Nanowrimo is not happening for me this year, but I’m trying to write everyday in November. I’ll be posting fragments of what I write here daily, edited very lightly for clarity and grammar. Here’s post #8.
It’s remarkable how badly our culture has conflated love and desire and sex. When we say “desire”, what we mean is that delicious surge of evolutionarily-designed chemicals that tell us, “I would enjoy reproducing with you” or, at the very least, “I would enjoy thinking about the possibility of reproducing with you.”
Love is what happens when desire and social chemistry meet together. We can fall in love and out of love. Love rides with gleeful abando, the waves of our relationshi, especially when the seas get stirred up. (e.g. “Do I love him?” “Do I love her any more?” “Why do I love both of them?” And so on and so forth. )
Love, in this case, is a state, one that we can fall in and out of,one that can come and go with the tides, ebbing after a bad fight or when the fizz of newly found social chemistry has worn off, or when the sex gets boring, or the person becomes unattractive.
It is commonly accepted truth that you should only marry for love an a less commonly accepted but still relatively widely-held truth that you should only have sex with someone who you love. However, I don’t believe that you should love marry for love, or even have sex for love.
Why is this? It’s because of my faith, and a particularl word it uses to describe what love is: hesed.