Until Sex Do Us Apart

Setting aside political correctness invites public excoriation. Sometimes, the ensuing aggravation has no redemptive value. Other times, it fosters meaningful debate leading to personal growth and social change. If people were only told what they want to hear, they would never hear what they need to know. What follows is not a moral lecture, but merely the exposition of my personal opinion regarding an issue that has been destroying the bond of love in human relationships.

Sex was once an act of utmost intimacy shared by two people in love. Sex is now an act of immediate physical gratification unbound by love. The result has been the degeneration of relationships, not to mention marriage itself. None of this is politically correct to say, but I own these words just the same. Sex worshipping has been destroying long-standing, meaningful relationships. It has transformed human beings into expendable objects used at will and discarded without hesitation. This is what experience and observation have taught me.

For ten years, I was in a relationship with a woman and for ten years, I was faithful. There were many times when I could have broken my vows of fidelity, many times when I was invisible to the most prying eyes. Even when living in distant lands, never was I enticed by other women, never was I coerced by solitude. Sometimes, I refrained from attending social gatherings because her absence meant my own. Other times, I distanced myself from friends because their lust was theirs alone. None of this was difficult. True love domesticates primal instincts.

Even after the relationship was over, never did I regret my fidelity. Abandoning it would mean abandoning myself. Others suggested I was wrong. They implied the woman I had loved did not share my perspective of life, nor my dream for the future. There were times when she had been unfaithful, which I did not know about. Judging by the company of her friends, who exchanged partners as if in a short-lived dance, this remained a possibility I could not discount. Still, my behavior would have been just the same. When she left me, she took only herself. When you betray someone who loves you, you only betray yourself. My heart was shattered, not my sense of self.

When confronted with a future where I now walked alone, many women offered to accompany me along the way. But the problem was always the same. Finding a woman who ascribed greater and lasting meaning to a relationship was a struggle fought in vain. They had all come from a long series of failed relationships that scarred them in ways they could not understand. Lovers were simply names crossed from the list of experience, past failures leaving an emptiness that led only to greater pain. They learned to see human beings as expendable, simply as a means to an end: the sexual gratification of a short-term company that never led to a meaningful exchange, one that could challenge time and in their memories remain.

From my vantage point in life, the problem has always been the same. Love has lost its crown in a world that worships sex. A world over which immediate physical gratification all reigns. While women race against their biological clocks to find a partner, men race against time to amass conquests. There are exceptions in between, but these are too few to name. If I have walked alone during these past few years, it was by one imposition alone. The price a man pays to find the woman who truly loves him, is to love her even while still alone.