearts as in coffins.You! Let us kiss deeply…Between love and madness lies obsession.I prefer an ecstatic orgasm to a lot of angst.Love is a fire. But whether it’s going to warm your hearth or burn down your house, you can never tell. When you love someone all your saved-up wishes start coming out. To love is to receive a glimpse of heaven. Remember your loves by keeping their spirit alive in you and you will not need sadness. Idolize them only a little. Make peace with their devils, and you will do the same with yours. All will collect dust together.


FALLING IN LOVE IN SIX ACTS

A passion play

(Or what happens when you fall down that long well of passion over a person, a place, a sport, a game, a belief, and your heart goes boom and your mind leaves town.)

Act I: LUST

(I think I love you. Who are you anyway?)

Here it is, the big “wow,” the big “gee,” the big “yesyesyes” you’ve been waiting for. This is where you find something or someone and believe they are better, greater, cuter, wiser, more wonderful than anything you have ever known.

Lust isn’t a sin, it’s a necessity, for with lust as our guide we imagine our bodies moving the way our bodies were meant to move: we can do marathons with our feet, lift pounds with our arms, have stars in our eyes and do a nifty tango. And you think:

I have no need of food, I have no need of sleep, I have no needs other than occasionally chewing a breath mint. You are the best thing that’s ever happened to me, probably because you haven’t happened to me yet. Now I can pass into the next Act, so poetically called:

Act II: EUPHORIA

(Or: Oh Yippee, you’re mine.)

You feel funny inside. You feel funny outside. You feel you could do anything and no one would dare laugh at you.

This love, you will treasure. You will not put it in the basement next to your rowing machine, treadmill, and thermal body sweat wrap. And you will not take this love for granted, because this is the biggest sin of all. And you say:

I feel so good, I feel so strong. I feel actually attractive and I could learn to live with that feeling. Oh let us sing and dance and eat brown mushy foods low in fat! Oh joy! Oh rapture!

Oh but what if I’m no good at this? Oh I am no good at this. I am a dingy spek on the wall of humanity and look how badly painted that wall is! I am becoming very, very afraid. That must be because I’m passing into the Third Act, called:

Act III: FEAR

(Also known as: Uh-oh.)

This is where the doubt begins, where the mind comes back from shopping, yells at the heart, binds and gags it to a nice lounge chair and allows guilt, failure, and remembrances of things past to sit in for a nice game of bridge. This is where you fear what you need most. If it’s a person you love, you fear appearing foolish in front of them. If it’s a sport, you fear being foolish in front of many, many people at the same time. And you begin to think:

Oh no. What if I’m wrong? What if this stinks? What if my heart has blinders on, it’s had blinders on before, in fact it had dark heavy patches taped all over it. How can anyone love me if I don’t love myself? I mean, I love myself, there are just parts between the top of my head and the bottom of my feet that could use some improvement. I’m not demeaning myself, I have relatives who do that.

Act IV: DISGUST

(And the strange desire to eat everything in sight, hide in your room, and watch old Gidget movies with friends from high school.)

Now comes that unavoidable time when you say to anyone who will listen: What the heck am I doing, anyway? If it’s a person you love, first you hate only their foulest inadequacies, then you start hating their good points as well. If it’s running you love, you start to hate hills, sidewalks, and bad weather, and soon anything that slightly resembles a bump, concrete, or a small breeze.

I can’t believe I ever said I felt this way, I must have been dreaming! Wait, THIS IS NO DREAM, THIS IS A FILM NOIR MOVIE, and one of those really dark ones, too. I mean, this is love? This is what they tell you about when you’re 11 and naïve? Or 32 and more naïve?

Act V: THE TRUTH

(Love is hard work. And, sometimes, hard work can really hurt.)

Love is a game. If they didn’t tell you before, we will tell you now. Love is a game and if you play you either win, lose, or get ejected before the game is over.

There are no ties.

Maybe you’ll lose and learn some great meaningful answer from it all (Like if it looks too good to be true, it is). It’s easy to love something when you don’t have to work at it. It’s harder when it asks something of you, you just might be afraid to give.

Give it anyway.

The heart is the most resilient muscle. It is also the stupidest. So if this love you’ve found is good to you, hold it, keep it, shout about it. If it isn’t, then maybe you should just become very good friends.

Act VI: THE FINALE

(Also known as the big whopperdoodle, or, the most important part of this whole darn thing.)

So this is love, as demanding and nourishing and difficult as it can be, and as strong and wise as it makes you become.

There is something to be gained from commitment. There are rewards for staying when you would rather leave. And there is something to e said for running up that hill when you would rather slide down it. And so you let love come perch upon your shoulder. And you do not turn it away.

You do the tango.

Just do it.