We use foolish, hand-me-down notions about sex to figure out who we are, weigh our options, write our own story … and fumble our own life. Understanding how sex dominates our thinking is critical to understanding how it dominates our society and our quality of life. Sexuality (and what we hold to be true about it) offers a private viewing into love, naked desire, our primal history, the unconscious mind, our woundedness, and our healing; but not if we’re hiding what is raw behind what we learned was “normal.” Even the fiercely independent may forsake their authenticity for all-consuming passion and the epic task of either keeping it alive or abiding a partner without it, based on what they believe to validate them.
Our biological need to be loved is really a need to be understood, to be valued, to be responded to. To be in synch. While this desire seems almost lost to our consciousness, we are smitten by somebody who “gets” us, somebody who is tuned in to us.
And if only for a few moments, during sex, we have dropped our boundaries and connected. Thus, sex is a leading substitute for love, making it a leading obstacle to love.
If you want to better understand the role sex is playing in your relationship and your life choices, you can.