Back to the main question about the circularity of love and the collapse of the distinction between selfishness and unselfishness. One way of looking at it is from the angle of self-interest. We all know what it means to pursue one’s own self-interest. Well then - what happens when you identify your self-interest so thoroughly with another person’s that there no longer is any distinction between the two? What has happened to the distinction between selfishness and unselfishness?

Or look at it from another angle. When you fall in love, your ego boundaries collapse. That is the psychological description of that process. Now falling in love happens outside of romantic settings just as much as in them - you fall in love with your child during the pregnancy, fathers as much as mothers if they are present during the pregnancy. Combat bondng - when you face death at any moment day after day after day with someone, when you rely for the protection that enables you to live into that next day on someone, and he on you, the bond that develops is as strong as any romantic love, sometimes so troublingly so for many that they become violently homophobic in response - your ego boundaries fall and the distinction between ego and non-ego vanish. When there is no distinction between ego and non-ego, how can there be any distinction between selfishness and unselfishness?

This is an interesting comment which has made me think, and I realize it’s premature for me to agree with it. Could you please go a little deeper with your perspective on this? Only within the context of intimacy please, child rearing only muddles the picture for me.

Thanks, Jim.

Eivind

Adam seems to embody something remarkable, and something very fearless, and playful and on the edge……and many women can sense this…. It is a bit different that “wanting men to take the lead”, it is different than the ususal masc/fem polarity that Deida et al. write about…..

Jane

I agree that we need to reclaim the primal sexual energy that has become politically incorrect for men. However, I believe that many men in postmodern societies have found themselves in a bit of a double bind: they’ve learnt that primal male sexuality is bad, but at the same time they (we ) intuit that women want men to take the lead. So I think that it’s quite possible that we need to reclaim both kinds of energy; the primal one and the one where we dare to relax and let go.

Jim,

You reach a point in any aspect of love where it becomes circular and pointless to try to distinguish selfish from unselfish motives.

I agree.

Xaviera Hollander, the “Happy Hooker” back in the 70’s, or maybe it was someone else back then, said that all really good sex was a little selfish, and the reason is obvious - what is more flattering than that someone just ravenously desires you, without any distracting “sensitive” thought of you in any other way? When it comes right down to it, the emotional side of sex is a hunger for attention, and that single-minded desire is the purest form of attention.

Obviously there is a lot more to a relationship, but we are focusing on the sexual part for now.

You reach a point in any aspect of love where it becomes circular and pointless to try to distinguish selfish from unselfish motives. You learn this very quickly when you are raising a child for instance - every sacrifice you make for your child’s happiness and well-being is a sacrifice you make to yourself.

The challenge here is to realize that there IS a base form of sex, which is basically masturbation with a partner. It’s all about your own pleasure. Then there is a more sensitive version - caring, soft, and oh so nice, which we’ve had around for quite a while, and now it’s pretty boring. Now, we need to reclaim some of the primal energy we left behind and dare to penetrate and surrender with passion yet again. I suspect that all of this sex advice in the media make people so heady and anxious that most of the fun and natural pleasure goes away.

We must - men as well as women - learn to trust our bodies’ natural responses yet again.

Male sexuality - interesting topic and VERY enjoyable to research.

I’m going to be addressing this more on Masculinity Movies in the time to come too.

Good that you bring it up, Pelle.

Eivind