Understanding Between the Sheets

Raw desire consists of a subtle combination of factors. If I fully understood those factors then I would almost certainly not be sitting in front of a screen right now, I’d be having sex. Desire for sex is a drive as basic as eating and sleeping. The specific desire for sex with a particular person is more sophisticated and is caused by countless factors that vary from instance to instance as well as from person to person. Science, psychology and common sense tell us that sexual desire, along with desires in general, are driven by such things as pheromones, genetics, social norms, developmental environment and immediate circumstance. Personally, though, as a single male, there are very few women that I would not have sex with. And from experience I know that the closer I feel that I am to the act, the more I desire it. Of course, that doesn’t mean I actively pursue sex with most women I encounter. In many respects the fact that so many women are, in my eyes, sexual eligible reduces the need to pursue on that basis alone. But this fact, that I tend to be pickier with who I would fall in love with than who I would have sex with, makes me think that sexual desire is not to do with love. Or rather, sexual desire is not a signifier that I love someone.

The act of sex itself is not love either. I can live a relatively normal life abstinent from sexual stimulation but I can not do the same deprived from love (in the broader sense). The experience of love, of reciprocal recognition and understanding, on some level is a crucial part of the development of a consciousness. A child without parents or friends who love them, who grows up without ever feeling a moment of love, is probably going to have quite a twisted mind – it’s a recipe for super-villainy. But just because sex is not love and does not represent love that is not to say that the two are unconnected. Sex may not be love but it is also not inherently not love. All action has the potential to trigger moments of love. The act of sex is like any action that is shared. It can be, but is not always, a medium for communication, a medium for sharing experience, a medium for a moment of love. Love can be sex but love can also be walks in the park, laughter, the playing of games, sharing a glance or a good conversation. Just like all of these actions sex can be an affirmation-type moment of love, a realisation-type moment of love or it can be neither or it can be the opposite, like a destructive disagreement that causes a separation.

However, sex does have unique relationship to love owing to the nature of the act as well as societal and personal expectations from the act. We do place a special importance on it in the context of romantic love, and for good reason. But at all times I wish to resist entangling sex with love as I have thus far defined it. To do so would commit an error of the kind that says a game of football is only such if it is played in Wembley Stadium. Wembley is a place where football can be played and arguably it is played to its highest levels of quality and/or significance there. But to say that ‘Football = Wembley Stadium’ is to diminish the game and to radically misrepresent the role of the stadium in the whole affair. As a consequence of this, while sex as a topic is fascinating on a number of levels, it is far too vast and my own experience too narrow for me to cover wholly in a single post, if at all. I would like to discuss sex and love – how love can enhance sex and the some of the effects sex has on a relationship of connection and understanding. For the remainder of this post I will talk about sex as love, as opposed to sex as hedonism, sex as procreation or sex as power – although all deserve their own posts at a later stage. That is not to say any given act is one or the other; just that I should like to examine the component of sex that is driven by and a driver of love.

Traditional sex in the context of a romantic relationship of love is a shared act between two people. (Of course more may be involved in sex as the act, and can still be loving but for the sake of argument I’m going to put such complications aside for now). It involves the revelation of our physicality – not just intimate exploration of the shape and consistency of the other’s body but also a revelation of our internal physicality – how our bodies relates to our minds to give us pleasure and fulfil desire. The act is private, and with privacy comes an intimacy. Very few people have seen me completely naked and I choose to share this with you; I trust you not to tell people about any abnormalities in my penis, for example. In turn, you trust that I will not verbally expose you similarly. I also trust that in spite of any parts of my body that I am self-conscious about and do not like, you will still find me desirable and attractive by virtue of our mental closeness. As well as all this (and more) the act itself does a good job of representing the closeness of consciousness’ – an attempt to become, however briefly, as physically one as we feel? Perhaps this is mere poetry.

John Berger

John Berger wrote a very illuminating piece on sexuality in ‘Ways of Seeing’, specifically regarding the nude and the moment of seeing the other naked. I think it will help explore the act of sex as it relates to moments of love quite well (my bolding) –

“Their nakedness acts as a confirmation and provokes a strong sense of relief. She is a woman like any other: or he is a man like any other: we are overwhelmed by the marvellous simplicity of the familiar sexual mechanism…
…We did not expect them to be otherwise, but the urgency and complexity of our feelings bred a sense of uniqueness which the sight of the other, as she is or he is, now dispels. They are more like the rest of their sex than they are different. In this revelation lies the warm and friendly – as opposed to the cold and impersonal – anonymity of nakedness.
One could express this differently: at the moment of nakedness first perceived, an element of banality enters: an element that exists only because we need it.
Up to that instant the other was more or less mysterious. Etiquettes of modesty are not merely puritan or sentimental: it is reasonable to recognize a loss of mystery. And the explanation of this loss of mystery may be largely visual. The focus of perception shifts from eyes, mouth, shoulders, hands – all of which are capable of subtleties of expression that the personality expressed by them is manifold – it shifts from these to the sexual parts, whose formation suggests an utterly compelling but single process. The other is reduced or elevated – whichever you prefer – to their primary sexual category: male or female. Our relief is the relief of finding an unquestionable reality to whose direct demands our earlier highly complex awareness must now yield.
We need the banality which we find in the first instant of disclosure because it grounds us in reality. But it is more than that. This reality, by promising the familiar, proverbial mechanism of sex, offers at the same time , the possibility of the shared subjectivity of sex.
The loss of mystery occurs simultaneously with the offering of the means for creating a shared mystery. The sequence is: subjective - objective - subjective to the power of two."
- John Berger, Ways of Seeing (Penguin 1977, Page 59)

One thing that is initially striking about this passage, and why it appealed to me in particular for this purpose, is that it is distinctly gender neutral. The essay from which this passage is taken is clearly influenced heavily by feminism and therefore keenly focussed on gender issues – the way the woman is seen as a subject in representative art. This particular passage, though describes nakedness (as opposed to nudity) in the context of lived human experience – that is to say in the context of two consenting adults revealing themselves to one another as (I assume) a precursor to sex. In describing our lived human experience of nakedness with another, Berger takes a notably gender neutral tone. He seems to be indicating that in the context of our primary lived experience of nakedness the principles he describes above are true regardless of gender or sexual preference.

Of course, I would certainly concede that men and women differ wildly in their approaches and reactions to sex – in the ways in which we seek it, in what we desire from it, in how we physically experience it and how the act itself impinges on our public and social lives. However the areas of difference that I have just listed relate primarily to components of sex relating to the pleasure, the power and the biological functions of sex and not to the moments in the act that relate to love. If sex were just this then it would indeed be essentially an issue of gender relations but it would also not be to do with love. When we are talking about the love component of sex, I would argue that gender differences are not as pronounced as culture may tempt us to think. If there are differences in propensities to experience the act of sex as connection that are gender based then they are so marginal when compared to our differences as individuals regardless of gender as to render them invisible.

Berger’s mention of the loss of mystery giving way to the possibility of creating a shared mystery resonates well with what I have already said about moments of love. All experiences get imprinted into memory, conscious or otherwise. It is in those memory-worlds that the dreamers and the melancholy live. The collective memory-worlds of wars and other major events are where a national public character is born. A personal experience creates a mental space for us to assess things, a shared experience creates a world for us to share and inhabit. Whether it is sex or not there is a special bond, a special world, created between people who share a private experience or secret. The private, shared world between the sheets is a space in which a couple can allow a kind of ‘third other’, or an ‘us’, to really develop. The act itself is a cooperative sport with near instantaneous feedback. When it is going well there is a oneness of purpose by virtue of that “utterly compelling but single process”. Afterwards, thinking about the act and anticipating the next time all promote thought about yourself and the other – together. The pleasure of having a partner subtly refer to when you last had sex or making eyes as if to say ‘let’s go again’ stems from more than just the sating of desire for more sex or satisfaction that they enjoyed it enough to want more. The joy of a partner referencing your private act together is also the joy of recognising and reaffirming that they too have been living in (or at least visiting) the exclusive shared world that the two of you created. In this way, you could think of sex like an in-joke – a moment of love that gains more intimacy and power by virtue of it’s exclusivity. It is rude to make in-jokes around those not in on the joke, just as it’s rude to be overtly sexual with a partner around friends – that is not prudishness, it is simply an acknowledgement that it makes you feel unloved and unconnected to a couple or group of people that you care about to be reminded that they share a connection that they don’t see fit to share with you, even as they indulge in it.

Berger’s talk of the move of “subjective - objective - subjective to the power of two” is also quite compelling and reinforces what I have said about sex being a medium through which we can feel love. When we get to know a potential love as a prelude to sex we tend to get to know more and more of the particular uniqueness of them, of their consciousness. Berger’s notion of ‘relief’ at seeing the sight of the familiar form of a naked body relates to what I discussed in ‘moments of love’ regarding communication through a medium – how the reliance on the common language of the medium acts as a comforter, a source of relief and safety from the pitfalls of unrestrained conversation. Setting aside arguments and particulars regarding technique – we all know how to ‘do’ sex – it is a language through which with some basic empathy and anatomical awareness we can all communicate in. An objective ground for two people to share no matter where the come from or what they think. Once the act is complete and this new ‘subjective to the power of two’ exists for the pair to co-inhabit, communicate about or through, arguably the two gain greater capacity for closeness. At the very least if they find their consciousness’ asynchronous and are not able to or do not feel like exploring the reasons in a rational productive argument fashion, they can stop disagreeing and have sex. Sex is very effective at ending rows because it is a full body experience, it is arresting and takes over other thoughts allowing a couple to ‘move on’ from whatever issues they were having.

Sally and Sex

Sometimes we use sex as a means of finding love, by using it as a relatively predictable way to trigger that key realisation-type moment of love from which we may build a stronger relationship. Take Sally for example. Sally is going out to a club tonight. She has been single for a few months. She misses sex for the sheer joy of it but societal norms and some bad experiences have taught her that sex is safer, more controllable and easier to reliably obtain in the context of a relationship. Sally would like to be in a relationship so she can have sex with a single partner and so she can fall in love. But Sally is not naïve and she does expect to fall in love at first sight when she goes out tonight but her hedonistic desire for a shag means that she’s fairly sure she’ll be going home with someone tonight – she’ll have a good time and she won’t expect anything from them afterwards. Of course, just as Sally is not naïve she’s also not some hussy. She’s not going to sleep with just anybody who buys her a drink and even though she won’t expect a boyfriend from the evening, she wants to find a guy is fairly likeable – just in case they ended up talking afterwards. Come to think of it, Sally got together with her last boyfriend after a one-night stand – so stranger things have happened!
Sally is not consciously using sex as a tool to find love with – she’s fulfilling a desire for basic pleasure (that probably stems from an evolutionary biological urge). However, she knows that sex can bring people together and this knowledge is displayed in her behaviour – if she just wanted a man she could have walked out with one and saved herself some time and money – she wanted a man she could potentially fall in love with because on some level she was aware that sex is a catalyst for love. The intimate nature of the act helps, but does not guarantee, moments of love arise.

Sometimes we use the act as an easy means comfortable common ground to retreat to. For the last three months of Sally’s last relationship it felt like all they did was argue and then have sex. The arguments occurred over trivial things; a late phone call, what music they should listen to, where to go out. Her boyfriend also suspected her of cheating which put them both on edge – her not wanting to give him reason to feel insecure, him constantly looking over his shoulder. They would get in and talk for half an hour. By that point an argument about something would flare up and one of them would end up in tears the other storm out. At three in the morning there would be a return, perhaps few minutes of screaming and then passionate sex. The sex was all the more passionate for the passion of the preceding argument; cathartic. But it also reminded the both of them how much the loved each other, how much they did share or at least how much they had shared (see ‘A disagreement’). It reminded them of how they had gotten together and how their love had grown in the first place:
Her - how he had been powerful and so irresistibly forceful when he pulled her to him in the park on their third date.
Him - how she had turned up at his house naked, save for a trench coat, on his last birthday. She had been eager to please and so sexy in her confidence that she would. And she had.
After they would finish, closer to 5am now, bodies trembling from exhaustion and a lingering cocktail of stress, anger, affection and fear they would lie in each other’s steadying arms and love each other until morning. But morning came too early, for they both had jobs and would have to leave the house by 8. Although they felt love for each other the rhythms of their love had become destructive – depriving them of sleep and so making them more irritable the next day and so more prone to petty arguments. Their lives had become a cycle of argument, frustration and reconciliation. The act of sex, not the pleasure but the moment of love that came with it, was a sole comfort to them both and had sustained not just their love but themselves as individuals. Sally began to realise this, and although she would certainly not say their relationship had been based on sex, it’s power to remind them of their love had been the driving force that had extended their relationship months beyond it’s natural end. Painful as it was, she decided to finish it. Although agonising at first, within six weeks she was sure she had made the right decision.
About a year later, Sally bumped into her ex boyfriend at a bar. They ended up sleeping together again. Although the sex was still physically as good as it had ever been, Sally had moved on – time had robbed the act of its power to remind her so vividly of the connections the two had shared.

By virtue of the power of sex to provide moments of love, sex can be both a catalyst for moments of love but it can also be a crutch. Healthy relationships can use sex as means of reconnecting after any kind of rupture to their synchronicity to prevent a greater distance from forming but the power of sex, like any other power can be over or misused as a temporary ‘fix’ can just be putting off problems or facing up to real and important differences. Equally though, a couple can stop having sex because one or both parties realises this phenomenon of potentially disproportionately reconnecting when a reconnection may not actually be desired. As such sex lives can be barometers for the ‘health’ of a romantic relationship but perhaps only retrospectively. After all there are so many drives to perform the act we are at great risk of misinterpreting other’s desires or lack of desires for sex or misunderstanding reasons behind the other’s under or over-‘performance’.

Some closing comments

Society places a special significance on the act of sex in regards to relationships and with good reason. Leaving aside the reproductive components to the act, sex is uniquely configured to produce moments of love – it in itself is a relationship creator and sustainer. Sex and the desire for sex I have deliberately kept separate from reproduction and the desire for reproduction because I believe they are two separate drives that we, in our infinite fallability, sometimes confuse. I will discuss reproduction in a later post.

Sex as the act of giving and receiving pleasure has been broadly covered here – I can give myself nearly equivalent raw pleasure – it is love that I can not give myself. A hedonistic desire for sex is not something I can rule out but I don’t think it really affects our meaningful relationships too significantly. I am aware of people who stay in or out of relationships because they coldly calculate which setup of their life will get them more sex and more pleasurable sex. Those people would confess that they are not looking for love, don’t want it or don’t really know what it is.

What I have not touched on at all is a broader topic for this blog to cover, which is power. All relationships are themselves to some extent relationships of power, this is not more so in the act of sex but it is more noticeable. Discussions on this will come later.

I have mostly been talking about sex with one partner. I am not ruling out the possibility that a moment of love can occur from experimental group sex. I would say that as far as I can see it’s not quite as naturally set out to produce them though.

An objection I have encountered at this juncture before runs something along these lines “All this talk of love, moments of love shared mystery etc. is overcomplicating and nothing more than Sophistry – Sex is an evolutionary urge, it is controlled by chemicals. The ‘effects of the act’ of which you speak are not subtle realisations of mental connection they’re chemicals released in the brain immediately after sex that make you feel good. You associate the feeling good with your partner so you think you’re in love – it’s an evolutionary trick. All this stuff would be very interesting two hundred years ago but science has proved that you’re talking nonsense already.”
Well, that is sort of fair. But science hasn’t proven why chemicals appear in the brain – we have observed that they do appear after certain stimuli, we haven’t proven anything apart from that. What we have proved by living though is that the same stimuli on the same subject can produce different results and the same sequence of stimuli on different subjects can produce different results still – I can not be predicted even if I do have happy chemicals pumped into my brain when I have sex. Love is a component of our consciousnesses – it affects what we think about, how we think and how we act from that. Our consciousnesses exist within our brain, body and nervous system some effects of which are commonly observable, while others are scientifically observable. The evolution argument is basically to observe one correlation between chemical happiness and sex, another between love and sex and another between sex and children and then conclude that the chemical happiness is because of the children - ignoring the actual variety of conscious processes at work to get us there. Yes, love might be an evolutionary quirk – it may have arisen as something that benefits the species. There seem to be a lot of quirks of behaviour relating to love and sex that harm the species but there you go, nobody fully understands the process by which evolution happens. To explain every decision in my life in terms of survival of the species involves ignoring my experience of making many decisions that do more harm to ‘the species’ than good. But more importantly it ignores my consciousness and my agency and is to ignore the vastest body of evidence that we have in front of us – that is our own selves.
Issues about the consciousness can only be thought of with any subtlety when considered through the lense of consciousness itself.

A Disagreement

Disagreements are significant moments in the relationship of two consciousnesses.

Disagreements are times where it is revealed that on certain subjects or issues two consciousnesses are so asynchronous that the two disparate attitudes seem irreconcilable. We might think that such moments are exact opposites of moments of love – moments of disconnection, a creation or discovery of barriers, blockages of shared consciousness and a sharp reminder of the distinction between two autonomous minds. To some extent they are; Often disagreements can result in a kind of ‘moment of un-love’ whereby at the moment of disagreement we feel completely detached and alienated from our loved one to the point where they can seem as a stranger to us. Having said that, how both parties react to the expression of an opposing view, along with the nature of the disagreement, defines what feelings arise from it. Remember, while we can disagree with strangers or people we dislike – we usually just do this internally. We disagree with friends, family and lovers far more frequently and more memorably because it is with these people that we are comfortable in expressing and asserting our disagreement. These times do not always result in love lost, indeed, a disagreement can even cause a moment of love as the end result can be a greater sense of closeness and achievement at having had to work towards understanding.

There are three basic ‘moves’ in a disagreement: 1) the expression of the difference of opinion, 2) the joint exploration of the extent of the difference and 3) the reconciliation of these views or the ‘acceptance’ of the difference. Disagreements can be considered either ‘productive’ or ‘destructive’. A productive disagreement is one that results in the promotion of a better understanding and/or synchronicity with the other person. A destructive one will create a distance or separation between the two parties. Whether a disagreement is productive or destructive will, to some extent, depend on how many ‘moves’ into the process both parties are willing to travel. Naturally, it will also depend on the importance of the issue to both people as well. If I was to air a disagreement but we were unwilling to explore that disagreement, there is a good chance we would both leave the encounter feeling a greater sense of ‘otherness’ and disconnection.

The expression of a disagreement is essentially an assertion of self. If you disagree with a statement someone makes and don’t speak up to air your views, then you are implicitly agreeing with what they have said. They are leading the conversation and in some ways the thoughts of listeners; to disagree is to inject your own autonomous thought, your individual viewpoint into the thoughts of the other listeners. They must consider you in a far more active way than if you were merely agreeing. To do so, we must feel confident that our opposing view will be given the consideration it demands. Depending on our own personal confidence and confidence of the strength of our position we may often only express disagreement in the company of those that we expect to give our view consideration, to those we expect to understand, to those that we love and love us. If I hear strangers on the bus saying stupid things, I won’t usually interrupt to disagree because I don’t care about trying to make them think a little more like I do as it does not affect me or my relationship to them. I also don’t necessarily have faith they will understand or try to understand my viewpoint. In this way, we could view the expression of a disagreement (assertion of self) as a sort of test of love. We are testing whether or not the person who’s mind we do care about will listen, be willing to rethink but more fundamentally still want to hear our views in the future in spite of this disagreement.

I am not saying that we are always consciously ‘testing’ our friends when we disagree. We often just disagree for practical reasons that have nothing to do with trying to make an impact on the overall relationship. However, disagreements do ‘add up’ just as moments of love do when it comes down to trying to pin down and define our feelings for others –

‘I like Fred because he’s easy going when it comes to deciding where we go out’,

‘Robert is very agreeable when we talk about football but infuriating when we talk about women’,

‘Jill is prone to very contrary moods, when she is like that I tend to avoid her’

– Such observations shape the where, the when and the way that we interact with everyone that we actively choose to spend time with, everyone that we in some way ‘know’.

Consider the adolescent’s relationship with their parents and family. At a stage when they are becoming fully conscious, fully self-aware they disagree more and more. This is an effort to assert themselves and can certainly be viewed as a means of testing the love they have received unconditionally so far. A similar, less intellectual form of this phenomenon occurs at an earlier stage of the development consciousness – ‘the terrible twos’ - a child is disagreeable and assertive; they are testing the boundaries of the parent/child relationship. Sadly, some parent/child relationships do irrevocably break down at the adolescent stage. Series’ of disagreements create a barrier between the consciousnesses, knocking them out of synch, replacing the understanding of love with confusion and miscommunication, which leads to distance or hatred. This chain of events can occur because parent, child or both is unwilling or incapable of taking the next step towards reconciliation – exploration of the disagreement. The disagreement ‘ends’ with the simple assertion: ‘because I said so’. That answer creates a barrier to understanding, preventing both parties from understanding the other’s minds and views and causing more seemingly inexplicable disagreements in the future.

As we develop more conceptual tools, a greater capacity to think and express complex thoughts and lines of reasoning, as well as more emotional maturity, we tend to probe into the causes of differences of opinions when they occur – we argue and discuss. When we disagree about something within a given medium (‘I disliked x film’, ‘That goal should never have been disallowed’ etc.), we are able to discuss the disagreement within the conceptual framework of that medium. As long as our disagreement is with a person whom we have already recognised as having sufficient expertise in communicating about that medium we can expect the exploration of the disagreement to be civil and productive. Broader disagreements regarding things like values and politics can get messier because everyone feels qualified to express their views but our starting assumptions and experiences vary much more wildly when they relate to life in general. Broad life topics like these follow no shared or fixed logic and tend to contain a good many more internal contradictions, making them far more prone to get personal and spawn further disagreements. These topics, however, are more rewarding to debate intelligently because they reveal far more about the core of the person. The exploration of a disagreement gives us an opportunity to reveal ourselves to the other and to learn more about them. We will learn why they think x idea, how they arrived at x idea and what other things they must think to support it. Disagreements provide a good opportunity to ‘lift the hood’ and get a closer look at the not just what a person thinks, but how a person thinks. And since most of our ideas are not in fact character traits or set in stone (although we often feel tempted to present them as such), by arguing with someone who listens and challenges us we can actual discover a lot about ourselves, develop ours own minds and perhaps change the interlocutor’s as well.

The process of talking through differences is usually a process of exploration and reduction. We are trying to reduce a relatively complex point into a set of shared assumptions and a set of unique ones. When people disagree and attempt to rigorously explore the cause of their disagreement they usually end up clarifying their points until they reach one that both parties can agree on. Once this point is reached, both parties will attempt to reconstruct their original thought in an attempt to pinpoint the exact cause of the disagreement. Obviously disagreements do not tend to unfold as methodically as that, but usually arguments do first consist in trying to be understood, which involves finding the common ground and then finding the specific cause of the difference. Sometimes the ‘difference’ is illusory – there appears to be a difference due to nothing more than an original miscommunication, making two very similar views appear at odds with one another when in fact they are complementary. There is certainly shared satisfaction in the discovery that out of difference there is, in truth, one shared view. Any exploration that involves touching on common ground is conducive to ‘moments of love’ arising.

Sometimes the difference, though, is fundamental and very real. If two friends discussing the merits of a certain tax plan they may debate based on economic theory, the issues facing the world right now, they would refer to personal anecdotes and struggles, they would consult bystander’s for their views or to fact check, they would inevitably get quite off-topic a few times but they may well end up faced with a disagreement that looks like this: – “The fundamental difference between our socio-eco-political views is that I believe man is inherently cooperative and you believe man is inherently selfish”. (Leaving aside the position that man might be inherently nothing,) the two friends would at that point be faced with a choice. They can carry on the argument in an attempt to explore and perhaps force a reconsideration of this point. Doing so would be difficult because positions like that seem to be more about the raw processing of experience; it is very difficult for me to persuade you that man is not selfish if all your experience has led you to believe that he is. And while it may be possible and even important to explore further into this difference without the argument getting heated or hurtful, the hour is probably late and the rest of the company is quite bored so it may be time to agree to disagree.

You may walk away at this point either content that at least you got to the heart of the problem or frustrated that you got so close to agreement and then hit this brick wall. You may even rethink your relationship with the other as you realise perhaps you did not know them as well as you thought. You had assumed that you had shared principles and now faced with the truth you may wonder what other areas of life the two of you may differ on, that you just didn’t know because it hadn’t come up yet. Disagreements particularly pertaining to real, lived actions both past and present, do tend to cause at least a temporary realignment of the relationship.

A lot of how we react to the outcome of an argument and how we explore a disagreement is determined by attitude. The attitudes that we bring to arguments shape their outcome but, at the risk of sounding like a ever-lovin’ hippy, the only way to achieve a productive end to a disagreement is through a sincere desire to understand as well as be understood – argue with love. Due to the nature of a disagreement it is very tempting to argue ‘to win’, whatever that means. Some people refuse to reach a point of acceptance of difference but keep on arguing for as long as a person is willing to stay in the room – having the last word constitutes the win, to others, only persuasion will do. For very few people the end goal is simply ‘understanding’, although understanding can be achieved in the attempt to aggressively win an argument (as if by chance). To some extent these attitudes are part of our characters, but we are all guilty of taking a disagreement too far because we felt we could, or should win – the cause was too important to let lie. When it relates directly to how we treat each other within a friendship or relationship, it usually is too important to let lie. Often, disagreements carry on until one or both sides are worn out or until a ‘winner’ can be declared. When the exploration of difference takes this ‘winner/loser’ form, ceases to be cooperative work towards a solution to a problem, the outcome is almost invariably destructive. The ‘problem’ of disagreement, should not be formulated ‘how can I stop you from being so wrong?’ but ‘we are both intelligent people who’s faculties of reason are good – if it is not ‘bad’ reasoning that causes disagreement – what could it be? (Perhaps I will learn something that I had missed before)’.

Disagreements stick with us. We are prone to dwell on what we have said and heard. At the very least a vocal disagreement sharpens our wits and helps us formulate our ideas for ourselves or in future disagreements. At best, we will change and be better for them. Changes in the way our mind works do not often happen instantly, often they require reflection and contemplation – My mind is not often changed on the spot (I am too stubborn for that), but my mind does change some time after a disagreement. At the point that I realise I now hold a view that I was arguing against with a friend only a few weeks before, I am filled with a newfound respect for my friend, a closeness in consciousness.

Even after savage arguments, disagreements that left us shaking our heads wondering of our friends or lovers ‘who are you anymore?’ there is room for a moment of love. We are all familiar with this moment if we have quarrelled with family, fallen out with a friend or broken up with a lover. We distance ourselves from the other; we build up in our minds the idea that they are an alien, that if we disagreed about x then we don’t have anything in common. Then, after a period of silence or time apart we see them again. Just as I described in 'Moments of Love’, we will notice a phrase, a gesture, a way of being that we recognise. That recognition reminds us that one disagreement does no discard all that we do share – that recognition and understanding of our loved ones’ is second nature. The familiarity on more familiar terms reminds us that we love them in spite of disagreement. We may never be fully synchronous consciousnesses but we are a lot closer than most. More significantly, and a topic for another time: would we want to agree on everything anyway?

Moments of Love

Understanding and love play different roles in the different relationships that we have over the course of our lives. We might say that the love shared between friends generates a sense of belonging; family love creates a reliable sense of comfort and romantic love a deep intimacy of body and mind. Of course, having just read that list you might think of many counter-examples; Human relationships, in their infinite configurations and complexity, defy categorisation into these three groups. Rather than think about types of love that apply to types of relationships – “friend love” for friends and “romantic love” for lovers – I would like to instead look at the fact that we can feel different kinds of love for the same person at different times without always consciously processing it. There are certainly times where we feel as intimately close to our friends as we ever have been with a lover and arguably many lovers spend most of their time behaving like friends. Equally important I think, if we are honest with ourselves, most of the time we are not feeling love for friends, families or even partners. We know we love them and we remember what it felt like when we realised we did, we’re just not feeling it right now. I am not talking about falling out of love – I am talking about the fact that our feelings aren’t timeless, they relate directly to what’s going on with us at the time. It is our minds that later make the conscious move of saying ‘that moment that I just shared with this person means that they fall into the category of people that I love’ – a category that can be more static than our capricious emotions. Because of that far more conscious move, what we say we feel and what we actually feel do not always match up perfectly. While this act of consciously categorising our relationships the actual feelings that comprise them are usually more varied than we allow ourselves to think about.

I would like to examine some of these ‘moments of love’ that cause us to consciously think that we love a person. In doing so I hope I will shed a bit more light on what I mean by ‘synchronicity of consciousness’, understanding and love. If love is understanding and a synchronicity of two consciousness’, then for the most part, that synchronicity seems to only really occur over a series of moments. It is the way we attend to and treat such moments that helps us pin down and define our relationships. What follows is a rather hurried look at some ‘moments of love’, I am sure that many, many more exist and I hope to hear of and discuss more examples in the coming months.

A moment of love can be one of recognition or coordinated thinking. For example, think of a conversation with a friend or a stranger that you have had where you just ‘click’. Sometimes that sensation of ‘clicking’ is one of the reasons that we enter into a romantic relationship, more often it’s just a good chat between friends. We tend to surround ourselves with people that we ‘click’ with and consider them loved ones but we shouldn’t understate the sense of affirmation and joy that one gets from revealing your thoughts to another and have them say “yes, I agree – and what’s more, what you’ve said reminds me of this thing…” A conversation that can continue down this structure almost indefinitely is a moment of love – an affirmation of your beliefs that is also productive. That is certainly not to rule out productive disagreements, as opposed to destructive arguments, as a moment of love; the common ground between a discussion based on agreement of principles and an intelligent ‘argument’ is that both require a deep understanding of the core meaning of what the other is saying and the way their reasoning is developing. Either way in such instances we do feel a moment of love (of affirmation of self, of belief, of discovery of another and a newfound sense of connection) but it is also often so fleeting that we do not put a name to the sensation. Just because we fail to name it does not mean it isn’t there.

We enjoy talking about ourselves, our feelings, our beliefs and our views of the world. This is because if we talk about such things with a person who will fully understand what we’re saying and how we arrived at our conclusions we will be revealing ourselves to another in a relatively unfiltered and pure form. If they share or at least understand these ‘core’ attitudes to life and reveal to us this understanding by replying with complementary anecdotes about their own situations, experiences and views we will inevitably feel acknowledged and understood – loved. Of course, such conversations are not easy to spark, especially with strangers but even with friends and family. The often unspoken contract of a romantic relationship is that we will be honest with each other about how we feel and what we think about ourselves, each other and the world. This kind of relationship (where sharing 'core' attitudes is implicit) is highly conducive to more intimate conversations that are closer to a pure sharing of self, which is why romantic partnership is the deepest form of love – more real moments of love occur more often. In our day-to-day lives and in most of our encounters though, we don’t just talk about our values, or ourselves we talk about something: hobbies, a game, a film, music what we have been doing. This is no less important – things we like or know define us too.

Some hobbies and pastimes make us feel unique; others make us feel part of a group. Either way, when we take part in such activities we configure our minds to work within the bounds of the activity. When playing a game of football, all the players minds are attending to the game – the very fact they are playing the game sets their minds working in a way that thinks about things like ‘where is the ball?’ ‘What is the position of relevant players on the pitch?’ ‘Which player should I be marking?’ etc. They are less likely to be thinking about the election or the movie they saw on Friday night. The fact that their minds are in ‘football mode’ allows them to work as a team with the faith that their teammates are thinking in a similar way – a team sport is all about synchronicity of body and mind. When there is effective team play there is a feeling of exhilaration and ecstasy, there is also a strong sense of camaraderie among teammates; this is because they will feel a moment of love when they play well together.

To varying degrees any hobby or act of recreation, be it active or passive, involves setting up your mind in a certain way. The more you immerse yourself in a given activity the easier it is to configure your mind to that task. Some elements of these configurations transfer into your general thinking: this is why many think team based sports build characters, but similarly a movie buff may be more prone to think of their lives like a movie narrative, or at least find themselves making analogies based on influential movies.

When we talk about an interest with someone who shares it we can talk more comfortably because we know that we are talking the same language, because when we engage in the conversation both our minds will think about that song, that film, that match in the way that our time spent on that particular interest has trained us to think. The fact that we are talking about something external from us allows for an easy slip into synchronicity of consciousness in a way that there is simply no guarantee of when talking about values or feelings. Most friendships are built around moments of love occurring through shared activities or talking about shared interests because these things facilitate clear communication without confusion. I have a lot of affection for people that I can talk with on fairly niche subjects at length.

Communication through or about a medium that we are knowledgeable about is a safe act of revealing oneself and learning more about another. It is even relatively easy to talk about hobbies that other people don’t share because we are animated confident, passionate when talking about a thing that we have spent a lot of time thinking about. But we feel particularly excited when we discover that an acquaintance likes something we like, like a band, that we didn’t think they might have done – it gives you something to talk about but more importantly it brings you closer to understanding that acquaintances conscious process’. If both Joe and I like Metallica then I have an avenue of understanding him that was unavailable to me before – I can ask him what he likes about Metallica, listen to Metallica and make a start on figuring out if his consciousness works similarly to mine when he listens to them. In doing so I can tangentally learn more about the core 'him' and become aware of a synchronicity of consciousness that I was not aware of before. I can in some way get to know him by our common experience and talking about that common experience without having to ask probing questions of him. A shared interest does not guarantee a moment of love - It may be that Joe likes Metallica for reasons that I can not understand, and that what he sees in them adds nothing to my own experience of the band. In such an instance there was an opportunity for a moment of love but none was forthcoming. That we failed to connect is of no concern; we were only discussing Metallica and there was no conspicuous or even conscious decision by either of us to use the common ground to try to ‘connect’ so we don’t feel like anything was lost. Of course, the fact that we failed to connect even over common ground may play a part in me not going out of my way to speak to Joe any more.

It is a truism that women say that a ‘good sense of humour’ is the most important quality in a prospective partner. What do they mean by ‘good sense of humour’? In this case, I think a ‘good sense of humour’ means ‘he will know what makes me laugh and laugh at my jokes’. Humour and laughter are in themselves almost as mysterious as love and there are a multitude of different tastes. Women are not saying they want to date comedians who will tell them jokes; we are not talking about gags and puns but belly laughs that catch you unawares. To make someone laugh on a personal level both teller and listener need to be, to some extent ‘on the same page’. When two people share a joke, particularly a private one, there is a connection of consciousness’ – the laughter is an expression of the moment of love. When someone laughs at my jokes loudly and sincerely I feel loved and I feel equally loved when someone makes a joke that makes me laugh in the same way. Because good, personal, humour cuts straight into the way you think and requires conscious or unconscious understanding of your mind. To make someone laugh requires an expectation of what they will find funny, and equally the act of laughing says, “I get it”. Genuine laughter says more than “I get it” though, it also says “I get you”. When a woman say she wants a partner with a ‘good sense of humour’ she really isn’t just trying to make the funny, fat, balding guy feel better – she’s trying to say ‘I want a partner with whom I can share moments of connection with. A partner who I ‘get’ and who ‘gets’ me.’ We tend to befriend people that we find funny for the same reason – sincere laughter is a moment of love.

So far I have mostly talked about moments of love that affirm our selves and subtly reinforce the common ground between us and so aid two consciousness’ communication and understanding of each other. Such moments are the meat of friendships, but in different combinations and under different circumstances they are the stuff of great romances as well. What becomes of moments of love is down to how we react to them. Quite sensibly we do not usually think anything of the moment but in some way log away all such experiences for reference later when we are prompted to make a judgement about the person in question’s ‘character’ or our relationship to them. Such prompts to attend to our experiences can come from without or within but are almost always some time after the moment(s) of love. However, some moments can be so powerful, can resonate so strongly with us that the moment of love can also be a moment of realisation of love. Rather, we should say, a moment of definition of love. Such moments of realisation or definition tend to be so powerful that they command our assent – at that moment we know we love the person truly and passionately and have an overwhelming urge to convey such feelings immediately – to do less would be to conceal a part of ourselves, end the moment of understanding and cut short the moment of love.

One such experience is a sensation I have felt often. When we get to know a person well their behaviour becomes familiar and we can start to predict how they might react to certain things happening. Just to clarify here; this kind of understanding is not necessarily evidence of love; we all know people who’s behaviour seems so transparent, so obvious and mechanical that at times it seems as though they are reading from a script. These are not people I love; these are people that bore me. I feel that understand them, yes, but only because their minds seem to me to be so simple and so straightforward that I can not understand how they might have ended up so uninteresting - and don’t care to find out. I treat such people as human consciousness’ out of social convention but in my mind I do not often recognise them as conscious aproper - not like myself, my friends and my family.

When we reach a stage of understanding with someone that also does provide interest, stimulation and affirmation that person does not become a bore. We have inklings of how these people ‘work’ but that only spurs us on to know them better. In our encounters with these people we can get so caught up in the particulars of life and in the learning of the new that sometimes a familiar gesture, phrase or reaction can cause a sudden and shocking reminder of how well we understand each other already. Such moments of re-recognition can sometimes trigger us to think, “ahh, that is so you” and as an afterthought “And that’s part of why I love you”. These are the moments when your girlfriend is being so herself that you just have to lean over and kiss her. This act is a moment of love – she has revealed herself to you and you recognise the revelation as being a true revelation of her. The fact that you recognise her reaffirms the closeness between you and the act of kissing her, out of the blue from her perspective, affirms her in-herself – it reinforces for her that she can receive affection simply for being herself. Unlike the other moments of love above, this one involves a sharp realisation/definition of what the sensation actually means in terms of the relationship between the two of you. Such moments can occur between friends and do not always result in a kiss, although a kiss can occur and can equally force a redefinition in the relationship (but that is another topic).

Here is another example of a moment of love that triggered a realisation of love. This example relates to family love, specifically the love between a mother and child. A mother behaves in a certain way to her child because of love, but also out of social obligation, a sense of duty and a biological urge. That biological urge and social responsibility could probably be enough to maintain parental bonds without the feeling of love actually being there. Of course, all three feed into each other in the long run. I would describe the source of the strength of a mothers love as stemming from the fact that she has a privileged perspective on her child’s consciousness growing and developing – throughout most of childhood the mother understands her child’s consciousness better than the child itself does. The reciprocation at this stage comes from the fact that the parents are the first consciousness’ that a child has a chance to encounter so for a long time the child understands it’s parents better than any other people in the world. The child is at a disadvantage due to lack of experience, but this is probably why in many cases parents display more love to a child than they initially get repaid in return!

Kirsty O’Connor has an interesting blog entry about how the first time she felt in love with her daughter was not the first time she held her but the first time she got a glimpse of her individual character at dinnertime – the first peeks into the workings of her daughters newly developing individual consciousness.

“I also realised, looking back that it was at this time that I felt an overwhelming sense of falling in love.... with Carmel. I’ve never in my life experienced love at first sight but, like I’m sure many mums do, I expected to feel the all-consuming, overwhelming love I’d heard so much about, the minute she was born. I didn’t. Perhaps when I first put her on my breast, or at least by the time we took her home from the hospital. I didn’t feel it. I felt nervous and exhausted and very protective over my tiny baby, but not love. I didn’t know her yet…

…I love dinner time, it’s intimate and gives our baby a chance to assert her independence, allowing us a great opportunity for getting to know the real Carmel.”

– Kirsty O’Connor, courtesy of askamum.

These, then are ‘moments of love’ – times where we feel two consciousness’ meeting, times where we feel we are closer to another and so closer to ourselves. They increase the affection we feel for another and they can make us realize how important our connections to these specific others are to our self-esteem and happiness. It is important to distinguish moments of love from love as a continuum or a narrative with a beginning, middle and an end as such conceptions do not match up with our experience of our feelings. We do use these moments of emotion to help define and pin down relationships or give turn them into a story of distinct phases. Of course, the act of defining certainly does have a further effect on the way we feel. For now though, we have concentrated on the basic moments from which we build a picture of others, ourselves and how we feel. We have not yet explored how these moments of love add up to defining one person as a lover and another as a friend and what else may affect these decisions. Nor have we begun to touch on the most famous ‘moment of love’ – sex.