Last week I started reading two very different books
at the same time. I do that a lot – read two books simultaneously. It’s a habit
I picked up from my husband a few years ago. The first book is a very
thoughtful, reflective memoir about one woman’s struggle with her faith. The
second book is a novel where a young, liberated female college student signs an
agreement to be totally submissive toward a billionaire businessmen. Two
totally different topics to be certain, but they both bring up interesting perspectives on love.
In Andrea Palpant Dilley’s memoir, Faith and other Flat Tires, she talks at
one point about her friend presenting her with the following allegory for love,
"Imagine
I was in a magical forest, he said, and down from heaven came two platters. One
held a rich three-layer cake and the other had a bologna sandwich."
The rich, decadent dessert was someone unique,
forbidden and the bologna sandwich, the plain, safe person that one ultimately
settles for as a mate. It is why I think as women we are drawn to the second
book I was reading, E.L. James’ Fifty
Shades of Grey. We are longing for that piece of cake we once devoured
because our love lives have become something that represents more of a plain
bologna sandwich on white bread staring back up at us from a cold plate.
Some find this book to be “Mommy Porn”, but I have a feeling there is a lot
more to the book than restraints, riding crops, and the like. In fact, I
think many women liked the books in spite of some of those things. People have
felt women are drawn to the story of Anastasia Steele and Christian Grey
because of the modern woman's inability to carry the entire burden that has
been placed on her by society. As she struggles to balance career, family and
other responsibilities she just wants someone to lighten her load. She wants
someone to take full control so she gets a break. And a book about a man taking
over her life is thereby, in a sense, liberating. But if that were the case
then a novel about a woman getting a really good housekeeper and financial
planner could have been just as adequate. Why sexual submission?
The reason is black and white and plain as day. It
has to do with that piece of chocolate cake. It has to do with the other “L”
word; lust. Our world has little understanding of lust. We put all our emphasis
on love. We watch romantic comedies about men and women slowly falling in love,
in a slow, low-simmering manner. We laugh with them until they tie the knot and
live happily ever after in their comfortable, humorous, cozy little lives. We
offer platitudes like love being the most powerful emotion in the world.
But here is simple proof that it is not. About eighty percent of the men who
cheat on their wives claim to love their wives. But lust for another woman has
superseded their love. In truth, lust is the most powerful emotion in the
universe. When we think of lust, we often think of the part associated with
sinning. We think of an illicit affair between the married man and his
secretary or a housewife and her old high school flame she has reconnected with
on some social network.
But lust is actually an important part of marriage. I
pity the husband and wife who have ceased lusting after one another. In so
doing they have lost the deep, passionate, raw, carnal desire that draws them
to one another and makes each feel deeply desirable. We all want to be wanted,
need to be needed, desire to be desired. The Bible concurs. The tenth
commandment is that a man should not covet and lust after another man's wife,
which means, by direct implication that he sure as heck ought to be lusting
after his own wife.
So why do we so disparage lust? Why do we trump love at lust's expense? We
mistakenly think that lust is something merely physical. We wrongly attribute
it to being of the body. In truth lust is the feverish, intuitive gravitation
of masculine to feminine and feminine to masculine. Real lust occurs when there
is perfect polar alignment between masculine and feminine opposites. Lust is
what magnetizes an otherwise ordinary man and woman to become infatuated with
each other. It is not of the merely of the body but is rather the arrangement
of two opposing energies that causes us to passionately incline toward one
another. Think of how you felt about your husband or wife when you first
started dating. Do you remember?
The second reason we shun lust is because we don’t seem to know how to keep
it. Let’s face it, time, familiarity, problems, children, middle-age bulge all
detract from the carefree, early dating days---when he wanted you but did not
quite have you yet. And he spent money, and more importantly, time---time being
wowed by you, mesmerized by you, and showering all sorts of attention upon you.
We don't know how to sustain it so we disparage it. We don't know how to hold
on to it in marriage so we curse it. Be gone, you emotion of the devil. What
results, however, are marriages based on the weak link of friendship as opposed
to the fiery and scorching bond of lust. To be sure, both are necessary. The
complete marriage is where husband and wife are both lovers and best friends.
But today we are mostly, and sometimes only, the latter. I have heard lots of
men say, 'This is my wife. She's my best friend.' and just as many wives say that
about their husbands. But friendship is not the nuclear bond that marriage
requires in order to not just survive but flourish.
Be that as it may and simply put, lust is where you are made to feel
intensely desirable. It's where a man can't stop thinking about you, obsessing
over you, can't keep his hands off you. It's where you're placed at the center
of another person's existence and where they permanently bask in the glow of
your light. You are the planet and they are drawn into your gravitational
orbit. And there is no feeling in the world quite like it. Nothing can make you
feel more special.
Now we get to why women -- and so many married women especially, are reading
Fifty
Shades of Grey. The book is really the story of a billionaire who can have
whatever he wants. But he wants this one woman. He wants her so badly that he
obsesses over controlling her completely, making her submit, owning her, and
taking complete possession over her. Nothing else matters, only her. He doesn't
want to ink any deals except with her. She has to, has to, sign on the dotted
line or he'll wither away. In other words, it is he who is her slave, and not
the reverse. He can't be without her. He can't live without having her. He is
utterly smitten.
The truth of the story is that she is the one who is dominant. It is she who
has a far greater hold over him than the opposite and it is she who controls
her submission. He, however, has no control, pursuing her doggedly, making her
feel intensely desirable at all times.
And why submission specifically? Yes, women want to be wanted, but why in a
position of subservience, even if only feigned? Simple. In a world where lust
has died, where sexual polarity has all but disappeared and where sexual
attraction has been reduced to the single cylinder of the physical alone, an
author gives us a wild story of a man and a woman recreating extreme sexual
polarity of masculine and feminine in the most extreme sense and we lap it up.
The polarity is created in a manner, to be sure, but then one extreme invites
another. The extremely passionless nature of today's relationships, where the
poles of masculine and feminine are unaligned and therefore boring, is met with
another extreme to create sparks.
We crave that desire we had at the beginning of our relationships so we are
enthralled and intrigued by Christian Grey. Bottom line - We need make our marriages more
exciting. We need to make them more passionate. Do our wives really need to
find this passion only in a fantasy novel about domination? Perhaps it is time
to emphasize not just love but desire in our marriages. We can have our
chocolate cake by restoring the desire in our marriages.
