How To Think More About Sex (School of Life)

Postcoital sadness often settles over a couple.

Beneath the kiss itself, it is its meaning that interests us – which is why the desire to kiss someone can be decisively reduced (as it may need to be, for instance, when two lovers are already married to other people) by a declaration of that desire – a

To most ears, such an admission would sound rude (perhaps even cruel), animalistic and vulgar.

We should try to locate the good and the beautiful beneath the layers of habit and routine.

It lies in the power of certain great works of art, however, to induce us to revisit what we think we already understand and to reveal new, neglected or submerged enchantments beneath a familiar exterior.

Would there not therefore be a certain wisdom in redrawing our expectations, depathologizing and destigmatizing our so-called ‘failures’ and sometimes just turning over to the other side of the bed, ready to accept without rancour, with stoic calm, some of the necessary compromises of long-term love?

The specifics of what we find ‘beautiful’ and what we find ‘sexy’ are indications of what we most deeply crave in order to rebalance ourselves.

We avoid sex not because it isn’t fun but because its pleasures erode our subsequent capacity to endure the strenuous demands that our domestic arrangements place on us.

eagerly against our lovers’ most private and ‘contaminated’ parts, kissing, sucking and thrusting our tongues inside them and thus symbolically lending our approval to their entire selves, much as a priest will accept a penitent, guilty of so many transgressions, back into the fold of the Catholic Church via a chaste kiss on the head.