A post with mostly not horrible and not even completely useless sex advice ends with a surprisingly childish outburst:
And never, ever say “I love you” if you don’t mean it. Or if you’re not 100% certain you’ll be saying it again.
Huh? Does anybody know what this is about? Is this some sort of a carry-over from the olden times when people though that a sex act constituted a promise of marriage or something?
I remember, when I was a teenager, one of my boyfriends left a message on the phone that ended with ‘Love you’. My parents did say, in rather a warning tone, ‘You shouldn’t say “I love you” unless you mean it’. I think it is something to do with a worry about relationships getting ‘too serious’ or ‘leading someone on’, so that then you might find yourself unable to extricate yourself, should you be that sort of person….!
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I notice that in some cultures sex is all about talking about sex. I quoted a while ago this hilarious person who offered the following definition of sexual freedom, “Sexual freedom is when you can speak completely freely about sex.” Hilarious stuff.
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Love marks the cross-over between the body and the mind in Christian metaphysics. The body isn’t any good, but once you have crossed over from it to the mind, you enter a different sphere of being. That’s why you should never say you have crossed over when you haven’t.
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Interesting! I need to think about this more because this is a new idea to me but it feels very right.
Thank you for making this insightful comment.
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That would be the Christian take, but the assumption that the ”body isn’t any good” is a poor place to start.
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Yes, the mind-body dualism, that is nearly always implicit in Western texts, does not generate health, as a rule.
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There isn’t a task more ungrateful than trying to demonstrate to people that this duality is detrimental to their well-being. I’ve been trying to demonstrate it for as long as I’ve been blogging and people get very upset.
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Yes, that is basically the goal of my writing, too, if the meaning and value of it could be condensed into a nutshell.
In a way, though, I’ve given up on the task, at least to the degree that it had required my emotional involvement. I’m convinced that life teaches its own lessons about this. Those who would completely estrange their emotions from the rest of themselves will end up being entirely strangled by emotions that they can barely express. Emotions and the body have to be integrated with the intellect. You can’t imagine them not to be there and expect them to disappear. You will end up with severe relationship problems and health problems if you try that.
As for the mind-body dualism becoming political policy, I feel terribly sad about it, when that happens. In Africa this rarely happens, but in the US these metaphysical notions that would divide the mind from the body are often drafted into law.
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It is difficult to get the point across by writing about it because writing speaks first to the mind. Helping someone get beyond the dualism is a total activity.
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A conservative literary critic and college professor
Clarissa's Blog 
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