So, how’s your love life? Now, don’t tell me you don’t have one with Valentine’s Day upon us. Either you’re blissfully bonded to a mate or six A-list silver screen idols take turns occupying your imagination. Social scientists maintain we fantasize intimacy about every nine minutes. It’s right in there after food and shelter. Doesn’t matter if it’s elegant innuendos out of a romance novel or something acrobatic and nitty-gritty. So, if I’ve interrupted anything interesting, finish up…I’ll wait.

What’s that? Stupid Cupid is wearing a mask this year? Bummer. Have you considered the Kama Sutra? I don’t know if the ancient Hindus dealt with pandemics, but they used more veils than Salome, and explored more role-playing than 50 shades of Grey. Plus, you’ve got a cell phone and can just call it in if you’re good at creating phone passion. Like everything else in life, the turbo boost takes place between the ears. Where there’s a will, there’s a way. Between judicious application of the Kama Sutra and steamy communications there’s a lot to explore. Methinks the reason Valentine’s month only has 28 days (not counting Sadie Hawkins Day on leap years) is to keep us from becoming exhausted.

One thing I’ve noticed that has lessened from last year are articles purporting to explain the differences between men and women. I think “experts” gave up when the number of genders climbed past 100. Still, plenty of advice being offered, though. I have a few questions myself…like, are personalized Valentine’s Day ads the thing this year? Data mining seems to be targeting bachelors right down to nicknames printed on stuff. It’s very intrusive. And why do married women try to marry single men off to single women?  

Einstein said marriage was the failed attempt to make something lasting out of an event, and Freud called love the overestimation of the sex object (…so cold, even for a couple of wonks). Admittedly, I synced up my compass to stay permanently on Bachelor Boulevard in my younger years, but for different reasons than Einstein and Freud. I simply thought romantically ideal love wasn’t possible in the modern world. Chased no one. Pretty much skipped society’s superficial rites of passage. And if women hadn’t come into my environment and made emotional connections, I could have ended up a shepherd in some remote backwater with an unhealthy chumminess toward sheep.

There’s a word for it that has only recently come into vogue: demisexual. The intensity of sexual attraction for a demisexual scales up directly with the intensity of emotional bonding. That’s pretty much what I call romantic idealism in a relationship. Difficult for someone like me to separate sex from love – especially since life eventually taught me that a soulmate is possible after all. Not that I don’t cultivate the erotic cues of a beautiful female for their own sake. As Bob Hope once said, a beautiful woman is someone you can’t describe without using your hands. But as someone else said, or sang, “…is that all there is?” It’s like a faucet with two handles – both hot. Physical attraction is one of the handles, but the other is exclusive emotional bonding. Can you bond exclusively with a herd or a sexual revolution? Which brings me back to my original question asking why do married ladies find satisfaction in marrying off single men to single women? Is it the herd thing? Some vicarious sexual fulfillment? Wouldn’t occur to most married men to match-make, except maybe for practical reasons involving a sister or a daughter. Male or female, for a demisexual, passion without emotional exclusivity is like going to a five-star restaurant for tomato soup. 

A picture is worth a thousand words, so allow me to share one – a painting, actually – that ties up Valentine’s Day for me with a silver bow and a red rose. This is something I wrote last year on Facebook (the painting I refer to will lead off the photos at the end): 

Love this painting! Says so much about gender love, its masques and masks (in the Time of Covid), its joys and follies, its secret urgings and surgings. As a romantic idealist, I believe you can only bring the full engagement of all that’s imprinted on your radar, your instincts, your total heart, mind and soul to one inamorata. It could happen young, it could happen old, most likely it won’t ever happen at all. But any attempted love after that high water mark of full intensity, whether practical from the outset or the result of bitter disappointments, gets shaped like a pact with clauses for self-defense and self-interest. However life carves up your circumstances, if romantic, erotic, undefiled, passionate, pure love finds you, it will blind you, bind you like a magnet. If it outlasts the limerence stage, you will never forget the feeling. Go beyond that and the hunger inside you becomes like the crocodile in Peter Pan, forever searching for the satiable feast, be it Hook or another bite of the apple. If that possibility did not exist, I think I’d be a very different person. But it’s the nature of romantic idealism – my nature – to enshrine that possibility. Without it, there’s nothing much that isn’t generic and replaceable about passion. Bonds cool to warm, sustained by gratitude, shared history, a sense of personal integrity, expectations, one bed as good as another. No silent butterfly palpitations of the heart, no empty ache, no undiminished heights for the soul to soar. Everything crashes back to Earth in piles of compromise and negotiation. Ultimate love isn’t 50-50; it’s 100-100. Pity if you miss that top tier that exists beyond the bargaining formulas for today’s relationships. Better your fairy godmother should tell you to kiss Prince Charming today when he comes disguised as a frog, but all day it’s raining frogs everywhere. Better you should be a barber shaving a mafia don surrounded by his goons, and you open up a gushing gash on his chin with a straight razor. Give me clowns and blindfolds. I’ll customize the dream.

Well, I see my nine minutes are up. As you were…

This month’s photos: #1 Pierrot’s Embrace (painting by Seignac, 1900); #2-11 a month of celebrating sax and snow from my house to Elm Creek to Crow-Hassan, day or night; #12 a superb shot from a little further north by my friend Lexy, whose exquisite eye turns nature into an art gallery, frame by frame.

Thomas "Sully" Sullivan