How To Think More About Sex (School of Life)

with a long-term partner who has forgotten to guard his or her nakedness against the ever-present dangers of our predatory ingratitude.

eagerly against our lovers’ most private and ‘contaminated’ parts, kissing, sucking and thrusting our tongues inside them and thus symbolically lending our approval to their entire selves, much as a priest will accept a penitent, guilty of so many transgressions, back into the fold of the Catholic Church via a chaste kiss on the head.

Normal life continually demands that we be polite. As a rule, we cannot win the respect or affection of anyone without severely repressing all that is ostensibly ‘bad’ within us: our aggression, our heedlessness, our impulse towards greed and our contempt. We cannot both be accepted by society and reveal the full spectrum of our minds and moods.

At the heart of the pain created by sexual rejection is our habit of interpreting it as a moral judgement, when it might more accurately be categorized as a mere accident.

all but the least self-aware among us will sometimes be struck by how distasteful our desire for sex can seem to someone else, how contrary to reason it can appear, how peculiar and physically off-putting our flesh may be and how unwanted our caresses – and therefore how careful we ought to be in going about the business of seduction.

We should accept that sex is inherently rather weird instead of blaming ourselves for not responding in more normal ways to its confusing impulses.

all of these needs inspiring our relentless and passionately idealistic quest for someone to kiss and sleep with.

It’s time for the need for sex and the need for love to be granted equal standing, without an added moral gloss.

The signs of others’ satisfaction in our existence declines, and their enthusiasm begins to be linked to our performance. It is what we do rather than what we are that is now of interest to them.