Lessons in Love

I am so in love with love. I have multiple love hearts tattooed on my body. I designed a claddagh ring engraved with the word grá (Irish for love). I am romantic. I feel emotions intensely. I have ADHD. I have hyperfocus. I am usually quite singular in my attractions. I am not polyamory inclined. In the first instance, it is actually quite rare for me to feel strong sexual attraction to anyone.

It’s highly unusual to look at an image of someone and feel like I want to sleep with them (except maybe Jacob Elordi, all norms are suspended here). Generally, I can look at someone and see that they are objectively goodlooking but in order for that to be activated into sexual desire, something intellectual has to occur. We have to have some sort of cerebral connection for me to desire anything sexual. Equally I have had partners who are not conventionally attractive but they have been attractive to me for combinations of other reasons (although I decided to pause romantic pursuits with average looking men, because in my experience they don’t treat me very well whereas handsome men more often do - that’s another essay for another day.)

However, once attraction is activated, and certainly if I become intimate with someone, the idea of sleeping with anyone else at the same time, legitimately spins me out. It’s not a question of “morality” or what’s “right” or “wrong”, I am an unconventional person, but for me generally I just do not have the interest or the bandwidth. I feel a great deal in the first place to experience desire, and the thought of being able to have those feelings doubled simultaneously feels unfathomable to me.

Now, even with all of that context and experience ( I got married relatively young), the belief that there is one person who I am supposed to feel sexually attracted to for 50+ years and that as a result of that attraction that person is also supposed to be my primary everything, the other partner in a nuclear unit in which it remains (for many if not most people) economically imperative to stay in should they want to be able to you know, provide the bare necessities of life, like rent and mortgage and that if we forgo this formula, we risk living alone in isolation, with all of the risks and challenges and dangers that potentially brings, certainly once one gets into old age, is not a basis for happiness, peace, joy or contentment.