Some Dreams and Thoughts about Love & Sex

Blogger is still give me problems when I try to upload pictures. Maybe there is too much traffic on Blogger at lunch time.

I’ve had dozens of dreams during my life in which I am back in school—either high school, my undergraduate university, or my graduate school university. Out of these dreams, the ones I dislike the most are when I am back in high school. In these dreams I have to go back and finish a couple of classes because later in life my reviewed transcript reveals that I didn’t in fact qualify for my diploma. These dreams are embarrassing and stressful because I am now some old guy sitting in on a class with sixteen and seventeen year olds. I am old enough to be the teacher, and in some classes I should be the teacher. Anyway, last night I had a dream that I was back at my undergraduate university, but the details are now hazy. I take these dreams to mean symbolically that I have more to learn in life or that I missed learning about something essential during those time periods in my life.

On Monday morning I woke up with that Huey Lewis and the News song in my head “That’s the Power of Love” (or is it “Power of Love”?). Have no idea why. I don’t particularly like that band from the 1980s. I figure it must have come up during my dreams that night. The song’s lyrics made me think about love and marriage though. I’ve been married for close to eight years now, and my wife and I have been a couple since 1995.

Some Thoughts:

It’s true that there are phases in a romantic relationship. You start off being passionately in love where you can’t get enough of each other, have lots of sex, and everything is shiny and new. At some point whether you’re living together, married, or whatever and you know each other well and have a few fights with each other under your belts, you start to see the other person more as a best friend. This is not to say that you still don’t have passionate feelings towards the other person and act on them, but they are less frequent. Some people call this process: falling in love, to being in love, to standing in love (some call standing in love a more mature or realistic phase of love). Then there are the stresses and chores of daily living that tend to keep you looking at your partner as more of a best friend or ally than a passionate love object: the grind of work, paying the bills, who does what chores and when, etc. My wife and I don’t have children, but I imagine the rigors of raising children tend to make you see your partner as even less of a passionate love object. You have less time and engery to do just couple things.

It’s in this phase of love when it is very helpful if you were wise enough to pick a mate that is generally fair, willing to apologize and make amends, wants both of you to be equal partners in the relationship and keep it healthy, and he or she recognizes that you both bring certain strengths and baggage to the relationship. While this doesn’t sound very romantic, I think these are key ingredients necessary to stay together.

As I mature, I see sex for more of what it really is. It is just sex. A neutral thing. Sex won’t make you important or powerful. It won’t change who you are. It won’t necessarily make you feel valued or loved or fill a void, though it can. Sex is different every time you have it, even with the same person doing generally the same things. Sex can be delightful and mind blowing, or it can be disappointing. Sex can be addictive. Sex and its pleasures are sadly ephemeral in their very nature. The acts of sex can seem ridiculous if you think about it from a certain viewpoint (e.g., the desire to put one body part inside of another body part, the friction of two bodies moving against one another, the awkward looking positions, the strange and silly things people say during sex, how germaphobia doesn’t seem to apply when you are kissing, licking, and touching someone you find attractive, etc.) Sex may be the only time when some people address God aloud.