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Is
it love or is it sex? Love and sex keep coming
back as subjects for discussion like the proverbial bad penny. So let's get
to the point: Love pertains to the rational and what is civilized in us and
sex pertains to the beast in us. When we think of love we
think of such things as duty, loyalty, promise to
love, affection, selflessness and even sacrifice. And in the person we love
we attribute such qualities as kindness, interesting, intelligent, caring,
anyway you know what I mean! Sex is probably more straight forward. We are basically looking, both
metaphorically and literally at height, proportions, ratios, sizes, body
mass, aesthetics, facial features and the rest of the body put together. And
of course a bottle of The first question we must
address ourselves to is this, why do we, as individuals and as a society, generally
insist on forming love type relationships and not sex type relationships? I mean, when was the last
time your morality mentor told you 'sex fulfils our lives' as opposed to
'love fulfils our life?' You get the idea? Nevertheless, sex is very
easy to measure even in a quasi scientific manner, something we cannot always
do with love. We can always draw a bell curve on the type of person we are
sexually attracted to. Moreover, we have all sorts of manuals and
'DIY' type of books written on the subject. Another aspect about sex is that
we can have verifiable objective confirmation that sexual behaviour is taking
place. What criteria do we use to objectively verify love type
behaviour/event? What would a forensic science/methodology for love be like? Most of us can easily decide
whether someone is sexually attractive and, more importantly, whether we are
sexually attracted to them. A task I'm sure we can do in a few seconds. This
might not be that hard to believe, after all scientists are able to give a
fairly accurate description of the universe, and its future state, three
minutes after the big bang; i.e. the Lepton epoch. Surely, three minutes
worth of information about us mortals is enough to make a reasonable
judgement about our sexual attraction (or not) towards someone? After all, we
have been doing this for much longer than dating the universe. Although this three minutes
idea sounds ridiculous, the consequences ought to be serious. Let's
look at it from the other side of the fence. As I was thinking about this
issue on the train I counted at least six very pretty women; QED. Admittedly,
I'm not the best of guinea pigs, but I'll have to do. No matter how pretty these
women on the train may have been, I certainly didn't feel like doing anything
about it. However, the time when I was bitten by the love bug, I did feel I
ought to do something about it, and I did. And if behaviour is anything to go
by, hundreds of thousands of couples are doing something about it as you read
this piece. The consequences of all this are: Firstly, we are very quick to judge and have
an opinion about matters of sex and at face value much quicker than matters of
love. Secondly, in matters of love we feel obliged to always act and do
something about it, which is not the case with matters of sex. Of course
there are always exceptions to the rule, but I'm not going into all that. On the other hand, epistemologically,
we are more convinced about matters of love than sex, given that we feel we
ought to do something about it. And the emphasis here is on the ought more than anything else. In other words, love is
based on conviction whereas sex is based on instinct. This also suggests that
action based on love takes its authority on something more than just the
physical. For example, the act of
promising is a moral act. The same goes for the idea of duty. Once again we also
encounter in love the idea of altruism. Love seems to find its justification
in some sort of moral system which sex does not need at its foundation. At this point we have
reached the situation where matters of love are: based on conviction rather
than instinct, supported
by some form of moral foundation, pertain to conscious epistemology and to
voluntary action. Of course we can go back to the slippery slope argument of
reductionism and into chemicals firing in the brain or the metaphysical
entity of Devine fate. But I'm not doing that because the average passenger
on the Clapham omnibus is not into this sort of thing in a big way. However, there is something
the average and not-so-average passenger on the Clapham omnibus does care
about: rejection. We can and are rejected for both sexual advances and
declarations of love. We can accept that sex is
pure instinct and a numbers game; for example, we just do not fit in
someone’s sexual attraction bell curve. But how can we be rejected when we
are in love? What’s more certain than love? And why are we rejected when
justice and reason seem to be on our side? After all, love matters seem to be
on a higher plane than sex matters; i.e. the plane of moral and rational
order. Basically, what is going on
when we are rejected by someone we love? Exactly with whom are we in love with
when we are rejected? And what are the consequences of rejection? I call this
the Lover's Dilemma in an article* I wrote on this issue. To bring all these ideas
together, reason tells us that we ought to look at rational motivation (for
want of a better expression) instead of just the physical in matters of love.
This is not to say that sex and love are incompatible. There are two issues
here: how important are the love
component and the sex component in a relationship? And even more important,
which comes first, love or sex? It's not unreasonable to
assume that we can decide on sex matters within the first three minutes of
meeting someone. If, however, it takes us longer to fall in love how do we then know that love is not the manipulation of the
long arm of determinism? That is, sexual determinism. Now here is a funny idea,
can we fall in love in less than three minutes? Can we, in other words, fall
in love before the long arm of determinism gets hold of us? Could it be that
there is more to the expression, love at first sight, than meets the eye? Take care * http://www.shef.ac.uk/~ptpdlp/newsletter/issue92.html |