...it's the ego lurking right behind it.

Taking your clothes off and, after a brief learning curve, becoming proficient at the sex act is not that difficult. The endorphin rush that comes as a reward makes the process seem effortless and full of endless possibilities.

The neurochemicals wear off. The lights come back on. The brain starts to heat back up. The ego feels compelled to protect this luscious escape with rules that benefit it's present incarnation.

What follows is stuckness. For some, not for everyone, romantic love and sex are a lifelong grail-esque quest that never seems to make any sense. We feel so good at the start, but things generally never seem to end with anything like the good feelings with which they began. Decoupling becomes a crime punishable by excommunication from the religion the ego would utilize to sanctify it's paucity of loving intention.

Newsflash: things end the way they begin. Just because I believe that my feelings mean that there is no continuity in relationship cause and effect does not mean that things are the way they seem. When relationship and sexual love are the means through which a temporary escape from the mortal coil are achieved, my ego can dress up and put lipstick on the ugliest of gorilla.

To love without setting the price for the reciprocal exchange -- to simply trust that love must and will return to itself in an ever increasing spiral of comfort and contentment -- requires faith in a belief that transcends the limits of the body's perceptual machinery.

But such a faith is not found inside of four walls with a lid atop, no matter how eloquent the speech, nor cravenly cruel the cause and effect formulae spewed from within that box.

The simple faith we are all given for fun and for free doesn't require a religion nor a ritual to accomplish it or sanctify its presence. Celebate or not, chaste or not, neurosis is neurosis and there was never a more neurotic time in my life than the times when I felt compelled by my largesse to brag about the lengths I was willing to crawl to be someone other than who I was created to be.

If chastity works for you, be glad that it is so. But be happy, too, for those who can give and receive sexual love without need of gifts beyond the present here and now. Be joyous and content that, "this too, shall pass," is so not only in painful times, but in times where time stands still as well.

The mind can heal the body, but the body can never heal the mind - it merely moves the symptoms around.

On the next occasion when I, or anyone else, finds it necessary to spin a rule of absolute existence out of whole cloth, please read more history, first. No empirical data exists to demonstrate, nor prove, in the human ability to successfully pass judgment on others, or even ourselves.

The ability to achieve absolute certainty in this life does not its accomplishment make.

...I have to say that it is much easier to cease thinking of a woman as a sex object when she ceases seeing a male as a success object.

But I don't think that's going to happen anytime soon.

So, men, please, continue the attempt of balancing your entire body weight on your left elbow for the amusement of the females you would attract, and women get to go on doing the judging of our relative (male) success with impunity.

I keep looking and looking for women who've risen above the battlefield, but I'm obviously not there yet because I still don't see them with any great frequency. Or, if I am seeing them and don't know what I'm looking at/for, I am absolutely terrified of the happy prospect of the daily joy to be found in cooperative coexistence.

I dunno. Maybe getting beyond the man I promised my broken and beaten mother I would never be has made me melancholy. Gone are the halcyon days when I could have all the sex and affection I wanted provided I was willing to play into the psychodrama of victimization and abuse from which I was reared.

If you think being a victim of the socialization of a war-state is tough, try actually changing the interior of a natural born warrior. In between then and now are alot of doors and choices for things one can not possibly interpret outside of actual experience. Imagine the alienation of a man whose father continues to play alpha male while his son simply offers an open hand and heart to rusty old tin soldier. Or a man whose long-term employer suddenly realizes that he is no longer a good "fit" for the lunacy that passes for toil in a fascist labor colony.

To lose one's self in the love of one's life is the only romance. Looking for great love steers one inevitably down a path where, "love's threshing floor," must have its way with you. Fitness does as fitness is.

Love yourself, love your life. Great love is as great love does.