Sex and Love, Food and Life

Extracted and edited from a letter ...

The other thing was something I raised, namely the thought on sex and love.

As sex is to food, so is love to life.

We eat to live, and not live to eat, just as we work to live, and not live to work.

So when you told me you spending such long hours at work, it is symptomatic that something is not right in your life. Either you have no life or you are avoiding it.

But back to sex and love: correspondingly sex is for love, and not love for sex.

No matter how fantastic the fuck the top gave you, it is, at the end of the day, still empty. And then the best ever will never be good enough; the next time you seek an even better best.

It is like food. Like the ancient Romans or the Chinese among the rich and the elite. Their food becomes more and more exotic, eg bear's paw, or parrot meat, etc. It is just the nature of human beings, as long as it is physical we can never be satiated, for we not merely physical beings.

This is because the satisfaction sought for is not in the physical realm. It is like thirsting for a drink and you approached what you thought was water, which later turned out to be a mirage.

But on the other hand, when you are with someone special even simple bread and wine can be a most delightful and satisfying meal. I do not know if you have had such an experience.

But this you surely know: you find it hard to take dinner alone. Thus it is not the food that really is the matter, but rather who you are having dinner with.

And so it is with sex: it is not the sex that matter but whether there was love. In fact if there is love there may even be no need for sex.

And then of course there is no such thing as good sex. There is only whether there is love and the love is true. If there is then any sex, no matter how simple, eg just hands-holding, will be good, even very good.

And to continue the analogy of food, the reason why there is fasting in religion, is to make yourself aware that life is not for food. So similarly there are sexual fasts too, with the same symbolism, namely life is not just for sex.

Life is for life, and life is for love. Food is to make this life possible, and sex is to express this love, physically.

And that leads to another point, namely that love need not be expressed only physically. In fact there need not be any physical expression at all for love to be true. For surely there is still love between two old couple.

But then again you are at the stage of life when sex, in and of itself, is already exciting and enjoyable. It is like a kid just given the freedom to eat all the ice cream he wants in the world. So he has to eat; and Love can wait. So enjoy then! :-)