One thing that I have learned in studying the way of the Romantic is how contrary its ways are to my Christian upbringing. I had the problem of too much faith. Most self-professed Christians have the good sense to temper their faith with Reality. They know that in life you get what you work for, whereas I believed that God would provide all that I required and all the tools that He required for me to fulfil his divine plan. The result was that I never learned the skills and tactics necessary for a successful life.
Along these lines, I believed that the physical world was irrelevant. It was a necessary burden to carry until we transcend to the reality of the Heavenly Kingdom. As a result, I denied the physical. When the beauty of St. Peter's Basilica surrounded me all I could see were the peasants conned through the selling of indulgences to pay for it. I was the kind of person Oscar Wilde referred to in his preface to The Picture of Dorian Gray, when he wrote, "those who find ugly meanings in beautiful things are corrupt without being charming.
Perhaps another factor was the transient nature of the physical. At a young age I realised that the toys that brought so much joy on Christmas morning were little more than junk at the bottom of the toy box by June. In love, the woman who worships the ground you walk-on one day and swears eternal love decides the next day that you are no better than the dirt under her feet and trades you in for another model. Then there were the unfulfilled desires and the accompanying disappointment. However, in the realm of the mind, all fantasy becomes reality. They are constant and true, require no effort, there is no failure to achieve, and these dreams can never forsake you. No wonder I came to value the realm of the idea over reality. It is a potent drug.
There was another influence. When I was growing-up in Los Angeles, there seemed to be an obsession with "fun". "Was it fun?" "Did you have fun?" "This will be fun." I was a goth goddamit. We don't do "fun". Fun is the pursuit of the shallow empty-headed creatures polluting the Malibu coastline. In my prejudice, alternative rejection of mainstream values, and of course a desire to be cool and completely unmoved, I rejected the pursuit of fun and just got-on with the burden of existence. Besides, I had a higher, enlightened, spiritual calling. I had no time for fun and base-physicality. Boy, did I get it wrong.
There is another aspect of physicality – the sexual nature of human existence. On one level I saw it as something that a man does to a woman to satisfy his carnal desires at her expense. This was reinforced by the popular image of the man who, once satiated, rolls over and falls asleep. I never wanted to be seen as such a man. Then there is the concept of the gentleman who does not take liberties with a woman. On another level, I saw sex as a divine act leading to the union of two souls. Beyond that, I saw true love as more Platonic and almost familiar in nature and beyond the base physicality of mere sex.
I am writing this anti-pleasure mentality out very clearly and precisely, but this ideology was not always completely clear and precise to me. As children we are thrown into this thing called reality and seek to identify and understand all the things that we find under the sun. Once labelled, these concepts are filed and automatised as part of our preconceptual worldview. Such concepts are the invisible hands pulling our strings and only reveal themselves through our feelings. The test is to go deep and discover these preconceived notions and challenge them in the light of new understanding.
I find humour in the expression, "I know my own mind" or any variation of it. From watching Derren Brown and studying some pop-psychology, I have come to the conclusion that most of us do not know our own mind. Half the time, our minds are up to no good behind our backs. That is why it is important to understand our feelings and motivations.
I had moved beyond these ideas of sex on a conscious level, but not on a pre-preconceptual level, which is the source of the feelings driving our actions (and our sexuality). While trying to embrace the here-and-now rational hedonism of the Romantic, I was being restrained emotionally by the preconceptual expectations of my religious upbringing and a fear/worry of the potential consequences of my actions. I had become the Push-me Pull-you from Dr. Doolittle trying to move in two opposite directions at once.
The pursuit of pleasure seems so natural. Human emotions probably developed from our primitive impulses involving the acquisition of food and sex as essential values. The constant pursuit of values still drives us, though now our values and the emotions they evoke are far more complex. I would agree with the Epicureans, though I would argue for a rational hedonism that promotes long-term and consistent pleasure through the acquisition of values rather than risking everything positive for the pleasure of the moment or the "if it feels good, do it" mentality.
However, most religions advocate the rejection of the physical as a path to spirituality and this has permeated most secular approaches to morality. We are therefore trained to reject pleasure on moral grounds while simultaneously we pursue pleasure as a basic human need. This contradiction must find resolution in the psyche.
One way that the mind accomplishes this is by compartmentalisation of the psyche. It is almost like multiple personality without the psychotic aspect. People do not have one unified personality. We are multifaceted beings. Sometimes we assign beliefs to one aspect of ourselves that are contrary to those that we assign to another. For example, the corrupt lawyer is one personality when he is at work and another when he is at church. This is not a conscious hypocrisy, but hypocrisy nonetheless. He must address and find resolution to these conflicting belief systems.
In my case, I developed an internalised sex life. This allowed me to preserve the sanctity of the love I felt for my partner while still satisfying my sexual impulses in a private, clean, sanitised, and easily hidden reality of the mind. Any proper Romantic would be disgusted by my behaviour. I was rejecting the pleasure and beauty of reality for soul-destroying fantasy. As with the corrupt lawyer, I was operating on a preconceptual level that I never reconciled with my conscious beliefs. The psychological affects and consequences of this pattern of behaviour have been catastrophic for me during the course of my life, which I have only recently come to understand.
I appreciate that I am sharing rather personal information to complete strangers, my dear reader, however, I believe it to be an important point to share. I am not the only person to have suffered from the repression of the natural drives towards pleasure in the name of a moral code completely divorced from reality. The solution is to develop and ingrain a new moral code more in keeping with reality.
If we hold that there is no God and no afterlife, then the pursuit of happiness through the acquisition of values becomes the primary purpose of existence and the repression of this impulse serves only to devalue existence. How horrible it is for me to discover that the life is about fun. The shallow mundanes of my youth were right. The one with the most toys does win. The purpose of morality then is to create a code of conduct conducive to this pursuit happiness, whatever happiness means to you, and we must ensure that our preconceptual beliefs are consistent with our conscious beliefs to allow us to achieve that happiness.
Returning to my personal example, I have learned that sex is not something that men do to women rather it is a shared act intended for mutual pleasure. It is a gift a man gives to a woman as much as it is a gift a woman gives to a man. In an exclusive relationship, it is the glue that binds the couple together as an expression of their union and their love. It is a man's way of telling a woman that she is desirable and that she is loved and can therefore feel loved by him exclusively above all women. In this regard, the gentleman is the man who indulges her desire for pleasure and not the man who withholds it with miserly disregard.
This last statement reminds me of something I read in Philosophy in the Boudoir by the Marquis de Sade. "...is a man saying something disagreeable to you when he reveals his desire to enjoy you? Absolutely not! He's paying you a compliment! Then why respond with insult and abuse? Only a moron could think in those terms....But the world is populated by dull imbeciles who believe that you are being disrespectful when you confess to them that you find them suitable for pleasure." I myself think that a gentleman may compliment a woman by expressing this sentiment provided the context is appropriate and manner charming. I think few women would find a statement like, "I gotta get me some of that" from a fat, drunken fool to be desirable.
I have come to believe that sex can be devoid of love, but romantic love cannot be devoid of sex. Confusing this issue often can lead to confusion and pain. Someone may feel loved when they are not or they may feel unloved when they are. This is also why relationships often end due to sexual problems. It is not the act itself, but the role of sex in the relationship as an expression of love that is important.
It has been said that men are torn between the archetypes of the Madonna and the Whore. On the one hand a man wants the pure woman to raise his children and on the other he wants the sexy woman who gives him pleasure. Likewise, women want to be both respected and desired. I found myself morally against viewing a woman as the "whore" despite my male desire and encouraging my perception of her as the elevated Madonna on a pedestal. I recently disovered that in the past the more I came to love a woman, the less I desired her sexually. There was this ingrained belief that it was wrong to view someone you loved as an object of your lust. The trick is to attain a balance. The question is not a choice between the Madonna or the Whore, for a woman must be both the Madonna and the Whore to her partner.
I have had four major relationships in my life. I believe that I had varying degrees of love for each of these women. However, each of these relationships ended in less than two years. I have thought long and hard on all the myriad reasons why they failed when less loving couples seem to persist beyond reason. Was it me? Was it her? Was it money? Was it maturity? Of course there is no one reason but the dynamic of two people caught in a dance, however I believe the pivotal reason stems from my rejection of pleasure due to my religious programming, repression, and the negative habits born in my attempts to reconcile my inner contradictions. Not just sexually, but a complete withdrawal from physical space into the realm of my mind. One might say I was too self-absorbed in my own thoughts to really enjoy life and therefore my life with the women I loved. Once more I must tip my hat to the long-suffering muse who taught me this valuable life lesson despite my resistance.
Some Romantics were raised free from the constraints of religion and encouraged in their pursuit of happiness. Then there are those like me who must struggle to break free of the shackles restraining them and learn how to exists as free men must exist, without fear of reality. Ultimately, it is fear that causes people to hide within themselves rather than engage reality. Idealism promotes the act of entering into your mind as a retreat from reality, whereas Romanticism promotes a constant engagement of reality in the endless pursuit of pleasure, real pleasure with all the benefits to soul, body, and mind that comes from it.
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