As I said before, I’ve never been in a lust-driven relationship. Never been in one where even the initial reason for hooking up was some variant on “I like your body and I want to do you”. I really need to try that, at least once in my life, if only to see what it’s like. Occasionally I meet someone just in the course of ordinary life and we hit it off, but most often I run a personal ad and/or reply to one and we get to know each other via email. There’s usually a romantic relationship established long before I have any inkling of what the other person looks like, or vice versa.
For me, the ideal situation is to love many people, some of whom you currently have a sexually active relationship with, but all of whom you continue to love after that mercurial inclination has moved on to focus on someone or someones else.
When I love someone, I want for them good things. If some of those good things take place in some other fellow’s bed, that is not an insult to me, it’s just her being human and having a normal, varied, lusty appetite.
There’s also a difference between being “in love” and loving someone, and also a difference between plain-old having the physical carnal hots for someone and being “in love” with someone. There are three, not two, of these categories. Being “in love” isn’t going to happen in a shallow, insuffiiciently intimate situation. It feeds on romantic appreciation for the other person’s thoughts, dreams, nuances of behavior, and on tenderness for the other person’s vulnerabilities, and the caring warmth from it is entirely genuine and heartfelt, and yet it is distinctively sexual, yea even biochemical, complete with some nasty withdrawal symptoms. What I’ve just described is not “love”, it’s being “in love”. Not that they can’t overlap, but they are different things. Love endures longer, usually; it interferes less with your clear head, doesn’t tend to make you sigh and doesn’t tend to disrupt your sleep patterns and eating patterns. It does tend to inspire obsessional thoughts and behavioral patterns. It doesn’t tend to last, it isn’t in any fashion “objective” or an expression of one’s “true and permanent” whatever. Nope, for all that it isn’t trivial or superficial, it is nevertheless very strongly chemical, hormonal, and of the day.
Now, you can promise someone you’ll never respond if and when you get that feeling for someone else. You can keep true to that promise (at the cost of quite a bit of short-to-medium-term misery if it does happen). You can write off having those feelings ever again in your life once they are no longer attached to your relationship with the person to whom you made the promise (and the “in love” feeling does tend to move on, it is transient in nature). Do note, however, that if you decline to make any such promise, love (which is, if you’ll recall, a different thing from being “in love”) will tend to persist; there’s really no reason I can think of outside of selfishness and jealousy to keep you from loving and caring deeply and thoroughly for this person if she falls “in love” with someone else and pursues the experience for its many delights and joys.
Love, unlike being “in love”, doesn’t tend to be a one-at-a-time thing. While you may not have time in your life to remain closely entertwined in the lives of dozens of people, you can do so with a more manageable number, and except for time there’s just no sense of limits there. While you can’t really promise to always love someone (who can promise what they’re going to feel?), you can testify to what you do feel, and acknowledge the importance of it and pledge to keep each other special in your lives. And people do, and these are the relationships that last a lifetime.
