I've learned some things living for 60 years. One of them is that, in order to have any kind of understanding of anything, you've got to figure it out in your own head. It's wonderful to listen to all of the wisdom of the ages that has been passed down to us, but I believe that we only come to understand if we disregard what we have been told and work the entire system from the ground up for ourselves.
It's like translating general principles to make them applicable to our own lives. Elsewhere I've written about how I am doing that with my spirituality and how it is a consideration in economics. Here, I want to mention a bit of how I've applied this concept to my ideas of sexuality. More specifically, I've come up with some ideas of how it applies to the differences between the sexes in their sexuality.
Sexuality is all tied up with love. The differences between men and women arise form how well these two forces are integrated in a relationship. Ideally, you would have the yin of sex wrap around the yang of love and vise versa and they'd be more or less equal.
But it seems that generally, women are more attuned to romantic love. I said 'generally' because there are guys who are more attuned to love too. Some men are just as attuned to love as women and many others are all along the spectrum from hardly attuned to love to just as attuned to love as women. While love is preeminent in women, women are all along the love/sex spectrum as well. Some women are just as sex oriented as your average man, while many others fall all along the spectrum from 'as sex attuned as a man' to 'totally tuned into love'.
I think it's obvious that the folks who have sexual hangups are those men
and women who are located at either pole or close to either pole. It's not right to dwell too much on 'love' in a relationship, because it would tend to exclude the physical world and become an 'imaginary' thing. You need sex to keep a lover's feet on the ground. It's necessary to keep pure love grounded to reality and sex is what does that. Sex can be a physical manifestation of love in this respect.
It's not optimal to dwell totally on sex in a relationship either. That excludes the magic of love. That makes a relationship into just another physical need of the body, like moving one's bowels.
I think that the way we grow our sexuality to be more true and fulfilling is to move ourselves more from the polar love or sex based relationship to an integrated love/sex relation, where a yin-yang feedback loop can develop and love desire can feed sexual desire and vise versa.
Personally, I can not find the spiritual closeness with a man that I want. Likewise, the thought of sex with a man is much more stimulating for me than the thought of sex with a woman. I must realize that if I were to get total sexual fulfillment with a man, it is unlikely that there would be much love in the relationship and I would be dissatisfied. Likewise, any man who could totally satisfy my need for love would be unlikely to be sexual enough for me.
I do not think that I am rationalizing my position if I say that I currently find myself where I can be happiest; where I belong. I am a man who is attracted to the spiritual loving side of women, but towards the physical sexuality of men. I am somewhere on a number-line that denotes my physical and sexual needs. My wife is too. Our relationship has worked well for 23 years. The way that this relationship can improve is for both of us to strive towards a mutually acceptable location on the line between love and sex. This requires change and acceptance on both our parts, to move towards each other. This involves changing ourselves for each other; making a gift of those parts of us which must be jettisoned because they impede us getting closer. That's the work of building a relationship.
Sometimes I do not think it is a matter of being homo or hetero sexual. It is a matter of choosing the partner who can satisfy at least the minimum of our sexual and love needs and then being committed to improving that match by changing to provide more of what the partner needs either sexually or spiritually lovingly. This must be done mutually. Effort on one side which is not matched by effort on the other side is doomed to failure of the relationship.
For now I think this is right. Total satisfaction in either sex or love is
unattainable. Human beings will always want more of both. But the magic happens when we surrender this desire to the greater desire of becoming closer to our mate. And that closeness is what everyone desires in their heart of hearts.
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