And what I have learned is that sex doesn’t really solve anything. The main lasting positive is the pride in the conquest. It is good for self esteem.
But in my own case, and I suspect that of a great many men, I consistently found myself unable to respond to women emotionally, on their level, in a connected way. For the more attentive women–and I can count 3 very attractive intelligent women without batting an eye–this failure on the front end prevented the seduction in the first place. They could see I wasn’t there.
My last relationship with a woman she was OK with me just coming over every Tuesday night for sex, and asked nothing more of me. But even though this is about as congenial an arrangement for a man as could be imagined, even then–before all this work and learning I’ve done in the past few years–I could feel something wasn’t right. I didn’t know what. I couldn’t name it, but I ended the relationship some years ago.
It is said that women use sex to get love and men use “love” to get sex. I think this is wrong. Both sexes need to feel understood, appreciated, loved. Men are merely more stupid about the whole thing, in general. Our culture, of course, is vulgar. We are fueled by sexual fantasies driven by increasingly disturbed pornography, that cannot ever lastingly satisfy anyone, because their real need is social. They need connection, understanding. Everything else moves them away from their real needs, their real wants, and makes them more and more angry, frustrated, and alone.
Since I read regular sexual expression helps prevent prostate cancer, and since I am concerned with my health, I express myself most days. I pretty much never look at pornography of any sort, since I have a very vivid imagination, and I find most of it gross.
What I have in recent months started doing is including the emotional component. I am trying to develop the ability to be in the room where the sex is, to be present emotionally. I will literally start with meeting a woman, going on a couple dates, then go all the way through, then at the end imagine the pillow talk, her leaving, and what comes after, and how I feel. To my mind, this is much more mature and less cartoonish than what you can see on porn sites. And it is mental rehearsal for whenever I do decide it’s time to head back out into the dating world.
I don’t like passing up opportunities to bash Freud or the professional left, and won’t here: we are living with the legacy of bad ideas in the sexual–the connection–realm, and it is hurting us culturally, which is to say almost universally as individuals. Married men feel like they are missing out, single men view sex as an acceptable end, women feel like being used is OK, or that they won’t find a man who can connect with them emotionally.
All of our instincts for compassion, for intimacy, for caring, for love are suppressed. I called this Qualitative repression some years ago, and continue to feel that a useful term. College students are fed ideas which were bad when they were rolled out a hundred years ago–that sexual “repression” is unhealthy, that the sexual instinct is more important than the connection instinct, and that people are disposable. We are all disposable. This is the net teaching at most universities.
I’ll leave it there. This is more autobiographical than I like to get, but it may be useful for someone.