Love

Passages

Every passage tagged with this emotion in the Vela corpus. Search the body text, narrow by source or register, click through to a book’s profile to see how the passage sits with the rest of the work.

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• From A Hebrew and English Lexicon of the Old Testament (BDB) (1907)

  beloved, love (pl.), uncle‏ .ג דור (NH id., Syr. 98, J93; As. dadu D1*4")—abs.‏ Ly 108‏ דד 3t.;‏ +104 8 ז דוד estr.‏ :559 6% דוד Est 2* ; sf. ‘7 Is 5! (but cf. infr.) + 26 t.‏ Je32° + 2t.; FI Je327; FI‏ דרי all Ct;‏ Ly 20”‏ דדל ,10% ₪ ז 6% Am‏ דודל Ct 5°°+2t.;‏ Pr 7®‏ דרים ;}5 Ct‏ דורים pl.‏ ;85 06 דודָה ;4% + a Ch rss‏ ;ל 6% דד bE‏ יו .237 6 זו שו most often‏ .36"—1 וא Ct 4; pT‏ דדיף loved one, beloved (lover, betrothed) Ct 1%" 23:8.9-10-16.17 416 2.4.5.6.6.8.9.9.10.16 61.1.2.3.3 710-1112.14 95.14. , beloved one, friend, ‘iI NYY Is 51 (where Lo Che ש' דודים‎ love-song, v. 3 infr.) 2. specif. uncle, Ly 10% (father’s brother, patruus; Syr. = also avunculus) Nu 36" 18 14° 2K 24" Ly 2079 2 I S ד‎ Est 25 Je 2 perhaps also 1 Ch 27 Jonathan, David’s 71 so AV RV;=kinsman (1, so St RVm) Am 6”. 3. ple abstr Cove"Prg™ Chir? ו‎ Bite” alt concr. beloved ones, so AV RV, © ddedgpoi) ; 0 דרים‎ NY Ez 16%; דרים‎ ABw Ez 23”. Tat] n.f. aunt—only sf. 777 Ly 18" father’s brother’s wife; iNT Ly 20” Ex 6” father’s sister [cf. Nu 26°]. ae a n.pr.m. (his beloved, cf. ;דודוהו‎ or comp. דודה‎ n.pr.divin. 211% ef. 117 infra)— 1. man of tribe of Issachar Ju 10’. 2. דרי‎ 3% 2 8 2 ) ז דודי בב‎ Ch 27:%(. דודו = ען) דודו‎ ב ך‎ 11% | 3. father of דודו 23% 8 2 אֶלְחֶנֶן‎ = ו‎ (q.v.) 1 Ch 27* (cf.‏ דודו = n.pr.m.‏ דורי1 Kt).‏ 23° 25 דדי n.pr.m. (< G rod ’Qdaa, GL‏ דורוהוּ1 Aovdiov, i.e.3717 115, beloved of “,cf. Nes ™ 9 father‏ of Eliezer 2 Ch 20%.‏ 1066 רות דָּוִד king of Israel, whose dynasty remained on the‏ throne of Jerusalem till the Babylonian exile‏ (cf. 2S 7 etc.) (beloved one? cf. BaX®™; ace.‏ to Sayce Mod. Rev. 1884, 158 ff. Rel. Bab. 53, 56 f. orig. Dodo,‏ דודה title of sun-god worshipped in Isr. ef.‏ n.divin. among E. Jordan Israelites MI”)—‏ alw. Ru Sa Ki (exe. 1 K 3% 11*"( y Pr 6‏ דוד Is Je; also 1 Ch 13° Ez 34™ 37% (c. 790 %.(;‏ Ze Ch (exc. 1 Ch 13°) Ezr Ne; also‏ .אןג דָּוִיד n.pr.m. David, son of ,שי‎ דרי Am 6° (where gloss acc. to Peters 79" 4?*

• From Working Girl: On Selling Art and Selling Sex (2023)

  I saw an image online, a drawing of a fantastical and hermaphroditic girl-child with their hair in pigtails tied with red ribbons at the ends, strange antlers or devil horns spanning outward from their head, naked, holding an enormous orange flower. A word bubble extends from their mouth, written in what looks like pencil: “Goodness didn’t you kids ever see a flower this big?” I fell in love with the drawing. I discovered it was by outsider artist Henry Darger. Of course. This drawing encapsulated ours for me: an ours that I did not own but that expanded far beyond my grasp; that flowed from looking at the right place at the right time; that I was primed to love because my grandmother had loved Darger’s work and taken me to a show of his drawings of which I remember only the colors and the eerie feeling; that evoked youthful innocence and destruction in equal measure; whose subject looked like me as a child, and how I appear sometimes now, in an approximation of myself as a child, with my Lolita style; that offered the magic of a huge flower, and of showing that flower—impossibly big and impossibly beautiful—to those you’re playing with. All of these things made it ours. When my boyfriend fucks me in our bed while the sun streams through our window, chokes me—that’s a vision of a sun-choked ours, of getting choked in the sun. These are the qualities of experience that make a life worth living: the art of the big flower; the erotics of the sunlight tickling the face of your beloved. This ours is akin to José Esteban Muñoz’s queer utopian futurity in Cruising Utopia, in which he argues that “queerness is not quite here; it is … a potentiality.” The ours, the moments free of capitalism, are potentialities. Muñoz’s use of hope is inherently anti-capitalist; he implores us to “dream and enact new and better pleasures, other ways of being in the world, and ultimately new worlds.” These things that happen, that coalesce, that we see or make or do that feel use-less and good; that are neither constructive nor destructive but something else entirely—a moving of worlds wholly unrelated to a reality before or after. Muñoz analyzes Frank O’Hara’s famous love poem “Having a Coke with You,” which goes on from the title, is even more fun than going to San Sebastian, Irún, Hendaye, Biarritz, Bayonne … I look at you and I would rather look at you than all the portraits in the world except possibly for the Polish Rider occasionally and anyway it’s in the Frick which thank heavens you haven’t gone to yet so we can go together for the first time and the fact that you move so beautifully more or less takes care of Futurism. Muñoz offers:

• From Wild (2012)

  There was nothing much to say. She’d been so transparent and effusive and I so inquisitive that we’d already covered everything. I knew that her love for me was vaster than the ten thousand things and also the ten thousand things beyond that. I knew the names of the horses she had loved as a girl: Pal and Buddy and Bacchus. I knew she’d lost her virginity at seventeen with a boy named Mike. I knew how she met my father the next year and what he seemed like to her on their first few dates. How, when she’d broken the news of her unwed teen pregnancy to her parents, her father had dropped a spoon. I knew she loathed going to confession and also the very things that she’d confessed. Cursing and sassing off to her mom, bitching about having to set the table while her much younger sister played. Wearing dresses out the door on her way to school and then changing into the jeans she’d stashed in her bag. All through my childhood and adolescence I’d asked and asked, making her describe those scenes and more, wanting to know who said what and how, what she’d felt inside while it was going on, where so-and-so stood and what time of day it was. And she’d told me, with reluctance or relish, laughing and asking why on earth I wanted to know. I wanted to know. I couldn’t explain. But now that she was dying, I knew everything. My mother was in me already. Not just the parts of her that I knew, but the parts of her that had come before me too. It wasn’t long that I had to go back and forth between Minneapolis and home. A little more than a month. The idea that my mother would live a year quickly became a sad dream. We’d gone to the Mayo Clinic on February 12. By the third of March, she had to go to the hospital in Duluth, seventy miles away, because she was in so much pain. As she dressed to go, she found that she couldn’t put on her own socks and she called me into her room and asked me to help. She sat on the bed and I got down on my knees before her. I had never put socks on another person, and it was harder than I thought it would be. They wouldn’t slide over her skin. They went on crooked. I became furious with my mother, as if she were purposely holding her foot in a way that made it impossible for me. She sat back, leaning on her hands on the bed, her eyes closed. I could hear her breathing deeply, slowly. “God damn it,” I said. “Help me.” My mother looked down at me and didn’t say a word for several moments.

• From The Whole Lesbian Sex Book: A Passionate Guide for All of Us (2004)

  I love being taken care of by my Daddy. I have a whole bunch of fantasies where I’m a little girl and am made to please Daddy. Subjects that we keep under wraps—such as taboo fantasies and imagined complicities—may ignite an especially potent erotic charge. Do you feel guilty about having rape fantasies? Do you feel that your erotic response to your abuse history means you secretly wanted it? Not so! Sex is sex, and abuse is abuse. Sex is consensual, and abuse is not. If you’re ever confused about this, compare a negotiated sexual encounter with an incident of abuse. The differences will be quite apparent. See “S/M Is Not Abuse (Abuse Is Not S/M),” below, for clarity. In fact, the more you practice negotiation—whether for an S/M scene, a sexual encounter, or a trip to the Grand Canyon with your lover and her two kids—the more easily you’ll recognize the difference between the negotiated consensuality of a mutually respectful relationship and the nonnegotiated manipulation and coercion of abuse. Still confused? Try concocting a (non)erotic (non)play list of your abuse history. List everything that happened between you and your abuser. Now, write “yes” next to every item you desired and explicitly negotiated to achieve. What? Not writing yet? Of course not! Abuse has nothing in common with consensual sex. Some women consciously choose to play with the dynamics of abandonment and abuse because they want to understand themselves. Hardly a substitute for a good therapist, yet an S/M partner can help you facilitate a scene in which you get a good look at yourself. What about that traumatic experience is yet unresolved? Where do you feel shame? Where do you feel pride? You can even turn the story around. S/M can be a tool in healing. As Patrick Califia writes, “As a top, I find the old wounds and unappeased hunger. I nourish. I cleanse and close the wounds. I devise and mete out appropriate punishments for old, irrational ‘sins.’ I trip up the bottom, I see her as she is, and I forgive her and turn her on and make her come, despite her feelings of unworthiness or self-hatred or fear…. A good scene doesn’t end with orgasm—it ends with catharsis.” 1 My girlfriend surprised me by planning a scene to fulfill my rape fantasy. It was a powerful experience because the concept of rape was twisted and turned into sexual play between two women who trust and care about each other. Being a rape survivor, I thought our rape scene might bring up some old issues, but it actually didn’t at all. The scene was totally about us—my girlfriend and me. S/M Is Not Abuse (Abuse Is Not S/M) S/M play is consensual.

• From The Great Believers (2018)

  He wheeled himself closer, which didn’t work, and so he wheeled himself back instead. He wasn’t crazy: It was a paper clip. Not the first thing you’d notice, but now that he was looking, yes, and there was another, too, closer to his brow. The shapes were distinct, and she’d accomplished something very much like a glint of light off each. Had they been her idea, or Ranko’s? Had he worn his crown again that day, as he posed? Had she added them after he died? How odd, how inexplicably devastating: paper clips. He wanted to laugh, to shout it to the gallery, to explain—but he could only ever tell Fiona. To Esmé he just said, “That one’s my favorite.” A man beside Yale’s chair said to his wife, “I heard they had to include everything , it was part of the lady’s will.” But here it hung, and it was an artifact of love. Well—of a hopeless, doomed, selfish, ridiculous love, but what other kind had ever existed? —It had been an hour and five minutes, and Cecily ran out to start her car. Esmé wheeled Yale backward to the exit, and he had one last chance to look down the gallery. The people in their beautiful clothes, the edges and corners of paintings and sketches. Esmé said, “Oh, tar , it’s snowed!” There was a good half inch on the ground; Cecily’s shoes had made soft prints on their way to her car. Yale hugged Fiona goodbye, told her to look closely at Ranko’s self-portrait. He said to Allen Sharp, “If her parents come near her, pretend you’re having a seizure or something.” Allen ran ahead, scraping the snow out of the wheelchair’s path with his dress shoes. Allen and Esmé lifted him together into the passenger seat, got the oxygen tank between his legs. Cecily said, “It’s a quarter after. Yale, I hate this.” It was already dark out. Cecily drove up Sheridan Road far too fast, illuminated snowflakes shooting past them. “Slow down,” he said. “It’s not worth a crash.” “If we crash,” she said, “they’ll take us where we’re going anyway. And faster.” “We’ll be fine,” Yale said. “It was worth it.” “Was it? Are you happy?” She checked his face. “I liked Ranko’s stuff. I really did.” “She loved him,” Yale said instead of contradicting her, instead of saying it was okay if she hadn’t liked it at all. “Even if she shouldn’t have. I think it was one of those things where you can’t let go of how you first saw the person.” “We never let go of that,” Cecily said. “I mean, even for parents—that’s never not your baby, you know?” “I think you’re right.” As he got sicker, it was more and more often how he thought of people—of Charlie, certainly, and of everyone else here or gone: not as the sum of all the disappointments, but as every beginning they’d ever represented, every promise.

• From The Whole Lesbian Sex Book: A Passionate Guide for All of Us (2004)

  I love the exchange of power that goes back and forth from butch to femme. As a butch, I protect my femme partner from harm and am dominant in sex. Yet, at the same time, I am a willing servant to my femme’s desires, putting her needs and wishes before mine. When I walk, my hips swish and my breasts bounce and my thighs roll with the fluidity that is my femininity. High femme is not an everyday thing. But when I go out to cruise or party, it borders on the drag-que enly. This excites me—and attracts butches with balls! While I am very pleased to be a woman, my body is read as a heterosexual one because of the way I live in it, move in it, and adorn it. I don’t like that. But it’s the femme conundrum. I am a transgendered stone butch and it is crucial that my lover respect my body image. I have a female body but like to be touched in a way that honors my masculinity. I prefer for my butch to “run the fuck.” I love the feeling of lying in my lover’s arms as she ravishes me! It thrills me to see the love and lust in her eyes as she makes love to me. Sometimes, when my femme has orgasmed many, many times, I lie with my head down by her cunt and use a vibrator, imagining it as my dick. Both of us find this very hot and I have powerful orgasms this way. I adore only feminine women—and men, for that matter! I am sassy and willful and not easy to “take down” sexually. I need the authority, confidence, and uncompromising identity of a stone butch. Being a stone femme means that I do not want a sex partner who expects a 50/50 sexual relationship (she gets me off and then I get her off). If a butch softens when she’s with me and lets me touch her genitals and breasts without resignifying them as male parts, then I most likely would not want to be with that person sexually again. Ten Myths About Butch/Femme 1. All bi girls are femme. Not so. Some very hot, tough butches identify as bisexual. 2. Butches are stronger than femmes. Masculine = strong; feminine = weak. Butch = top; femme = bottom. If you believe this, go straight to your room and don’t come out until you have read Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex. 3. Butches don’t cry. See #2. ’Nuff said. 4. You have to locate yourself somewhere on the butch/femme continuum. Femmy butch. Butchy femme. Tomboy. Boychick. Butch. Femme. Nope! You’re not required to label yourself. And if you identify one way now, that may not be your lifelong identity. Gender can change over time.

• From The Whole Lesbian Sex Book: A Passionate Guide for All of Us (2004)

  What about partners? Partnering with someone in the midst of healing from sexual trauma is not easy.Your support and love really can help your partner heal. Just the fact of being loved, over time, with all of her triggers and all of her history, can be healing. Certainly, your steadfast presence can help your partner to learn how to trust. Most importantly, by taking care of yourself—including your sexual fullness—you can stand as a reminder to your partner that sexual wholeness is possible. On a bad day, that will go a long way toward encouraging your partner to stay present for herself. Here are some suggestions for you: • Be authentic.That doesn’t mean being selfish. It means that you remember who you are. What are your concerns? What are your aspirations? • Negotiate sexual frequency, sexual activities, affection, and nonsexual touch. Be proactive. • While you may negotiate a time out from sex—for either of you—remember that your sexual heat is good. It’s good to be sexual. It’s good to want sex, to get horny, to get hot, to feel turned on. • Masturbate. Keep that intimate connection with yourself vital. • Don’t take it personally when your partner gets triggered. You didn’t cause the trauma, and you didn’t do anything “wrong.” For survivors of sexual trauma, it is inevitable that triggers will arise during sex. • Don’t shrink your shared sex life in order to avoid triggers. Keep gently expanding the comfort zone—for both of you. • Develop a trigger plan. The Survivor’s Guide to Sex suggests survivors create a detailed, step-by-step plan for handling triggers during sex. You can create a similar plan for yourself. How do you want to handle triggers that come up for your partner? By listing your options ahead of time, you’ll have more choice in responding to triggers that arise during sex.You can talk about it with your partner and come up with a joint strategy for maintaining your shared erotic life while respecting the need for safety—for both of you.8 • Don’t be a martyr or a savior. You can’t “save” your partner from the pain of healing by sacrificing your own well-being. • Get your own support, including touch. Along with friends, therapists, and discussion groups, support can include massages, bodywork, and hugs from friends. Two helpful resources for both survivors and partners: The Survivor’s Guide to Sex: How to Have an Empowered Sex Life After Childhood Sexual Abuse, by Staci Haines, and her DVD, Healing Sex: The Complete Guide to Sexual Wholeness. Bathe your senses. Aromatherapy candles, sensuous fabrics, dreamy lighting, fresh flowers, music, art…. Engage all your senses to feed your libido. Share your fantasies and invite your partner to share hers. For some women, hearing a sexy story can be just enough stimulation to get the motors humming. On the other hand, some women prefer to keep their fantasies private—a personal source of sexual potency whose power, one woman explained, she doesn’t want to dilute in the telling.

• From The Whole Lesbian Sex Book: A Passionate Guide for All of Us (2004)

  We have questions about our sexualities and gender that cannot be answered in a weekend, and ongoing themes that evolve over years of exploration. Our partners are more than steadfast support or critical witnesses. Our partners hold a long view of us. With years behind and years ahead, they can help us keep our sexualities in perspective. They have watched the changes in our sexual practices, desires, and bodies. They can help us remember our stated wishes and help us keep the momentum of our sex lives rolling. My partner likes my body. She knows I am not happy with being in too feminine a body and accepts my masculinity. I had fears of telling her about this until a year ago, as my ex always told me I was too masculine. She gets upset, though, that I don’t like my breasts being touched but has come to understand why. She is the first one to accept me as I am. Building on shared experience, sex can become more intimate—and more intuitive, playful, and vital—and can bring into being a more deeply intimate relationship. I didn’t realize just how much love can affect fucking, but it really does make a difference. I think great sex is very contextual. What I enjoy depends on the person I am with, and the relationship I have with them. I guess my ideal would be to be with someone I love completely, and be intimate with them, sexual with them, regularly—as an expression of our love for one another. This deepening of erotic intimacy is something that many people long for. They may be disappointed to discover that love and commitment don’t guarantee a satisfying sexual connection—or sustain sexual interest over the long haul. (Faced with that disappointment, they may conclude their partner is not “the one” and move on.) Thankfully, the qualities that make for thriving sexual relationships are ones you can cultivate, both in yourself and in your relationship. What Kind of Sex Life Do You Want, Anyway?Before you can say what kind of relationship you want, it helps to think about what kind of sex life you envision for yourself. You may have completed a Yes/ No/Maybe exercise—either as a way of discovering your desires (see chapter 2, Desire and Fantasy) or in negotiating with a partner (see chapter 7, Communication, and chapter 15, Play Nice!…). You probably already know which of the activities in the “Erotic Play” list in chapter 2 you’d like to try. Now take it a step further. Sure, you know you’d like to receive cunnilingus from your partner for hours, nonstop, if it were possible. Or that your best orgasms occur when you’ve got a chrome dildo in your butt and your partner squeezes your nipples as you hold a vibrator to your clit. But what kind of erotic life would you like?

• From The Great Believers (2018)

  Slim gray slacks, a coral shirt open at the neck, his cheeks glowing with attention. Her famous friend. How bizarre life was. —By the time Fiona made her way around the sectional wall, Jake was off toasting with some loud young Brits, and Julian had circled back. He said, “Is everything okay with your daughter?” “Lord only knows.” “It’ll be okay. I can tell it will. I know these things. And my God, she’s just like you.” Fiona laughed. “She’s nothing like me. That’s the problem.” “Are you kidding ? Don’t you remember yourself? You were the most bullheaded little—you were practically feral! Remember when you told your parents you’d climb in the coffin if we couldn’t all come to Nico’s vigil?” “There was no coffin. I said I’d stand up and tell everyone.” “Okay. But you see my point.” “That was the only way I could survive.” Julian smiled. “It’s not a bad way to be. Hey, are you really moving here?” “I actually think so, yes. For a while. I can’t believe I’m saying that, but I am.” “Well I’m proud of you. Hey, have you seen it yet?” “Seen what?” “Well, two things, really. Three things! Did you see me ? Do I look okay?” “You looked smashing, Julian.” “Okay, two other things. This one.” He took her shoulders and angled her toward a glowing light box mounted on the wall and covered, every inch of it, with black and white contact sheets. As big as a picture window. Some strips of photos hung vertically, some horizontally. Occasionally they crossed each other. The piece was titled 1983 . Magnifying glasses, strong ones, hung at each side—great, because Fiona didn’t want to dig her readers out of her purse. She started arbitrarily on the top left. A strip of some kind of party, too many men in each frame to make anyone out. A strip of a face she thought was Katsu Tatami’s. Four in a row of what looked like that year’s Pride parade, men waving flags. There was the really tall guy who used to sell loose cigarettes on Halsted. There was Teddy Naples. They kissed and danced and lounged on couches and wore ridiculous clothes and flipped pancakes and sunbathed on the rocks. She was hoping to see Nico there, but she didn’t. Julian said, “Look.” There she was herself, an arm around Terrence. In a restaurant, it looked like. She never remembered being that pretty, that happy. Claire was just an egg in an ovary, one more thing Fiona hadn’t ruined yet. At the left of the shot was Yale, mouth open, talking to someone out of frame. A mirror behind them all, in which you could see a room of tables, diners, and Richard himself, camera flash for a head. She wanted to climb into the photo, to say, “Stop where you are.” Wasn’t that what the camera had done, at least? It had frozen them forever. Stay there , she thought.

• From The Ultimate Guide to Orgasm for Women: How to Become Orgasmic for a Lifetime (2011)

  It may be that sex is not so much a body thing for me, so what someone does to me is not necessarily very important as long as their intentions are good. Sex for me is about union and connection and power exchange. Sex is not merely genital, but energetic; the whole person is involved, not just a bundle of nerve endings. I find the pacing, the arousal in tandem with my lover, the gestures, and courtship (from romantic to dirty) to be essential. Lots and lots and lots of foreplay, all day, all week, words, gestures, one finger touching one place. Being tuned in to your lover is vital. I have only had one lover who could reliably make me come with her hand. When I asked her what her secret was, she said, “Somehow I plug into your experience so that I experience what I am doing to you as though I were you.” And being tuned in to your own body is just as important. Anna Marti says: For me the challenge is to daily inhabit my body in ways that I become totally engaged, whether working, eating, loving, or playing, because the erotic experience truly is about every cell in my body becoming involved, directing my mind and my heart so that my body may become involved; the sexual, creative, ecstatic cells are not solely located in the genitals. If you manage all this, maybe you will have orgasms like these: Quite often during clitoral stimulation it will feel as if my partner has just found a particular spot that pierces up through me, which then sets off waves rolling down on me (I don’t know what the waves are—sort of like warm internal strokes). An intense orgasm will combine these physical waves with waves of emotion, and very occasionally these will be strong enough to make me cry. When the clitoral situation is combined with penetration, the orgasm is more about a sense of completion and wholeness. I can lose myself completely in a powerful orgasm. It’s like being ripped out from inside. It’s like planets colliding. Yes, the earth moves, but not before the Milky Way dissolves. CHAPTER 3 THE PHYSICAL EXPERIENCE OF ORGASM

• From The Ultimate Guide to Orgasm for Women: How to Become Orgasmic for a Lifetime (2011)

  Learning to love fully involves opening your heart. Opening your heart is not easy if you have learned to keep it closed to prevent experiencing pain and loss. You will experience pain and loss when you open your heart, but you will also experience the love, joy, and connections with other beings that make life worth living. Opening your heart may be a long, slow process. You open it a little and then close it a little, open it, close it. A great orgasm can sweep away the blocks that build up in day-to-day living. When my heart is open, love comes flowing in from whomever or whatever I’m loving, as well as from the earth, the sky, the goddess. However, I am not saying that if you open your heart, you are going to want to be sexual with everyone, nor that if you are sexual with lots of people, you are going to open your heart to them all. Be compassionate, but be discerning about who you open up to sexually. Just because you are sexual with someone doesn’t mean it is wise to open your heart to that person on a long-term basis. The person who was with you when you had that great orgasm (or two or three or four…) might have been wonderful last night, but you made the love happen together, and chances are that you can also experience love in other ways and from other sources. When you’ve just had an incredible orgasm, you may reach a kind of altered state where you are highly receptive or suggestible. In this state you can become disoriented and make unwise decisions. When I’m with the right person it’s easier to slip out of “reality” in that intimate space so that I get the feeling we are both caught up in something bigger than us, which I regard as the life force / source. I don’t often orgasm in this situation—lots of intense coming feelings with no real peak—but if I do come it’s a definite merging / boundary-less space of all body / no body rolling and tumbling like a pebble at the edge of the ocean. Post-orgasm, I have real difficulty focusing and “see” my lover quite differently. Whether or not you end up in a long-term relationship with any lover, allow the love to empower you in yourself and in your life. I’m not saying you shouldn’t stay with one person for the rest of your life. If that’s what works for you, then go for it. But this model simply doesn’t work for everyone, and if it doesn’t work for you, then don’t beat yourself up over it. There are plenty of other models that might work for you. They are, or should be, a matter of individual choice. I suppose one day when I’m ninety I might feel differently, but right now I can’t imagine one person fulfilling me sexually.

• From The History of Sexuality, Vol. 3: The Care of the Self (1984)

  But if love and sexual abstention thus coincide during the entire adventure, one has to understand that it is not simply a question of defending oneself against outsiders. This preservation of virginity holds within the love relation as well. The lovers save themselves for each other until the time when love and virginity find their fulfillment in marriage. So that premarital chastity, which brings the two fiancés together in spirit so long as they are separated and being put to the test by others, keeps them self-restrained and makes them abstain when they are finally reunited after many twists of fate. Finding themselves alone in a cave, left to themselves, Theagenes and Chariclea “took their fill of ardent embraces and kisses. In a moment they were oblivious of everything else. For a long time they clung to each other as though grown into one person, satiating themselves with a devout, virginal love, communing with one another through the flow of hot tears, and commingling only by the chaste means of their kisses. For Chariclea, when she found Theagenes making some too impulsive advance of manly ardor, restrained him by recalling his oaths, and his attempt was easily checked. It was a light matter for him to be temperate, for although mastered by love he could be master of his pleasures.”7 This virginity is not to be understood, then, as an attitude that is set against all sexual relations, even if they take place within marriage. It is much more the test preparatory to that union, the movement that leads to it and in which it will find its fulfillment. Love, virginity, and marriage form a whole: the two lovers have to preserve their physical integrity, but also their purity of heart, until the moment of their union, which is to be understood in the physical but also the spiritual sense. Thus there begins to develop an erotics different from the one that had taken its starting point in the love of boys, even though abstention from the sexual pleasures plays an important part in both. This new erotics organizes itself around the symmetrical and reciprocal relationship of a man and a woman, around the high value attributed to virginity, and around the complete union in which it finds perfection. * In Chaereas and Callirhoe. the separation occurs immediately after marriage; but the two spouses preserve their love, their purity, and their faithfulness throughout their adventures. [image file=image_51.jpg] ConclusionA whole corpus of moral reflection on sexual activity and its pleasures seems to mark, in the first centuries of our era, a certain strengthening of austerity themes. Physicians worry about the effects of sexual practice, unhesitatingly recommend abstention, and declare a preference for virginity over the use of pleasure. Philosophers condemn any sexual relation that might take place outside marriage and prescribe a strict fidelity between spouses, admitting no exceptions. Furthermore, a certain doctrinal disqualification seems to bear on the love for boys.

• From The Ice Storm (1994)

  He had changed elementary schools once too often. He had fallen from a railroad bridge, into a swift river, while being carried by his father. Almost drowned. His parents had rancorously parted. He told her all this. He couldn’t remember which story he had used. He couldn’t remember much in the way of specifics except a dim, smoky room, the warmth of tweed, the excess of that drummer, the swift tempo of a new attachment. —You should read———, was what Elena first said to him. Some mystic. Emanuel Swedenborg. Or Mme Blavatsky. She said it smilingly, flirtatiously, the way other people winked and said nice tie . He hated her for it; he hated that he didn’t recognize the name. Had she been a guy, Hood would have spit his rye in her face. Nevertheless, he was deep in conversation, drunkenly rambling. Talking about that railroad bridge again. He was uncomfortable with her and that seemed to be a part of things from the beginning. Fraternity brothers happened by, eased in and out of the conversation. Dances came and went. Long clarinet solos. The drummer had them all applauding. That drummer scattered himself around the kit as though the story of that evening, the story of that party, were his responsibility. As though he had to be sure to pass through every percussive mood, every tonal color, before the evening could pass away. It was a race against time signatures. Anything could happen in the world, Hood was telling his future wife. Profit and loss. Communism and capitalism. It didn’t make a bit of difference. He could be accepted at the training program at Chase Manhattan or First Boston or he could not. The notches in a whaling harpoon, the destruction of northeasters, the tedium of duck blinds—he couldn’t decide which opinion to give first. All that counted was a flashy car, a girl who would wear slacks and wasn’t afraid to smoke. Elena didn’t say anything. She was as easy to read as some German theological tract. But she didn’t chide him either. She didn’t mention his weight and she didn’t muss his hair. It broke his heart in the end how she just kept listening and listening and he kept saying things he didn’t want to say. In this way, Hood figured out that love was close to indebtedness. In settling this debt, he married Elena O’Malley. Family was a bad idea he got because there were no other ideas in those days. It was the outer margin of one little universe and nobody knew what lay beyond it. There were years full of evenings when the habit of marriage astonished him, when its repetition comforted him like nothing else ever had. Then this period came to an end. He had two kids, a house and a lawn mower, a Pontiac station wagon with simulated wood paneling on the side, a new Firebird, and a Labrador retriever named Daisy Chain.

• From The History of Sexuality, Vol. 3: The Care of the Self (1984)

  We see then that virginity is not simply abstention as a preliminary to sexual practice. It is a choice, a style of life, a lofty form of existence that the hero chooses out of the regard that he has for himself. When the most extraordinary occurrences separate the two protagonists and expose them to the worst dangers, the gravest will of course be that of falling prey to the sexual cupidity of others. The greatest test of their own worth and their mutual love will be that of resisting at all costs and of saving that virginity which is essential to the relationship with themselves and essential to the relationship with each other. Thus the novel by Achilles Tatius unfolds as a kind of odyssey of double virginity. A virginity exposed, assailed, doubted, slandered, safeguarded—except for an honorable, minor lapse that Clitophon allowed himself—and finally justified and certified in a sort of divine ordeal, which makes it possible to proclaim concerning the girl, “she is still the same, up to the present day, as when you sent her away from Byzantium; it is to be put down to her credit that she remained a virgin when surrounded by a gang of pirates, and overcame the worst of them.” And speaking of himself, Clitophon can also say, in a symmetrical fashion: “You will find that I have imitated your virginity, if there be any virginity in men.”6

• From New Testament Words (1964)

  (iii) It is an obedient love. Repeatedly the NT lays it down that the only way we can prove that we love God is by giving him our unquestioning obedience (John 14.15, 21, 23, 24; 13.35; 15.10; I John 2.5; 5.2, 3; II John 6). Obedience is the final proof of love. (iv) It is an outgoing love. The fact that we love God is proved by the fact that we love and help our fellow men (I John 4.12, 20; 3.14; 2.10). Failure to help men proves that our love of God is unreal and untrue (I John 3.17). Obedience to God and loving help to men are the two things which prove our love. We now turn to the other side of the picture—man’s love for man. (i) Love must be the very atmosphere of the Christian life (I Cor. 16.14; Col. 1.4; I Thess. 1.3; 3.6; II Thess. 1.3; Eph. 5.2; Rev. 2.19). Love is the badge of the Christian society. A church where there is bitterness and strife may call itself a church of men, but it has no right to call itself a church of Christ. It has destroyed the atmosphere of the Christian life and is bound to be suffocated; it has lost the badge of the Christian life and is no longer recognizable as a church. (ii) Love is that by which the Church is built up (Eph. 4.16). It is the cement which holds the Church together; the climate in which the Church can grow; the food which nourishes the Church. (iii) The motive power of the Christian leader must be love (II Cor. 11.11; 12.15; 2.4; I Tim. 4.12; II Tim. 3.10; II John 1; III John 1). There ought to be no place in the Church for the man who takes office in the Church for the sake of prestige and prominence and power. The motive of the Christian leader must be solely to love and serve God and his fellow-men. (iv) At the same time the attitude of the Christian to his leaders must be that of love (I Thess. 5.13). Too often that attitude is an attitude of criticism and discontent and even resentment. The bond of the Christian army is the bond of love between those of all ranks within it. Christian love expands in ever widening circles. (i) The Christian love begins in the family (Eph. 5.25, 28, 33). It is a fact not to be forgotten that a Christian family is one of the finest witnesses in the world to Christianity. Christian love begins at home. The man who has failed to make his own family a centre of Christian love has little right to exercise authority in the wider family of the Church.

• From The Journals of Sylvia Plath (1982)

  That is so true. If I can digest changes, in my novel. Not swell tumid with inarticulateness. As I am now. Or to gibbering—my old blue devil—black-white, black-white. I get quite appalled when I realize my whole being, in its refusing and refusing after my 3-year struggle to build it flexible and strong again, my whole being has grown and interwound so completely with Ted’s that if anything were to happen to him, I do not see how I could live. I would either go mad, or kill myself. I cannot conceive of life without him. After twenty-five years of searching in the best places, there is just no one like him. Who fits. Who fits so perfectly and is so perfectly the male being complement to me. Oh, speak. I am so stupid. Really stupid.… I could write a terrific novel. The tone is the problem. I’d like it to be serious, tragic, yet gay & rich & creative. I need a master, several masters. Lawrence, except in Women in Love , is too bare, too journalistic in his style. Henry James too elaborate, too calm & well-mannered. Joyce Cary I like. I have that fresh, brazen, colloquial voice. Or J. D. Salinger. But that needs an “I” speaker, which is so limiting. Or Jack Burden. I have time. I must tell myself I have time. Only the weight of Irwin Shaw and Peter De Vries and all the witty, clever, serious, prolific ones oppresses me. I feel, were it not for Ted, I’d sell my soul. It is so ironic to think of nobly writing and writing on this novel, and sacrificing friends & leisure & turning out a bad bad novel. But I feel I could write a best seller. I’m sure of it in a kind of reverse way: I am sick with what I am writing—but am sure it can grow, be rewritten [in]to an art-work. In its small way. About the voyage of a girl through destruction, hatred and despair to seek and to find the meaning of the redemptive power of love. But the horror is that cheapness and slick love would be the result of the thing badly written. Well-written, sex could be noble & gut-shaking. Badly, it is true confession. And no amount of introspection can cure it. I suppose I will get these papers done, & for a while get rid of this albatross of pressure & write well in vacation. I’ve done it before—the papers—& not died. But I must get back into the world of my creative mind: otherwise, in the world of pies & shin beef, I die. The great vampire cook extracts the nourishment & I grow fat on the corruption of matter, mere mindless matter. I must be lean & write & make worlds beside this to live in. Monday, March 11, 1957 . I have thought: a pox on my “She thought-she felt” banal novel. Read The Horse’s Mouth: that’s it .

• From The Mating Mind: How Sexual Choice Shaped the Evolution of Human Nature (2000)

  Most primates follow the general animal pattern of male sexual competition and female choosiness. But when the costs of male sexual competition and courtship are high, males also have incentives to be choosy. When male mate choice becomes important, sexual selection affects females as well as males. In monogamous marmosets and tamarins, females compete to form pairs with quality males and drive off competing females. In single-male harem systems, the dominant male’s sperm can become a limiting resource for female reproduction, and high-ranking females prevent low-ranking females from mating through aggression and harassment. In multi-male groups, females sometimes compete to form consortships and friendships with favored males. Such patterns of female competition suggest some degree of male mate choice. When the costs of sexual competition and courtship are high, males have an incentive to be choosy about how they spread their sexual effort among the available females. Males compete much more intensely for females who show signs of fertility such as sexual maturity, estrus swellings, and presence of offspring. Like females, some male primates also develop special friendships with particular sexual partners. It may not be romantic love, but, at least among some baboon pairs, it looks pretty similar. Our closest ape relatives, the chimpanzees and the bonobos, live in multi-male, multi-female groups in which sexual choice is dynamic, intense, and complicated. Under these relentlessly social conditions, reproductive success came to depend on social intelligence rather than brute strength. Both sexes compete, both sexes have dominance hierarchies, and both sexes form alliances. Sexual relationships develop over weeks and years rather than minutes. Many primatologists and anthropologists believe that our earliest hominid ancestors probably lived under similar social and sexual conditions. Constant sociosexual strategizing in mixed-sex groups was the legacy of our ape-like ancestors. It was the starting point, not the outcome, of sexual choice in human evolution. Pleistocene MatingIf we could look at the Earth through an extremely powerful telescope a million light-years away, we could see how our ancestors actually formed sexual relationships a million years ago. Until NASA approves that mission, we have to combine evidence from several less direct sources: the sexual behavior of other primates, the sexual behavior of modern humans who live as hunter-gatherers, the evidence for sexual selection in the human body and human behavior, and psychological findings on sexual behavior, sexual attraction, sexual jealousy, and sexual conflict. A number of good evolutionary psychology books already review this evidence, including David Buss’s The Evolution of Desire. A consensus is emerging about the key aspects of ancestral life, though there is still vigorous debate about many details.

• From The Journals of Sylvia Plath (1982)

  I feel my life linked to her, somehow. I love her—from reading Mrs. Dalloway for Mr. Crockett—and I can still hear Elizabeth Drew’s voice sending a shiver down my back in the huge Smith classroom, reading from To the Lighthouse . But her suicide, I felt I was reduplicating in that black summer of 1953. Only I couldn’t drown. I suppose I’ll always be overvulnerable, slightly paranoid. But I’m also so damn healthy & resilient. And apple-pie happy. Only I’ve got to write. I feel sick, this week, of having written nothing lately. The Novel got to be such a big idea, I got panicked. But; I know & feel & have lived so much: and am so wise, yes, in living for my age: having blasted through conventional morality, and come to my own morality. Which is the commitment to body & mind: to faith in battering out a good life. No God, but the sun anyway. I want to be one of the Makaris: with Ted. Books & Babies & Beef stews. The paraffin heater dear Dr. Krook loaned us gurgles down its lucent blue petrol and the glowing red wire dome warms the room. Afternoon sun reflects from the windows of the duplicate brick houses across the street. Birds whistle & chirr. Above the orange brick chimneys & chimney pots, white clouds drift and fray in a rare blue sky. God, it is Cambridge. Let me get it down in these next three months—the end of my 22 months in England. And I told myself, coming over, I must find myself: my man and my career: before coming home. Otherwise—I’ll just never come home. And now: both! As I never dreamed: a sudden recognition scene. Act of faith. And I am married to a poet. We came together in that church of the chimney sweeps with nothing but love & hope & our own selves: Ted in his old black corduroy jacket & me in mother’s gift of a pink knit dress. Pink rose & black tie. An empty church in watery yellow-gray light of rainy London. Outside, the crowd of thick-ankled tweed-coated mothers & pale, jabbering children waiting for the bus to take them on a church outing to the Zoo. And here I am: Mrs. Hughes. And wife of a published poet. Oh, I knew it would happen—but never thought so miraculously soon. Saturday, February 23rd, just almost an exact year from our first cataclysmic meeting at the St. Botolph’s party, we woke late, grumpy & full of backwash tides of sleep, depressed over Ted’s 3 rejections of poems from The Nation (after 3 acceptances in a row, a stupid letter from M. L. Rosenthal, rejecting them for the wrong reasons), Partisan Review (oh, so interesting, but we are simply cram-full with poems) & Virginia Quarterly . Ted is an excellent poet: full of blood & discipline, like Yeats. Only why won’t these editors see it??? I muttered to myself.

• From History of the Christian Church: The Complete Set of Eight Volumes (1858)

  Without disparaging the sacraments or disputing the authority of the Church, the German mystics sought a better way. They laid stress upon the meaning of such passages as "he that believeth in me shall never hunger and he that cometh unto me shall never thirst, " "he that loveth me shall be loved of my Father "and "he that followeth me shall not walk in darkness." The word love figures most prominently in their writings. Among the distinctive terms in vogue among them were Abgeschiedenheit, Eckart’s word for self-detachment from the world and that which is temporal, and Kehr, Tauler’s oft-used word for conversion. They laid stress upon the new birth, and found in Christ’s incarnation a type of the realization of the divine in the soul. German mysticism had a distinct individuality of its own. On occasion, its leaders quoted Augustine’s Confessions and other works, Dionysius the Areopagite, Bernard and Thomas Aquinas, but they did not have the habit of referring back to human authorities as had the Schoolmen, bulwarking every theological statement by patristic quotations, or statements taken from Aristotle. The movement arose like a root out of a dry ground at a time of great corruption and distraction in the Church, and it arose where it might have been least expected to arise. Its field was the territory along the Rhine where the heretical sects had had representation. It was a fresh outburst of piety, an earnest seeking after God by other paths than the religious externalism fostered by sacerdotal prescriptions and scholastic dialectics. The mystics led the people back from the clangor and tinkling of ecclesiastical symbolisms to the refreshing springs of water which spring up into everlasting life. Compared with the mysticism of the earlier Middle Ages and the French quietism of the seventeenth century, represented by Madame Guyon, Fénelon and their predecessor the Spaniard Miguel de Molinos, German mysticism likewise has its own distinctive features. The religion of Bernard expressed itself in passionate and rapturous love for Jesus. Madame Guyon and Fénelon set up as the goal of religion a state of disinterested love, which was to be reached chiefly by prayer, an end which Bernard felt it scarcely possible to reach in this world.

• From History of the Christian Church: The Complete Set of Eight Volumes (1858)

  To the Christian virtues of prayer and love she continually returns. Christian love is compared to the sea, peaceful and profound as God Himself, for "God is love." This passage throws light upon the unsearchable mystery of the Incarnate Word who, constrained by love, gave Himself up in all humility. We love because we are loved. He loves of grace, and we love Him of duty because we are bound to do so; and to show our love to Him we ought to serve and love every rational creature and extend our love to good and bad, to all kinds of people, as much to one who does us ill as to one who serves us, for God is no respecter of persons, and His charity extends to just men and sinners. Peter’s love before Pentecost was sweet but not strong. After Pentecost he loved as a son, bearing all tribulations with patience. So we, too, if we remain in vigil and continual prayer and tarry ten days, shall receive the plenitude of the Spirit. More than once in her letters to Gregory, she bursts out into a eulogy of love as the remedy for all evils. "The soul cannot live without love," she wrote in the Dialogue, "but must always love something, for it was created through love. Affection moves the understanding, as it were, saying, ’I want to love, for the food wherewith I am fed is love.’ "372 Such directions as these render Catherine’s letters a valuable manual of religious devotion, especially to those who are on their guard against being carried away by the underlying quietistic tone. Not only do they have a high place as the revelation of a pious woman’s soul. They deal with unconcealed boldness and candor with the low conditions into which the Church was fallen. Popes are called upon to institute reforms in the appointment of clergymen and to correct abuses in other directions. As for the pacification of the Tuscan cities, a cause which lay so close to Catherine’s heart, she urged the pontiff to use the measures of peace and not of war, to deal as a father would deal with a rebellious son,—to put into practice clemency, not the pride of authority. Then the very wolves would nestle in his bosom like lambs.373