Love, Sex, and Marriage

By S.M. ZakirHussain (Bangladesh)

Love, Sex, and Marriage

- By S. M. ZakirHussain (Bangladesh)

Introduction:

What is love? Now-a-days, as always perhaps, boys are often heard
saying to girls I love you. At that girls feel utterly confused about the
meaning of the word love. No doubt that they feel elated and thrilled
by the words I love you, but that is because these words at best convey
a PROPOSAL and not necessarily some TRUTH hidden inside. It
confuses a girl the most when she hears the words I love you from a
boy who has seen her for the first time. No acquaintance, no
commitment, still there is the utterance I love you. The girl who has
experienced cheating from so-called boy friends or received such
proposals a number of times, doubts whether the utterance is the
expression of a real FEELING or a superficial INTENTION.

Therefore we are going to investigate the issue with an unbiased attitude.
If love is what is usually meant by the clich I love you, then why
does the reality take a U-turn after marriage or even after some illegal
dating? Does the word love have any special meaning or significance
in the male-female nexus? Is the love of a mother for her child different
from the love of a wife for her husband? We must look into the matter
from a fresh angle of view.

What is NOT Love?
The definition of love is not love. So it is no use attempting to define
love in any language. Rather, we can try to identify events that represent
moments of love. And the best way of doing so would be to say which
events do NOT represent love.

Suppose I see a beautiful girl. She is so beautiful that I feel spell-bound
and find it hard to manage myself without wanting to possess her. Is that
love?

Surely that is a LIKING - A CHOICE, A FASCINATION - but not
necessarily love. I do not say that choosing something or somebody is
good or bad. What I am insisting on is that a choice is an
IDENTIFICATION based on some PURPOSE and hence involves
personal gain. Therefore it is not necessarily love.

Is love an instinctive urge to GET something? For example, a boy may
like any girl as far as his physical desire is considered. Is that love?

Love is universal. Let us assume that it is. Likewise, LUST or physical
desire for sex is also universal. Does this similarity, then, mean that love
and the desire for sex are the same thing? Let us not look for an answer
first. Just let us try to perceive the urgency of the question.

ANY man may feel sexual desire for ANY girl whether he is prepared
to satisfy his desire in that way is a different thing, and there is no doubt
that such a desire is universal. Now, can we say only on the basis of this
attraction that any man loves any girl or woman?

Any man may want to HAVE SEX with any girl or woman, but will any
man want to MARRY any girl or woman? As far as sex desire is
considered, the desire seems to be universal but such desire narrows
down too much when the question of the desire for marriage crops up. If
having sex is the only intention, then nobody seems to choose or limit
the alternatives, but if marriage is the intention, then there is a lot of
consideration and limiting of choices.

Because both love and lust seem to be universal, a girl will hardly
believe that a boy loves her only because he has told her so a number of
times. That is why a girl likes to hear the words I love you again and
again. She needs to.

I need my wife to satisfy my thirst for sex. Is that love? Definitely not.
Am I to blame for having the desire to be with her to satisfy that
purpose, then? No, I am not. Actually, it is not that a should or not
should needs to be associated with sex in this connection. We simply
say that sex does not necessarily mean love.

On the other hand, love, though a universal feeling, or attitude, has to be
reduced to some specific RELATIONAL ATTITUDES if it has to be
related to man-woman relationship. That is why I am free to LOVE
another persons wife because I must love a FRIEND or a SISTER, but I
cannot claim any sexual relationship with her. Because love unifies, it
may tend to unify me and any woman on the PHYSICAL AS WELL AS
MENTAL LEVEL, but if I claim to have true love for her, I cannot have
sexual relationship with her until I have married her with her own
consent in the proper way. This means that love entitles a man and a
woman to be physically united only when it has been translated into self-
compensating bilateral RELATIONSHIPS.

Let us try to go deeper into the nature of the problem. Unless we can
clearly distinguish love from sex urge, we may not understand the fact at
all. Those who are loving have loved simply loved all the time but
that has not helped us to intellectually understand the nature of love as
distinct from the nature of any other one-pointed desire.

I like a girl - or some girls - so much that I am prepared to sacrifice
anything for them. Is that love? In a sense, yes. That is love because my
mind is concentrated on something and is prepared to SACRIFICE
something else for that. So, that is love. But, however, that is love of
my OWN DESIRES, not of the girl or girls.

Here I think we have got a starting point. Love is the desire to be
united, when the desire gets concentrated so much that it tends to
break all barriers. Sacrifice is the means of breaking such barriers.

Now let us try to get familiar with the definition by using it to explain
some selected phenomena. Suppose I see a bird in a shop and like it very
much. I get it by sacrificing some money. That is my liking for the bird -
my choice, my fascination. But is that my love for the bird? Probably
not. Certainly that is my love for myself, of my bird-loving desire. My
choice of or liking for something is surely my love for my own
choices. So that is also love, but not love for that thing. It is only love for
myself. And so it is selfishness.

If, on the other hand, I purchased the bird by sacrificing an amount of
money and then felt that it would feel better in the open sky rather than
in the cage and let it free, then I could be said to have loved it. When
there is love for something or somebody, there is SACRIFICE of
self-interest or personal desires or choices. But again, we must move
carefully.

A mother in fact any mother loves her son, as we think so. The son
asks her for some money, and being a mother, she gives it to him. The
son spends this money on gambling and thus wastes his time rather than
studying and going to school. The mother knows about it. She forbids
her son to gamble but at the same time cannot help but give him the
money whenever he asks for it. Her mother heart is too soft to say no to
her son. Is that love on the part of the mother for the son?

The mother does not feel good if she does not have the opportunity to
satisfy the demands of her son. She is caught in the mechanical tendency
of instinct. That is love, no doubt, but NOT LOVE FOR THE SON;
rather, it is only love for HER OWN INSTINCT. The mother in this case
is caught in her conditioning as a mother. But love is freedom, so it
cannot arise out of a conditioning.

Love in Emotions:

If I do not love you, and on the contrary I love myself, I happen to hate
you or envy you; so hatred or envy is a form of love.

If I love wealth too much, then I am greedy. So greed is love for wealth.

In this way we can see that every mental attitude is love transformed
or distorted in some way. So we have discovered a very precious
truth: There is nothing except love. And it is for this reason that there is
reason to doubt when somebody says, I love you. There is love even in
the statement itself, but it is very difficult to know WHO IT IS FOR.

So love is not the main point; rather what should be the most important
issue is what the TARGET of ones love is. Is the individual identifying
their love with the correct person or thing or idea?

So we see that in the assertion I love you there is love, not necessarily
for the you but for the I that is uttering the sentence. But is that the
love we want to mean when we speak out the sentence? Most of the time
we only love OURSELVES. And that is why what we call love may
seem to be so to ourselves but not to others.

Thus it is evident that men generally love women because of the natural
instinct, which does not guarantee that there is personal care for
somebody in such love. And hence a woman has reasons to doubt if a
man says that he loves her. She finds it difficult to feel how he loves
her as a particular person. Unless she has the conviction that he
loves her AS A SPECIAL PERSON as against all others, she feels
the love is of not much use to her. But can somebody be loved
specially without building a special relationship with him or her?

Now we have discovered another very important point: LOVE AS A
UNIVERSAL PHENOMENON is one thing and LOVE AS A WAY OF
BUILDING PERSONAL RELATIONSHIPS is another. For the time
being we will confine our focus to the relationship between a man and a
woman, which includes physical relationship too.

If a man likes any specific aspect of a womans beauty or characteristic,
the woman feels compensated for. Such choice on the part of the man
gives her gratification. Suppose I like the eyes of my wife very
specially. My liking is enough for her as a reward. She feels grateful
to me simply because I like her eyes. But she clearly feels that that liking
of mine may not be my love for her; rather, it may be, and actually is, a
feeling of mine resulting from the fact that her eyes are a possession of
mine for which I should be prepared to sacrifice something maybe a
word of praise if not anything else if I say that I love her. If she feels
that she has beautiful eyes, then she has reasons to feel and to have the
confidence that anybody will like those eyes and praise them. So my
liking in this case cannot go by the name of love. If she feels that she has
something valuable and even if I pay her for that, she will not feel that
that attitude of mine to her possession or uniqueness is love. On the
contrary, the situation may turn out in the opposite direction. She may
feel that I am not giving her the right price and hence she is suffering an
opportunity cost.

My wife is beautiful or loyal to me. That is why I consider her a precious
gift for me. Does it mean that I love her? Maybe I think I love her. But
how can I say that I love her if she does not feel so? Even if she feels
that I love her, what is the proof that I love her?

Love and liking are not the same thing. Everybody values what he or she
likes. That establishes a give-and-take relationship, which is bound to
collapse when there is nothing to give or take or there is no person with
the ability to take. Then that will mark the end of the relationship. Love
never ends, only relationships do. However, if the relationships are
founded on love, they do not collapse. Then what is love?

We are in a catch. And we cannot possibly get out of it if we do not
know the relationship between LIKING and LOVE. Either we must trace
the origin of liking in love or see why liking and choices exist. Also, we
need to see how pleasure is related to liking in ones life.

Love for the Specific and the General:
Liking refers to the instinctive urge to CLASSIFY and CHOOSE. Thus
it refers to the compulsive drive to GET. Whereas love refers to the inner
urge to GIVE someone HIS or HER DUE. Actually, as far as love is
concerned, there is no someone, rather, there are the all. If I love my
own son too much by giving him everything he wants, then a time will
soon come when he will blame me for my having given him the
opportunity to go astray. Love does not mean just giving something to
somebody; it means giving somebody his or her due. It is in this sense
that if I love only one person in the world, I have already loved all
others. Giving somebody his or her due ensures giving others their dues
as well.

Loving means helping to grow up. It means giving as much as taking. If
a child stays away from its mother and does not let her have the
opportunity to give it care and affection, then the mother will feel
deprived and will think that the child does not love her. Love means
giving opportunities to give as well. Giving includes taking.

Love is nature, but because it works through instinct, it may happen to
be a biased state of the mind, too personalized and self-centered.

Suppose my wife loves me. She says, and wants me to believe and feel,
that she loves me very much. So she always wants me to stay with her,
enclosed within the four walls, cut off from my parents and brothers and
sisters and other relatives. She takes care of me more than my mother
did or would. She gives me everything that a man could ever expect
from a woman. Now, can I say that she loves me? Can I? In recent times
many women are seen to love their husbands in this way. They are
thirsty for a very small, nuclear family, with all passions revolving
around their petty desires and likings and disliking. Is that love?

Let us see. Please do not conclude hastily. From her own point of view,
what she is giving is really love. But then we must also admit that that is
her OWN WAY of imparting love.Love as a psychological
phenomenon is neither to blame nor to be praised. That is because it
is always there in everybodys heart. So what matters is HOW one
wants it expressed. If the way my wife takes care of me is to be called
love, then she does not love ME. I have my parents whom I must love
my own way or whom I must give an opportunity to love me in their
own way. Likewise, I have my relatives. I have relationships with all of
them. My personality is the sum of all such relationships. If she claims
that she loves me, then we must judge that love by the manner in which
she values my relationships with others. If she does not include my
TOTAL personality, she does not love ME. She only loves her OWN
CONCEPT of me, her OWN DREAM and EXPECTATION of me.

Or let us take another issue. Suppose I have 10,000 Dollars. I love my
wife so much that I have decided to give her all the money. And that I
do. She feels happy for the time being. She feels valued, acknowledged,
cherished, and elated. She kisses me on the forehead one hundred times
a day. She is doing what she is expected to. But from my part, can I
assume that I have loved her the way that will make her really happy?

We must examine the consequences before rushing to any conclusion.
After a few days she finds that I have loved her in all the ways possible.
She feels important. But my parents and relatives had also some rights to
the 10,000 dollars that I have given her. Because I have already given all
to her, they are deprived. Now they envy her. They consider her alien.
They posses a negative attitude toward her as much as I have possessed a
positive attitude toward her. So they give her as much hatred as I have
loved her. Now she receives condemnation and indifference from them.
My love for her is nullified by their hatred toward her. Now she has only
the money and a husband whose relatives do not like her. Thus, by
giving her whatever I had, I have failed to give her a good environment,
a society, recognition, a friendly background. Now she is only an
abstract picture on a wrong background. Have I really loved her? After
all, LOVING SOMEBODY INVOLVES PUTTING HIM OR HER IN
THE RIGHT PERSPECTIVE. So love does not mean giving something.
It means sacrifice. And sacrifice is more than giving.

Love and Sex:
Now let us move into the discussion of love in relation to sex. For the
time being suppose that we are not aware of marriage, which may be a
way of building relationship to validate or justify sex. And in this case
also we are going to have recourse to examples and analysis to explore
the issue. Suppose a girl says that she loves me and likes me. I also like
her. She does not have any physical relationship with any other man. She
is sort of devoted to me. I am pleased by her exclusive passion for me
and also grow a strong fascination for her. She wants to have physical
relationship with me and so I want to marry her. Surprisingly, SHE
DOES NOT WANT TO MARRY ME. NOR DOES SHE WANT TO
HAVE CHILDREN. What she wants is just to have physical
relationship, nothing more. She wants to have PLEASURE. She wants to
enjoy my body, reputation, and personality. Can I say that she loves me?
Suppose that she is even prepared to forgo the pleasure of building
relationships with others. And so she is undergoing suffering for me in a
sense. Now, can I call it love?

Dear reader. Please do not rush to any conclusion first. It is true that she
need not be bound to agree to my request of having children. She is not
even bound to marry me. So I may not blame her only because she does
not comply with some of my requests or opinions or values. Rather, I
should feel proud of myself because she feels attracted to me. However,
does she love me?

Please do listen. My urge for sex has a PROMISE in it. It is a
commitment to mankind. It is through my sex urge that whatever is
latent in me is going to be expressed. I also must contribute something to
mankind. My ethnic traits, my personality, my genetic makeup, my
experience, aptitude, knowledge, values, etc. want to get expressed and
prorogated through my offspring. Even when I am old and about to die, I
need to rest assured that I am not going to end forever, that I also have
created some waves that will keep moving on the huge sea of creation
even when I am no more. Mankind owes from me something that I may
not hide or keep hidden. Through my pleasures something constructive
should come out. MY PLEASURES SHOULD NOT GO IN VAIN.
They must be creative. Therefore I need to have children. I cannot
remain buried in the grave of the past when I am dead; rather, my
children should carry me along into the distant future and as long as my
progeny has something to contribute to the world, I will not be extinct.
In that sense IT IS MY RESPONSIBILITY TO MAKE MY
ENJOYMENT MEANINGFUL. I must have children.

But she wants me to enjoy and grow tried and old. She wants me to
waste my energy in the guise of enjoyment and then sit helpless. She
does not have any COMMITMENT to my family, to my existence, to
my blood stream. She does not want to see me creative. Nor does she
herself want to create something valuable. So, I admit that she loves my
body, my personality or social face, my wealth etc., but does she love
ME? She only loves me in the PAST and not in the FUTURE. She
does not want to love me when I am no more. She does not consider
me VALUABLE. She does not consider me a complete, continuous
personality. She only wants to buy me as a commodity. Therefore I am
not going to have sex with her. I cannot have sex with a girl who is not
even aware of the possibility that lies in my sex urge. I cannot have
sex with a girl who does not even pay attention to the good news that
the pleasure in the blood brings.

I am not saying that I need to plan having children every time I have sex.
Rather, what I am going to say is that sex is not an instrument of mere
bodily pleasure; it is a promise, a commitment to create, a gateway to
creativity. I do not have the right to enjoy the pleasure of something
alone depriving mankind of its real promise. Having sex is a way of
serving the entire mankind. That is why it is apparently gratifying and
gives pleasure. And do I have the right to enjoy the fruit of a tree
without doing something to keep the tree alive? A girl who does not
feel that I am the entire MANKIND does not deserve my sex.

So we see that sex is an activity that connects the past, present, and
future of a person. It keeps the past alive through progeny in the future
and gratifies the present with pleasure. That is why it should be
considered a responsibility, not an instrument of pleasure. The sex
which is only for pleasure, therefore, is not love. We love sex but that
does not mean that sex is love. However, if sex is taken as a
responsibility and promising possession, then sex and love have no
difference.

Obviously, sex for pleasure cannot be the basis of relationship. That
is why marriage is more than sex for pleasure. If marriage is to be
linked with sex exclusively, then it must be said that it is sex for love,
which has a commitment to the PAST, PRESENT, and the FUTURE
as a whole. It involves COMMITMENT and SACRIFICE. Because
sex for love is to help make future generation possible, sex in marriage
must be exclusively selective. Both the spouses must be so committed to
one another that neither of them can have extra-marital sex and thus
dissipate his/her real worth. They got united to save the value preserved
in them. And undoubtedly this is one kind of sacrifice, a great sacrifice.
In fact, commitment always involves sacrifice.

Now we can conclude that there is true love in a happy marriage, and
nowhere else. All else is fascination or infatuation, devoid of any
commitment. Love as a psychological state is always there in each of our
activities. We may love fishing, gambling, killing, helping, earning,
learning and so forth. Love may be universal but love in any of these
forms does not unify all. Any man may like to have sex with any woman
and vice versa, but that is not love. Sex for pleasure only unifies two
bodies for a few seconds, not even the minds. Because sex urge is
universal like love, love and sex have happened to be confused
through the reference of pleasure. If sex gave us bitter experience
instead of pleasure, I hardly think anybody but a few would call it
love.

There is actually nothing except love, no escape from love. Every liking
or disliking is a form of love, maybe distorted. Therefore, love is not the
point that is important as far as man-woman relationship is considered
it is simply always there in the heart rather, what counts is how we
want it expressed, and how we want it to establish relationships among
us.

My fascination for girls or women is my liking, not love. If we must call
it love, then we must also qualify the word love with another word and
say that it is physical love. But such a term, which is coined only to
satisfy short-term goals, should be avoided. Liking or choice drives us
toward action. It is not to be branded as right or wrong as long as it is
natural and lawful.

When I like something I do not look at myself; rather, I look at my own
liking. I do not even feel the need to look at myself because I feel I have
the myself as given and beyond modification. But when I really like
and choose something in light of my own past, present, and future,
from which mankind is not excluded, then only my liking and choice
become love. While likes, dislikes, or choices are one-shot approaches
of desires, love is a continuous discovery of the self. Therefore, as far as
male-female relationship is concerned, there is love in marriage.
Marriage is love. There can be no love in adultery.


When Sex Means Love:
So there is a way of getting immense pleasure from sex. Just imagine for
a second that you are no more in the world but still the world exists with
all its grandeur. From somewhere we do not know where you look at
the world and see that your children and grandchildren and great
grandchildren are representing you in the world. Some of them still
value your values and some of them do not. They constitute a great part
of mankind and so you are not meaningless, uprooted, and unimportant.
If you let your imagination drift five hundred years ahead, you will see
that a majority of the community of a certain region belongs to your
family. Maybe some of them are scattered around the globe, perhaps in
the sky too. Because all of them are not like you, rather some or many of
them are of diverse qualities, they not only represent your personality
and genetic makeup, but they really represent the entire mankind too. So
even if you are not alive physically, you exist through them with all your
promise, commitment, and possibility.

Now descend from the pinnacle of your imagination. Stand in front of
your wife (or wives). Look at her into the eyes. Just feel that it is
through her warm participation that you are going to multiply
yourself through the unknown future. So she is very close to your
heart. Her name is forever written on the history of your family tree.
She is the gateway through which you are going to make the
adventurous journey to the unknown future. She is part of what you
are in the continuous plane of existence of life on earth. What you
consider your children or progeny will get expressed through them.

So, see how personally you should take her! How close you should get
to her! How much you should care for her! How important she is to you!
Why should she be outside or away from you? And why should you be
away from her? You both should be inside each other. Then give her a
big hug. Love begins here. This is love.

Even if you are old and so is your wife, try this technique between
yourselves. The entire past will seem meaningful to you. So there can be
no wastage of life or time or passions. True love repairs all anomalies.
And if this article does you any good, then pray for the poor author.

[From the authors book Love, Sex, and Marriage, translated by the
author.]


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