A Clearer View of Sexual Intercourse

I doubt that anyone ever learned the facts of life, A-to-Z , in one afternoon-length lecture. I know my own journey of…prepare yourself… “sexual discovery” was piecemeal, ad hoc, and sort of lengthy. And it was definitely non-linear. I have a vague memory of a schoolyard playmate insinuating that sex involved a naked “boy”, a naked “girl”, and the boy’s penis doing something with an opening belonging to the girl. All I’m sure of is that at some point I understood that a married man had to aim his urine stream into his wife’s open mouth in order to produce kids. That’s why I’m now a monk, cloistered away from all females. No, but actually, I imagine that the truth wasn’t received much better. I mean, at age 10, I had the world figured out and it all made sense. And one thing I was sure of was that people potty in private and cover that part up the rest of the time. To suggest that men and women would fit their naughty potty parts together seemed so very wrong, an offense against nature. It wasn’t what people were designed for. Little did I know.

Of course, I know better now. But, since I’ve had issues with sexual obsession and pornography addiction, I probably know enough about the mechanics of sexual interaction to earn me a university degree. And yet, I’ve just deduced something that blows it all away.

What if…

• Sex is not just meant to be one of the “membership benefits” of marriage, like a joint checking account, co-ownership of a house, children, and a set of china, but is an integral facet of marriage, as inseparable from that holy union as a facet of a diamond is from the diamond itself?
• Sexual intercourse was designed not just as the generator of offspring, but as the spiritual conduit through which husband and wife express their deep love and commitment, i.e., the “spiritual glue?”
• Sexual stimulation, arousal, and orgasm trigger emotional, spiritual, chemical, and intellectual (subconscious) responses that assume a safe, committed, stable, marital bond?

If those things are true…

Maybe the notion of sexual activity outside of marriage isn’t so much an issue of breaking rules and facing God’s wrath as risking the natural consequences of misusing something very powerful.

Essentially, any sexual act outside of marital sexual intercourse mocks the design of human sexuality. Whether it’s sex with someone not quite your spouse or someone totally inappropriate and maybe not even willing, I think the spirit knows when the sincerity of marital relations is missing, if not replaced with the thief mentality of getting a sexual high from a forbidden relationship. So, in addition to the risks of disease, pregnancy, and relationship complications, and perhaps legal ramifications, you’ve mishandled a piece of your soul in what was supposed to be a spiritual exchange.

Furthermore, the stimulation of the penis was charged to the wife’s vaginal walls. It takes a level of selfishness and pretense to use a mouth, a hand, or an anus as a vagina. It’s that selfishness that digs at you inside, the spirit’s awareness that the process of connection and communication was attempted without a valid recipient. The singular objective of orgasm and ejaculation registers with the inner self as misguided and empty.

Mind you, I’m not attempting to moralize here. My aim is to help people who are hung up on obsessive thoughts and behaviors and don’t understand why those things are so difficult to shun away. The bottom line is that this concept is helping me re-appropriate sex, meaning value it more in the bedroom with my wife and value it less in images between paid performers. One of the reasons why pornography becomes so important is that I place so much value on what are actually aberrations of nature, as if we can take a part of want was meant to be perfectly pleasurable and separate it and focus on it and multiply it. We secretly envy people with lots of sexual experience. After all, I can’t make sweeping generalizations of what different types of girls are like in bed. Poor me! Group sex? Why I suppose if I engaged it that, my pleasure would be multiplied by the number of people servicing me. Partners with unusual flexibility or perhaps with zero body fat and oversized sex parts? Well, how have I lived without? My point is that we’ve learned or chosen to make certain things important. We’ve programmed ourselves to think that a happy time face-to-face with a spouse at home in your own bed is deadly dull, what losers put up with. In actuality, plain old vaginal intercourse with someone you love deeply is the peak of satisfaction, especially when the orgasm is followed by thoughts of peace, contentment, safety, and respect.

Please don’t take this as a sermon about happily depriving yourself. It’s our nature to want what we haven’t got or at least wonder if we’d be happier if we had it. But if you remind yourself that even masturbation is phony at its core, you begin to get some intellectual control over the things that you’ve been obsessed about.