Love, Romance, and Sexuality

Love, romance, and sexuality are some of the most difficult things to navigate as a human being. I think they cause me the most confusion. I can't really think of anything that affects my well-being more.

Love

Love is the allocation of attention and your willingness for sacrifice. You love the things you pay special attention to. You love the things you'd sacrifice for.

Sexuality

Sexuality is the feeling of physical desire. It's that animal attraction that you don't control. It's the physical desire for union. It's biology's attempt to help us break free from the prisms of our own consciousness.

Romance

Romance is the bridge between love and sexuality. You feel romance for the people you want to pay special attention to, the people you would sacrifice for, but who you also feel that animal impulse to unify with.

Obviously you can love someone without being sexually attracted to them, and you can be sexually attracted to someone without loving them. However, no romantic relationship can be had without love and sexuality. Loveless romance is just a sexual arrangement in which each party is lying to themselves or each other. And romance without sexuality is ordinary love operating under a false name.

They're easy to confuse, so we should stay vigilant

It's important to learn the parameters of each thing, to feel out where one ends and the other begins, because otherwise it will all just overwhelm you. It's especially easy to confuse sexuality for love. Sexuality's physical desire for union might feel very similar to love's special attention and sacrifice. But love's attention and sacrifice is altruistic where sexuality's is egoistic. With love, you self-sacrifice and you pay attention to the other for the sake of the other. With sexuality, if you do make sacrifices, you do so so you can be closer to the other person, which is ultimately selfish. If you someone attracts you sexually and you pay special attention to them, you're not paying attention to them for their sake; you're paying attention because you've been hooked. They are subtly different and easily confused.

None of that is to say love is inherently better than sexuality, or that sexuality is baser than love. They are just different, and there's beauty in both. Problems only arise when you get them confused. If you confuse sexuality for love, it's easy to mistakenly believe you're feeling romance. On a primal level, you will feel sexuality and, conceptually, you will believe it's love, which will result in the mistaken feeling that you've arrived at the place where they meet: romance. Mistakenly entering into romances is disastrous and should be avoided. It will simply scar you when the illusion is eventually shattered.

This post is not what I intended to write

None of this is what I set out to write. I set out to write something far more personal, but I've made it general and abstract. However, I do believe in the things I've written here, so I won't abandon the post. I guess I'll just have to return to what I really wanted to write at another time (or elsewhere).

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