Eros: body or soul? part 3

After reading my over-long reply, D answered me in turn as follows:
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Goodness; you did justice and more to what I wrote, and given my time constraints, I cannot begin to address all the fascinating issues you raise. I think, however, that there is a certain tension in our view of the erotic that will serve to stimulate our relationship. We have significantly different views…I wonder how this will play out.

Let’s return to the question that troubled Plato and many other writers. What has desire to do with love and love with desire? C. S. Lewis made a very interesting observation when he notes that lovers are normally face to face, absorbed in each other while friends stand side by side, absorbed in something else. We have each experienced falling in love and barely being able to tear our eyes away from the other person. Lovers also talk about their love while friends rarely mention it. Love and loyalty are often shown on the battlefield, yet the men involved are profane and lace their comments to each other with humor and teasing. Friendship means comfort, help and security; it’s what my colleagues and I offer each other at school. But erotic love offers danger, anxiety and stress; I may want only good for my fellow teachers, but I want you, and if I cannot have you, or someone takes may place, I will be unhappy; indeed, my love can turn to hate.

Erotic love is not a form of companionship; at least not at first. Its initial and defining impulse is to a desire for mutual possession and there is a certain violence to that desire. Erotic love, unlike other forms of love, desires no worldly benefits or gains beyond itself. Erotic love is not another form of agape or friendship; it is of a different order. Erotic love is not a blend of friendship and sexual desire. As I well know, the element of desire cannot fade away without altering the love itself. Erotic love seeks to possess, to hold and to exclude; and its object is not just the body of the beloved or the soul. It is the embodied person; the person bound by flesh.

Love, like desire, feasts on looks; this is how we present ourselves and makes a present of the self. Beauty is very much involved in our choice of lovers. Yet age affects us all, and even the blind desire others. Desire is aroused through touching and caressing. In arousal, the body occupies the foreground and it becomes transparent, exposing the other person as object and subject of desire. Desire is dangerous and it causes us acute anxiety. You will remember your own shyness and insecurity the first time we were together. This is natural; the expression of desire is rarely safe and our society constructs elaborate institutions to protect us from the abuse of sexual feelings. We may condemn extramarital unions, but no one censures friendship.

I believe lovers may also be friends, but you are not my friend by virtue of being my beloved. I freely confess to being jealous and at war with every rival—even the rival the friend might approve. Blake is right when he says:

Love seeketh only self to please
To bind another in its delight;
Joys in another’s loss of ease
And builds a Hell in Heaven’s despite

One of the most difficult challenges for me is to appreciate the tension between friendship and erotic love. We are lovers, and thus I find it difficult to accept the otherness of you, and accept your life as a life apart, given that I want to be first in your affections. Yet in fact we spend most of our time as friends, not lovers. The basis of friendship is precisely that recognition and acceptance of the otherness of the friend. Of course a friend desires the company of the friend, as I want to see [a friend on the faculty], but I also want him to be complete as an individual and to have a life of his own; and in two years I hope he will be far away from this school. I have no such hopes in my relationship with you; I want to see more of you and stop renouncing intimacy. Friendship must be mutual; if [that other teacher] does not want to be around me, the friendship will die. There is no such thing as unrequited friendship, as there is in love. Love is not a feeling, or even a complex gathering of feelings; love is an emotion and it can exist even when the other person is unavailable or gone.

My friendships are not exclusive, and it would be silly for me to demand that my friends have no other close relationships. But my love for you is exclusive and this is a great mystery. The presence of desire, which seems to be the major underlying difference between friendship and erotic love, does not fully explain this vast gulf. I recognize you do not share this view, and I leave myself open to great heartache because of it. It is a difference I must reluctantly accept. Yet in many ways, friendship and erotic love share many features in common. We share good conversation and companionship. We find each other and our friends irreplaceable. Both friendship and erotic love are life-long commitments and beyond. There is no goal outside the relationship itself. Finally, both are gifts and can be offered and received in no other way. I might then argue that both erotic love and friendship are not the same as love for God, because that is commanded and is only just and right. But friendship and my love for you are choices, not duties. Are we bound to one another by some fateful tie, like a parent to a child or a husband to his wife, like Hosea to unfaithful Gomer, like God to faithless Israel? [I'm sure she came up with the Biblical reference entirely on her own, by coincidence, because I absolutely have not told her that I go by the name "Hosea" here!] Perhaps not; rather, we are free to evaluate each other’s virtue and Good and if we find either wanting, we may leave the relationship. Erotic love may by-pass virtue and even decency, but an affair like ours can never be divorced from our effort to find in the other a person special, precious, and worthy of our devotion.
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I wasn't quite sure what to say to all this, so I answered a little lamely that, "Of course you are right that erotic love cannot be simply the same as friendship, because of the very ferocity that you articulate so brilliantly. And yet there is something very similar about it. There is a mystery here that I do not understand very well, and I don't quite know what to say about it."

Then our discussion meandered into other directions, until we came back to the topic of "ferocity" by discussing pornography.