@charliecompany34: Your way of looking at this is so dissociated, I don’t know how to express it. You clearly separate spirit and body. Perhaps this is your greatest loss. You seem to believe it is possible to have sex without being spiritually involved with the other person, and that the only way to engage spirits is in marriage. Marriage confers morality to sex? That’s like saying marriage confers morality to spiritual life!
Now, I will admit that there are a lot of people out there who believe in friends with benefits and fuck buddies and the like. They also attempt to separate pure pleasure from spirit. Personally, I think, whether hedonistic or fundamentalist, you all are missing something crucial, and your lives are sadder for that.
In my experience, we are holistic beings. The mind-body duality is an artificial construction of what it is to be human, and it misleads a lot of people into an unhelpful understanding of human completion. Mind, body, and spirit are connected all the time, and can not exist without each other.
People like to think as if a mind is a separate thing from a body, but without a body, we cannot think. Indeed, without a limb, our thoughts are changed. Much of the nervous system is in the body, and many of our memories are stored within the body. So much so, that when we lose a limb, we can not accept this on a subconscious level, and that is where the “phantom limb” experience comes from.
And of course, without mind and body, there can be no spirit. Spirit is that which unites all that we consider ourselves. It is a metaphor for the essence of personhood. Some believe spirit can survive the death of the body, but I don’t think anyone claims there can be a spirit without there having been a body. The unity of these aspects of personhood is absolutely necessary.
If what I believe is true, then people who think they can separate mind from body are deluding themselves. Sex is an incredible expression of spirit, no matter who you do it with. You are giving an incredible act of creativity, both metaphorically and literally. Even if you use all kinds of birth control, the body doesn’t know that. It behaves in this “spirited” way, dragging mind and spirit with it (because they can not be separated).
Sometimes we experience spirit on our own, but it is easier with a partner, and even easier in a group. Sex is one way of accessing spirit. So even if you don’t believe you love the person, you are loving the person, if you are engaging voluntarily. It might only be a tiny bit of love, but it is there, and people who do it become attached, at least a little bit, again, both literally and metaphorically.
Another thing that you say that doesn’t make sense to me is this romantic idea of soul-mates. Relationships are built. They don’t happen by magic. A lot of people disagree with me about this, I know. The myth of love is very powerful, and is reinforced by Disney and religious folks all the time, but in my experience, there are always problems in relationships, and if you don’t have an excellent problem-solving mechanism, you will be very unhappy, and often the relationship will break apart.
If you enter the relationship with a different attitude—that you have to develop relationship skills, and that you have to be committed to solving problems together instead of believing magical love will get you through, you have a much better chance of success.
While it does matter who you are involved with; it helps if you share experience and outlook on life; that does not mean there is only one person you could have a successful marriage with. There are many people, especially if you have good relationship skills. In most of the world, couples don’t get to choose their own mates; parents do it for them. While not all of these couples have excellent relationship, many do, and love follows partnership. I believe that divorce rates are lower for arranged marriages, although there could be many reasons for this that are not related to the quality of the interaction between the partners.
Dissociation from body, and belief in the magic of soul-mates doesn’t come from nowhere. It comes from one’s personal history, usually a history in which difficulties are a big part. Sometimes a very authoritative parent or other authority figure (usually father). Sometimes privation. Sometimes abuse of some sort. Sometimes just a very difficult time, and exposure to a lot of violence. People develop this world view as a mental defense against the pain they have experienced. Order becomes very important to them, and they see rules and strict adherence to rules as the main way to maintain order. Strict order may work, but it comes at a cost—the cost is a separation of mind and body, which causes, to some extent, a loss of spirit, as well as a loss of creativity.
I’m sorry to have gone on so long. It just takes me a while to work through the things I’m thinking and to figure out how to express those ideas. If you have read all of this, I appreciate it, and if you haven’t, I totally understand.