Adultery and betrayal? 2, The meaning of sex

This is part 2 of an extended essay. You can find part 1 here.



At the most immediate emotional level, the answer is that I don’t want to be left out. If there is rapturous sex going on some afternoon – at any rate, if it involves Wife – I want to be part of it. Indeed, if I am honest with myself, I have to admit that my deep, deep fear of being shut out is even stronger than my anger or resentment at some other boyfriend being welcomed in. Sure, it upsets me to think of him fucking Wife, warm and secure inside her cunt, bringing her to orgasm once or several times. Sure, my imagination can fixate on pictures like this in a truly obsessive way, giving me no peace. But even worse than all this is feeling that I myself have been cut off from this ecstasy, shut out in the cold while such celestial glory is going on without me. That part, truly, is Hell on Earth.

Peeling back this onion a little farther, then, what is it that I am missing? Is it my own orgasm? My own physical release? Not at all. If that were all, I could solve the problem by masturbating, and everything would be fine again. But it’s not. Sometimes I may have to resort to that to keep from losing my mind, if I know that Wife is with somebody else, but it is no substitute and a damned poor consolation.

What this means, as an interim observation, is that sex is not a physical pleasure – or not only a physical pleasure. If it were, the orgasm itself would be the key; in that case, jacking off would be as good as fucking, and I would have no reason to care if Wife, like a latter-day Messalina, decided to fuck every last one of the Green Bay Packers so long as I got mine too. But that is absolutely not the case.

What else is there? I don’t know how else to explain it but to say that during sex – at any rate, good sex, not failed sex – we are there with each other in a deeper way than we can ever be otherwise. It is as if – bear with the image for a moment – it is as if Wife opens her aura or her shield when she opens her legs; and as long as I am between those legs, I am on the inside of the shield, together with her more truly than I can ever be at any other time. Whatever we decide to do at that time to gratify each other, her open legs are a sign of infinite possibilities, when we can touch each other directly, when we can communicate heart to heart and soul to soul. The reality doesn’t often live up to the promise, I admit; I have never claimed to be a demon lover, and (truth to tell) neither is Wife. We both suffer from all-too-human limitations in that arena. And yet the promise – the promise that is whispered to us by our sexual entanglement – is of ineffable joy, perfect communion, and no boundaries. It is a promise that all the stern and surly limits of earthly life are repealed. It is nothing less than a foretaste of Heaven – for if there is indeed a God who cares for men and if he indeed offers us some kind of celestial bliss after our time here on Earth, that bliss can only be a fulfillment of the promise whispered to us by erotic communion – the joy of eternal fucking with its perfect closeness, but without the awkward angles, the missed cues, the inept timing, the pinched muscles, my elbow on Wife’s long hair ... none of those petty and all-too-terrestrial failures than make real sex fall too often short of its divine and holy promise.

And then when Wife closes her legs again, it is over. The infinite possibilities are shut off. We are back in the world of communicating with words, which are poor, feeble substitutes for speaking heart to heart. When she closes her legs again, a frost settles on the two of us and the world goes grey and flat and cold. And we are back on Earth.

How can this be? How can simple fucking be a foretaste of Heaven?

We all know that sex can make people fall in love, and really I’m not saying any more than that. All I am describing is how it happens. After all, from an “objective” point of view the causal link between sexual passion and romantic love doesn’t make a lot of sense. Just because I have disported my body in such and such a way with that of some sweet young thing, why should that change how I feel about her afterwards? Well, it’s like this. The bliss, the ecstasy of fucking is so transcendent that – at its best – it far surpasses mere pleasure. It works directly on our spirits every bit as powerfully as it gladdens our bodies; like Plato says about wine, it softens us like fire softens iron or wax, (Laws ii, 666B-C) so we can be totally reshaped. And when it softens us, when it reshapes us, it molds us around the beloved. Sex at its best melts each of us around the other, making two individuals into a single couple.

What does it mean to be a couple, to be melted around each other into a single shape? It means that each of us is a home for the other, a refuge from the storms of the world, a place of safety. If I am to be a home or a refuge for Wife, or she for me, then each of us must be the other’s highest priority. I must know that I can trust Wife completely (and she me) ... because if I can’t relax and trust then I’m not really at home, am I? That is what home is. And so the meaning of sex, if I can phrase it so, is that it creates a couple even if there was none there before, a couple who give each other shelter from the world and who treat each other as their highest priority, and who treat all other claims as secondary. This, after all, is why the law cannot compel a man to testify in court against his wife; because the law understands that, whatever the man owes to the majesty of the law, that debt cannot be presumed to come ahead of the priority he owes his wife.

I had better explain what I mean by talking about the meaning of sex, because clearly sex isn’t like this all the time, nor for everybody. Sex can be a lot more mundane than all that. It can be a physical drive, or energetic recreation, or just plain fun. We can fuck people we never intend to see again, let alone shelter from the world. We can fuck people we would never dream of sheltering from the world because they are too dangerous to be around – but who are still really, really hot in bed. Nor is sex always the same to both partners: a good friend of mine in college became suicidal during her sophomore year when she lost her virginity to some guy and fell for him hard, only to realize that he was working his way systematically through her dorm and had seduced her just because it was her turn.

What I am talking about, though, is what the ecstasy of good sex – at its best – whispers directly to our emotions, bypassing our heads completely. It doesn’t always happen, and some people seem to be more immune to the whispered promises of erotic bliss than others. But it is always a possibility.

And in a sense, it is a little more than merely a possibility. “Meaning” is a funny word to use in this context, after all, because we are used to thinking of meanings as arbitrary. If we all agree that a word should mean something new, then it means something new. The word gay used to mean “happy”; the word intercourse used to mean “conversation”. When enough people agreed on a new definition, the definition changed because the correlation of a word and its meaning is fundamentally arbitrary.

So it is logical to ask whether the correlation of sex and couplehood is also arbitrary. If couplehood is the meaning of sex, and if meanings can be changed by mutual agreement, why can’t we just agree to redefine sex as recreation or exercise or a short-term hobby? The short answer is that many people do exactly that. The longer answer, though, is that it is not quite so easy after all. The critical difference is that words are tools of the intellect; therefore, an intellectual agreement is all it takes to change their definitions. But sex speaks directly to the emotions without any intermediary; therefore it would take a reorientation of the emotions to change the meaning of sex. I won’t say such a reorientation is impossible; but you can’t do it just by deciding to. This is why the single biggest danger in an affair is the risk of falling in love: you go into the affair telling your mind that the fucking is purely recreational – just for fun. But your emotions aren’t in on the plan; they never got the message that this wasn’t serious, that it wasn’t for ever. And so when your emotions feel the bliss, the transcendent ecstasy of fucking, they react the way they think they are supposed to – by melting like wax around the shape of your partner. Soon, all you can think about is the beloved; soon, every waking moment is spent obsessing about him or her; soon, you can’t get enough of each other, in secret or in public; soon, your need for each other makes you reckless of the dangers, and you almost can’t care about the peril of discovery any more. Soon, you are in love.

The other big danger in an affair is jealousy and possessiveness. But if the meaning of sex is couplehood, you would expect exactly that. You may go into the affair believing (intellectually) that it’s purely recreational; so of course your partner in the affair should be free to pursue other amours as well. It’s all just good, clean fun – right? But the more often you fuck this partner, the more your emotions expect the two of you to form a couple. At that point, your mind may tell your partner, “Sure, go enjoy yourself with as many other lovers as you like”; but (despite your best intentions) your heart can’t want that. What your heart wants is for you to be the center of your partner’s world, your partner’s highest priority and reason for living. Nothing else will do. (This point is made, with a lyrical eloquence I cannot hope to match, in an essay found here.)

Everyone’s mileage is a little different. Some people find it easier than others to stay uninvolved. And there are tricks or techniques you can use to hold love at bay while you focus on fucking. But it is always a possibility; it is always a risk. The promise of eternal couplehood that fucking whispers to our emotions is the kind of promise that our emotions want to believe implicitly; because this is the meaning of sex to them, and so it is what they live for.



You can find part 3 here.