Sex and Sentiment

So St. Valentine’s Day is next Thursday. Normally I just tend to call it Valentine’s Day but God says she’d rather like it if I didn’t leave off the saint part and, well, who am I to argue.

St. Valentine’s Day is our national celebration of romance. Sure kids get to exchange “be my valentine” cards with just about anyone without any hint of romance, but that’s pretty much just to get them hooked on the idea and to let them feel a part of things while they’re still too young for romance of their own. I expressed that feeling to God and so she asked me just what my definition of “romance” was. Well, I leapt straight to the word “love,” but almost before I had it out I knew that that wasn’t enough. After all, we love our parents, but we certainly don’t romance them. Likewise our kids.

So then I suggested that romance is a mixture of love and sex, but that still doesn’t seem right; mostly because you can love somebody romantically without having sex with them. But I have to wonder if you can love someone romantically without wanting to have sex with them. I don’t like fuzzy definitions. I don’t like it when a supreme court justice says he doesn’t know how to define pornography but he knows it when he sees it and I don’t like it when we use words like “love” and “romance” without having clear definitions of what they mean.

But not liking it doesn’t get me out of it this time.

So is romance just love with sex? Certainly, when I’ve discussed “romance novels” with some of the women who read them they’ve admitted they’re a kind of “soft porn,” though without even the level of sex that comes with those things that actually admit to being soft porn. So could that mean that romance is sort of sex without the genitals? And if it is, is that what the nuns get when they marry Jesus? Well, I don’t know, and even though I asked, God wouldn’t say, so I guess I’ll have to muddle on with only the fuzziest definition for a while longer

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1 Comment

On February 8, 2008 at 11:22 pm

Romance is easy to define; it means a language based on Latin a really long time ago, right? Okay, maybe that’s not what you meant.

I think that romantic love is more about getting all mushy and sentimental and less about lust or partnership or any of those other things that I think go into a fulfilling significant-other kinda love. I’ve had flirtations that are all about feeling sexy and making the other person feel sexy and not much at all about wanting sex. I think that I’ve had crushes that I would define as romantic, flushed with warm, fuzzy daydreams and unrealistic ideals but that weren’t about wanting sex either. And I’ve wanted sex from people who didn’t once inspire any feelings I would call romantic. I think that lust and romance are just two different ingredients that may or may not be in the love one feels for another, but that they are separate from each other. They’re separate from love too, a person can have romantic feelings for someone they don’t know well enough to really love. Romance is the natural equivalent of beer-goggles. It puts things into a softer, more forgiving, focus and sets a fertile ground for feeling all those other things. That’s what I think.

–Crystal

 

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