Romance or lust?

Everybody who reads this column should know by now that I am 72 years old and sometimes wondering why I’m still alive. I have lived a full life, not an ordinary full life but and extra-ordinary full life. If I wrote an autobiography realistically it would read like an unrealistic gossip column.  I got married at 18, separated at 24. If I wrote the real reasons why you would pale from reading so never mind.

Why did I get married so young? Because I went to a Catholic school that taught me that girls were made for marriage.  I believed them. So I met a man who was 10 years older than I, who wooed me well. I felt all sorts of flutters in my young body that I thought were the signs of true love.  So I married him.

 I remember realizing (while wrapping gifts one Christmas almost five years after we were married) that I did not love him anymore. There was no more passion, no more longing, no more thrills. I wanted to leave him but I stayed anyway because we had children and they were small. Did I want them to grow up without a father like I did? Then the answer was no. So I stayed longer and life continued but there was a deep base of unhappiness that I did not understand.

I finally left him and went to work. Then I started dating again and fell in love again — the passion, the flutters, the ups and downs, those to me were the symbols of being in love and how deeply was measured by the intensity of those emotions. I lived with him but when I was 33 we broke up again. The lesson I learned — or so I thought — was that getting married and living together were the same thing and both did not work for me. That was almost 40 years ago. But now I sit on my porch and take my life apart or deconstruct as the modernists like to say.

Now I realize that I made all those mistakes because of a weakness in the Catholic teaching tradition. Remember the seven deadly sins? They were pride, gluttony, greed, sloth, wrath, envy, lust. They mentioned lust in school but did not tell us what it was. They did not teach us or at least they did not teach me that the feelings that songs, movies, whatever called falling in love was really better stated as falling in lust.

Around 30 years ago Time magazine ran a cover story on love.  I kept that for a long time until it got lost. Basically it said that when we meet someone attractive our hormones work overtime and our brain produces all sorts of things that we call “falling in love.” This upsurge of hormones and serotonin and some other potions that our body naturally produces when we are sexually drawn to a person continues for around two-and-a-half years. After that we go into an affectionate period, when we still feel some kind of passion once in a while, thanks to serotonin.  This period lasts approximately four years. Then you’re on your own. No more natural human juices running. No more heartbeats skipping. No more passion except maybe when you’re both drunk.

 Now I tend to believe in the power of lust for driving us into marriage. I will bet that 90 percent of married people married for the fulfillment of lust but they all thought they were falling in love. The 10 percent are arranged or forced or whatever marriages. But when the lust wears out and they stay together forever that’s when love comes in. Love is when you accept a person as he is, unconditionally, you put up with him and you stay with him as he accepts you unconditionally too and puts up with you and stays with you until death do you part.

Women are less lustful than men. Men can look at a girl in a mini skirt and get lustful after her on the spot. If she goes with him he can take her somewhere and quickly forget about it because his lust has passed. But the lady in the mini skirt is different. She had been eyeing him for a long time.  She was also strongly lusting after him. Why else would she have agreed to go with him immediately? But when he doesn’t call afterwards, she feels used, abused. Maybe that’s when the other sin — wrath or anger — comes in.

Lust is more serious for women than for men because, since we were never taught what lust felt like, we interpreted it as romance. We have bought the falling-in-love myth hook, line and sinker. How do I know that? Because I’m already a wise old woman who looks at life from all angles and hopes to teach. After all I’m 72 and still alive. That should be good for something.

* * *

Please text your comments to 0998-9912287.