Seth Mullins is on a journey to reconcile his feelings of lust with his feelings of desire.
I dream that I’m riding in the back of a flatbed truck. Across from me is a young woman who doesn’t mind at all that my bare foot is resting between her legs, grazing her intimate place. I’m naked, and I marvel that she takes no affront on account of that, either.
We talk. But I just can’t stay in the ease and permissiveness of the moment. It’s like I’m living the Garden of Eden myth, just after the forbidden fruit has been eaten. “And how did I wake up naked in the back of a flatbed truck?” I finally burst out. And just like that, paradise evaporates. I feel shame, and the woman withdraws.
I feel grateful that at least there had been that moment of self-acceptance with her—without doubt—and I can go back to it when I need to. In years past, I never would’ve had such a dream. Shame would’ve taken over right away, made me jump away before she and I could ever connect. This dream reveals that some part of the rift—the gulf that I’ve carried around for so long, which separates my sexual desires from my heart, setting them oftentimes at odds when I want them to be as one—is being healed. The sense of relief that this healing brings is hard to describe. The inability to experience both lust and love for the same woman—and the confusion, hurt feelings, and estrangement that this dysfunction can breed—has been a profound source of suffering in my life.
A new sensation and awareness has been growing inside me over the last few years. It is the capacity for desire without shame. In the summer of 2008, I attended an experiential dream-work retreat. The core work for me during that 5-day intensive (as well as much of the time since then) revolved around the split—the veritable war—that has persisted between my feelings and my sexual longings. Before we left the mountain, a close lady friend of mine gifted me with a picture that she’d created with crayons during the retreat. I still have it: It reveals a phallic pair of bulbs and stalk growing up through the center of a pink and red heart. Heart and phallus in organic union.
Because I was feeling both of those things—desire and love—for the woman who was with me in the back of that truck in the dream. And I had been filled (if fleetingly) with a sense of peace. The struggle is not over. For a long time now, I have chosen celibacy as a preferred alternative to acting out my desires with women who I don’t love or trying to consummate a more spiritual connection with women when affection is present but desire is not. The longing to unite both “halves” of intimate experience is still a dream for me, albeit one that I can feel growing more tangible by the day.
—Photo xXlyzzimarieXx and the futuristics/Flickr
Seth I fully understand your conflict. I labor under the same inability to reconcile my love with my lust. Unfortunately, it seems like these two drives in me are inversely proportional to each other. The pattern repeats itself across relationships: as my connection with my significant other deeps, so does my sexual attraction to them wane. In the past this has climaxed in a a crisis of flaccidness, where I couldn’t even fake it anymore. I don’t know how to go about reconciling these drives. I don’t even know if this rift stems from shame. At one point I thought… Read more »
This is a problem I don’t have at core. But I have learned to fear other people’s attitudes about sex (many of which seem completely crazy to me.) When I was about 11, someone called the police on our neighborhood’s kids because we had a sexual “show and tell” club. I learned then that you have to watch your back. I think another source of extra repression is the fact that no one talks about sex to kids and that porn and advertising are examples of misteaching about it. The discussion on the latest Terre Spencer article here will probably… Read more »
I guess it’s a “chicken or the egg” sort of question, but my personal feeling is that the idea of shame comes first; and then we humans invent/ gravitate towards various philosophies that support it – whatever they might be.
I agree with what Copyleft just said, up to the point at which (s)he pointed the finger at feminist radicals. I don’t know about anyone else, but when i think lust = shame, my mind leaps seamlessly to good old Judeo-Christian conservatism / puritanism. Though that could be down to my Irish Catholic upbringing…
True, there is more than one source of unjustified guilt-training. Religion is another spoilsport.
Thanks, Copyleft. Yeah, there’s cultural conditioning; there’s all kinds of detrimental religious attitudes; there’s scientific theories that reduce desire to a purely biological function; there’s a million ways to adopt shame in response to lust. I don’t think I can even say with certainty how the “split” between desire and love first happened with me. All I know is that it caused a lot of pain – pain that was needless.
Interesting point. The fact that shame or guilt was ever instilled as a reaction to lust is itself a nasty little side effect of our culture’s handling of gender issues. There’s no reason to associate shame with desire; there never has been, despite some feminist radicals’ best efforts to claim otherwise.
Lust is not the enemy of love; it’s an enhancement to it.