Gustav Klimt - Danaë
How do they do it, the ones who make love
without love? Beautiful as dancers,
gliding over each other like ice-skaters
over the ice, fingers hooked
inside each other’s bodies, faces
red as steak, wine, wet as the
children at birth whose mothers are going to
give them away. How do they come to the
come to the come to the God come to the
still waters, and not love
the one who came there with them, light
rising slowly as steam off their joined
skin? These are the true religious,
the purists, the pros, the ones who will not
accept a false Messiah, love the
priest instead of the God. They do not
mistake the lover for their own pleasure,
they are like great runners: they know they are alone
with the road surface, the cold, the wind,
the fit of their shoes, their over-all cardio-
vascular health–just factors, like the partner
in the bed, and not the truth, which is the
single body alone in the universe
against its own best time.
I love how Olds calls our feelings of love for our lover “lov[ing] the priest instead of God.” We have a tendency, needy humans as we are, of “mistaking the lover for [our] own pleasure.” The sex is good, so we think it’s the giver that is good. We’re human beings. Physical bodies. And in our aspiration to be trans-physical (is that even a real term?), in our need to be more than just pure body, in our endless desire and wishes to be more than what we are, we refuse to accept the simple, earthly, natural pleasure we find during the act of physical sex and insist on making it ‘more meaningful’ and more transcendental, so we insist that it is not just the body that we love, but the person (soul/body/mind) that comes with the body. Why can we enjoy a dish prepared by someone without guiltily thinking that we have to love that someone, yet we don’t do the same when it comes to sex?
But my own question goes in the opposite direction to that of Olds. How do they do it, the one who love without making love? Platonic love. Isn’t that what we call it? But isn’t it just partial love? Impaired love? Even flawed love? Isn’t it just preparation for real love? And if sex is such a necessary component of love (proven simply by the act of physically consummating a marriage as the ultimate goal of love), then why claim love to be more prophetic, more noble, more worthy of humanity? And why claim that love can exist without sex?
Strictly my opinion:
Platonic love is flawed because love is better expressed through sex.
You can satisfy your lust by “yourself” (you don’t really need a partner for that, even though it’s not similar without a partner) but you can’t satisfy your need for love… it has to be an external factor.
You can replace a partner but you cannot replace the feelings ie you can replace sex but you cannot replace genuine love..
Platonic love is beautiful. It feeds the hearts more than it feeds the genitals.
You ask too many questions. Just get married.
I think the only people who can answer these questions are the ones who have experienced both: love AND sex.
Can’t help with this one :/
The sole fact that sex can exist without love means that they are two separate things.
Both give pleasure…sometimes hand in hand, but they’re not the same thing.
So hypothetically, platonic love can exist without sex, just as Olds’ poem suggest sex can exist without love…
How they do it is a whole other question though…we should find someone who can love platonically and maybe they can answer your question…if you do find one…please remember to share.
it’s true that both together give the ultimate pleasure of satisfying both the body and the soul, but if sex can exist without love then what’s stopping love from existing without the sex :p
i believe that platonic love can exist, strongly too, without the sex. even if it lasts for ever, without knowing whether it can be completed with sex or not, or if sex is ever an option for them.
well, if it comes eventually, then that’s a bonus for them :p , that they took they love to another/next level
“Love” is a word that is widely used and means something different to every single person. Similarly, it is contingently effected by time and events. Your views on love this second might be quite different than your views when you were eight-years-old.
It is one word, true, but it’s an amalgamation of different categories: expectations, feelings, emotions, backgrounds, etc., where each is a compilation of another set of different words (expectations: comfort, care, adventure, commitment, joy, affection and so on; feelings:longing, fulfillment, excitement, and others) and each person prioritizes different variations of the word.
So if for one person love is ephemeral, exciting, and challenging (who enjoys “the chase”), another might view at as commitment, steady and simply (who enjoys “settling down”). Thus, I don’t understand why people continue to speak of it as a universal term and attempt to analyze it accordingly.
Sex might be a critical component to some people’s version of love, but certainly not to everyone. Love can indeed exist without sex–and love is neither prophetic nor noble– because it is contingent, personal, and varied.
Hanan let me first tell you why I have always loved Klimt’s work so deeply. It is not just that he regarded women as creatures to love or to celebrate their femininity as a man who feels this genuinely within himself may do, but because I feel Klimt was a male artist who embraced and looked for the feminine aspects of his own ’self’ by means of his work. He rejoiced in it being there in the first place and was unafraid of the feminine side of his nature, was unthreatened by it. His work always makes me think of Carl Jung and the interplay of anima and animus within the psyche of both sexes. And even though Klimt’s paintings are highly sensual and feminine in nature (rather than erotic or sexual in my opinion), I always find such love emanating from them. Love in the spiritual sense, where sex the act is undertaken not just to fulfill the physical need of the body, but as an act of unity between two people. Klimt celebrates what is divine in the nature of true physical and spiritual unity between a man and a woman through the act of sex, the ultimate unity in which their commingled energies become divine. I see that theme so clearly in Klimt’s Danae, as Zeus in his ethereal form physically and lovingly enters and impregnates the imprisoned Denae, and we intrude on the moment of her sexual and spiritual rapture in their unity. The first time I physically viewed one of Klimt’s paintings up close and in person at the MFA in Boston, I wept. I have had this reaction to one other artist and one of his paintings: Cy Twombly’s “Quattro Staggioni” at the Tate Modern in London, and I have yet to be able to explain to myself completely why this is… this weepingly intense emotional reaction I have to these artists, Klimt and Twombly.
But I digress and ramble on and on as I always do because I am a chatterbox.
I happen to be really good at this love without making love thing LOL…
I grew up with a few wonderful and extremely honorable men who love me as strongly as I love them, but with whom the idea of sex is anathema for us… incestuous even.
Yes, real love CAN exist without sex. Platonic love does indeed exist. It is not a flawed love, it is not impaired or broken. It is an *aspect* and a *facet* of what love is. A way of loving. A manifestation of love. Real and true love does not have one singular way of expression or being. Sex is not love nor is it an act of love unless it is chosen or made to be an act of love in the desire to enter into a state of unity with another. To grow closer to their soul not just their body or brain, but their whole essence. And then it is a physical act manifesting a yearning for a closeness which encompasses the physical, emotional, spiritual states of the existence of the human that is the object of that love. And I think that kind of love is a very rare thing, a very rare kind that very few people actually feel or are capable of feeling and experiencing. Most “love” is about trying to fulfill some kind of need or deficiency in oneself, about satisfying some egotistical or physical need of the body and of life and it’s social requirements or dictates. And that is why most times in life, it isn’t really true or real love that occurs between two people but an imitation or a weakened attempt at it (and even sometimes, a perversion of it, a terrible lie of what love is).
To me, the only pure, true, real and most powerfully elemental love in this universe, is that of a mother for her child. That is the kind of love that is what most of us are really after in some primal unconscious way, more than anything I think….
Apologies for the length of my rambling epic comment
Apparently. Love doesn’t exist, platonically or otherwise. I hate to be the party pooper pessimist here .. but go ahead and read:
http://www.scienceblog.com/cms/blog/6883-score-romantics-1-cynics-0-17854.html
this might sound very simple, but i think love enhances sex
it is always alot more pleasurable, alot more fun even to practice that physical act of sex with some one you love, but then we fall into the problematic question of defining love in this case
i don’t know what love is exactly; i thought about it too long and read about it too much to the degree of really confusing myself
At some point, I think the blogger is obliged to reply to these comments. No? So here it goes:
amethystos. And sex better expressed through love?
disturbed stranger. You can feed your hunger with canned soup too but it is just as flawed and imperfect, especially when compared to home-made real soup. And Isn’t everything replacable in this recycle-able world of ours?
3baid. I love asking questions. And marriage never answered any. Give it a try.
this lady. Oh come on. Be a sport. I never tried death but I know I have opinions of it
F and Angel. Oh I’m pretty sure they live in separation of each other. I’m just wondering if they live fully, completely, away from each other.
nada faris. Hmmm. Ok. You have a point there. So a claim in either direction is thwarted by the fact that each claim supposes a universal truth. So you cannot fully argue that love and sex can be separated. See. We’re of the same opinion after all.
ms. baker. Your rambling epics are always welcome here.
s3ood. So love and cociane have the same effect? How very interesting
white wings. Apparently love is more scientific than we usually think of it. At least that’s what s3ood’s link claims. So maybe love can be measure after all, and as such, defined. How terrible!!