One of the themes I want to develop in this blog is the relationship, tension, conflict, dichotomy or whatever you want to call it, between sexuality and spirituality. These have always been important issues for me, but rarely have I found a place where people can discuss these things openly and honestly, without the fear of judgment or excessive moralizing. Often people are in one camp or the other: either exceedingly sexual without any sense of the divine or the spirit, or even religious, or they are exceedingly spiritual or religious at cost of being prudish and puritanical. Yet I know there are many people out there who are both very sexual and very spiritual and feel perhaps lost in some strange purgatory between the two. Often that is how I feel, trying to balance these things, trying to have a spiritual life without being neurotically obsessed over sex, or trying to have a sexual life without losing my religious beliefs, many of which are complicated when it comes to sex and sexual desire.

One thing I  have been musing on recently when it comes to spirituality and sexuality is the necessity for love in our lives. Now by love I don’t necessarily mean romantic love, although I am not excluding it, but rather, the importance of love, of having loved ones in our lives, of being loved by others.

In the end, love is more important than fleshly things. Love lasts. Love is transcendent. Sometimes what seems so depressing about the whole PUA world (which I really don’t consider myself a part) is the complete lack of compassion towards others, the using of others for one’s own personal pleasure. In the short term this may seem fun, but in the long term I believe it is quite destructive. If I had to put this into religious terms, especially Christian terms, then I would consider that sinful. There are few worse things in life than callously using others for whatever reasons, whether it be sexually, financially, emotionally.  The complete lack of empathy, sympathy, and love towards others in the PUA world is disturbing. How can it not be but a destructive thing for all those involved, both men and women? If you read enough PUA material, you see the proof of this.

There is a certain unending loneliness to the perpetual conquest. One girl is never enough. You need more. Then when it is over, you need another. And another. It never ends. How much better to find someone you can love, and enjoy that love on a consistent basis. Love comforts in a way sex does not.

Christianity says that love is the essence of everything: the greatest of all three great theological virtues (hope, faith, charity) is love. I guess you could call me a romantic. As I mentioned above, I don’t like the harshness of the PUA scene. No, although I am an extremely sexual person, and the allure of cheap and easy sex is always there, I prefer to seek out deep, intense relationships with women. I can honestly say that I have rarely slept with a girl I did not have some degree of feelings for, and often those feelings were love.

If I had to chose, would I want a life of sensual pleasure devoid of love, or a life of love devoid of sensual pleasure, I suppose I would have to chose the later. Fortunately life is never this simple; but my preference is for deeper human contact than simply the carnal. The pleasures of the flesh are fleeting. Love, whether it be with family, friends or a lover, well that transcends the fleshly pleasures. I would rather feel a broken heart for a year than sleep with countless women and feel nothing. At least I know I am alive, that I experienced the fire of life, and that, despite my sexual habits, perhaps God understands and he understands because there was at least some degree of love involved.