A shopworn shibboleth heard often in various permutations from people who fearfully shirk from reality is that lust is dirty and craven and superficial while love is divine and transcendent and meaningful. This pretty lie probably has its basis in early religious texts, which pegged (heh) lust as one of the seven deadly sins.
And yet, without lust there would be no love. Much philosophy, supernatural or secular, which reveres the concept of endearing, lifelong romantic love must necessarily also revere lust for bringing its only begotten son — love — into the world. Evidence for this cosmically bonded relationship between lust and love abounds in personal experience. (Who here ever fell deeply in romantic love with someone they didn’t also sexually lust for, at least at the beginning of the relationship?)
CH knew this intimate entanglement between lust and love, long ago, before the “manosphere” was a twinkle in the blogosphere’s eye:
We here at the Chateau have in the past written that it is just as easy — in fact, may even be easier — to fall in love and begin a healthy long term relationship with a woman after having sex with her on the first date as it is with a woman who has made you wait for weeks or months before having sex. […]
Pure, feral lust is a necessary prerequisite to romantic love. A love not undergirded by animal lust is not a romantic love at all. It is, at best, a companionate love, or an affectionate love, or a phony love that two losers convince themselves to feel when no other options are available. So why delay the inevitable? If you feel hot for each other, go ahead and consummate on the first date! You won’t poison any budding relationship that might follow.
Now there is evidence from ♥SCIENCE♥ that… HO HUM… once again vindicates another vantage point in the Heartiste worldview.
Lust: Sexual desire forges lasting relationships.
People often think of love and lust as polar opposites—love exalted as the binder of two souls, lust the transient devil on our shoulders, disturbing and disruptive. Now neuroscientists are discovering that lust and love work together more closely than we think. Indeed, the strongest relationships have elements of both. […]
Brain imaging is revealing the distinct but interlocking patterns of neural activation associated with lust and love.
Lust is most likely grounded in the concrete sensations of the given moment. Love is a more abstract gloss on our experiences with another person.
Powerful lust conceives enduring love. And when lust wanes, love — romantic love at any rate — follows in its dissipating wake.
This provides ample justification for the player’s intuition that the best relationships are the ones that begin passionately, and sooner rather than later. The bounder who collects his bounty on the first date is more likely to segue into a loving long-term relationship than is the idealistic betaboy supplicant who dutifully waits ten dates for a scrap of tepid snatch.
That three date rule is more than just a game strategy for avoiding the curious cruelty of a cockteaser; it’s also a litmus test for the presence of irrepressible lust, which in turn heralds the prophetess of love. If you, or she, can hold out longer than three dates, your future love, should it come, will more closely resemble a candle flicker than a blast furnace.
This CH-embracing study also lets the air out of feminist bromides that women have to sleep around in order to determine with whom they’re sexually and temperamentally compatible. Such hogwash. If love is kin with lust, then the first man who inspires a woman’s convulsive orgasms can be, and likely will be, the man she falls in love with, or dreams of falling in love with, or regrets having let his love slip away. Such a man needn’t be her twentieth lover any more than her first lover.
And temperamentally, lust has a way of enabling superlative post hoc rationalizations of compatibility.
No, women who assert a “need to sleep around to find the right man” are playing the age-old hamster game known as “I keep getting dumped because I’m a foul skank, but I can’t tell myself that or the razor blade will start to look very inviting.”
With love,
CH
[crypto-donation-box]
