This is the the third of eight articles on love, sex and gender. As with the others, it stands on its own, but you can read through part 1, on man and woman, part 2 on sex and excitement, part 4, on courtship and woo, part 5 on solipsism and sex, part 6 on making love, part 7 on marriage and part 8 on eternal love.
Primal Love and the Civilised Schism
Making love evaporates the pain of sex. Desperation, neediness, anxiety, indifference, attachment, sentimentality, tyrannous emotionality, fear of commitment, frigidity and anger; all dissipate with love making. All that remains is unconditional love.
Unconditional love cannot be switched on and off. It must be lived, or felt in the body, throughout the day. This is not an ‘of course I love you’ love,1 a love that you ‘know’ you have for someone, but an actual sensation of love, in your body, which reaches out, to the other, from morning to night.
If this love is not present it is impossible to make love. Woman understands this much better than man. She can hop into bed and fuck, but even then she needs ‘foreplay’ to respond to him, although, as we shall see, this word is poorly understand. Real foreplay begins hours, days, years, before love-making.
The whole day is foreplay, because the whole day is play,2 an attitude of loving largeness of spirit that releases focused attention from the litany of isolated and mutually antagonistic things that self compels me to want or not want, like or not like. This release is a unitary experience, in that it unites distinctions.