@CaptainHarley I’m 55 now, and nothing has diminished since I was 16. In fact, I think it’s stronger now. Actually, I lied. There is one difference—my physical stamina. Sex is aerobically challenging, and while my libido and my cock are always willing, I have to be a little slower and take more breaks to recover these days.
It’s not what I thought would be happening when I was this age. I’ve had a challenging libido all my life—and it has always been dissatisfied. I thought things would get easier when I started to slow down, but the slowing down isn’t happening. I’m glad now, but for a while it was really frustrating. Fortunately things are getting a bit better.
I’m not sure I know how to address the issue of the relationship between sex and everything else for me. I never seem to make myself understood.
For me, sex is meaningless without love. Love is made up of all kinds of things, but one aspect, of course, is conversation—or as a friend of mine once put it: you have to want to fuck her brain, and she has to want to fuck yours.
Just as sex is kind of meaningless without love, for me anyway, love is meaningless without sex. I can not separate them. It has to be the whole package, or I do not feel like I love or am loved. Yes there is friendship love and companionate love and filial love, but those are different things. They are strong and maybe deep, but they do not have a dimension that complete love has.
Love for a mate, for me, goes places that you can get no where else. You can’t get there without sex or conversation, or a spiritual connection or any of the other stuff we associate with that kind of love.
Even so, I think there are a lot of different levels of sex associated with this kind of love in other people. I think some people don’t need any sex at all in order to feel that kind of multi-dimensional connection with a mate. Some people need it only a few times a year. Others once a month or once a week or once a day or two or three or five times a day.
If I had my druthers, I’d be a once or twice a day (on average) kind of guy. But the reality is that I’m in a once or twice a month marriage. Neither here nor there. What I want to know is why we are the way we are—whether we need it “all” the time or hardly ever need it. Does sex mean something different to people? Do some people think sex isn’t even part of a spiritual relationship? Where do these notions come from? What experiences lead to our varying levels of sexual desire or of meaning we attach to the sexual component of a relationship.
For me, there could be nothing more important. It takes me a great deal of energy to cope without it, although that’s what I do. I cope. If I lost the ability to perform, I would find some way around it. Maybe I don’t need penetration, but I do need to be wrapped around someone in an embrace as tight as that of a boa constrictor. I need to be together in a way we cannot tell ourselves apart. It makes me whole.
Some people think this isn’t healthy. We should be complete all on our own. And in a way, I do feel complete as long as I know she is out there. But if I feel disconnected, I quickly get lonely, and if it lasts too long, I get depressed and if that lasts to long, I get suicidal. I do not do well all by myself. I think that humans are tribal creatures and we are not evolved to be alone. It is built into us to need to be a part of a community. I don’t think we make sense outside of a community. Or outside of an intense dyadic relationship.
That is my experience, of course. I know other people don’t need very close relationships. There are others who don’t need sex. Others who would be happy living for years with no contact with anyone else. Why? What’s the difference? How can we explain my intense need to connect versus someone else’s intense need for solitude?