FEBRUARY 2024 SULLYGRAM:  What if Cupid, Venus, Bacchus and Diana the Virgin all got together for an orgy on February 14^th? One scorchin’ Valentine’s night, right? Or maybe not. Luvvv is still the number one subject of my considerable off-channel correspondence. Love more than sex – though sex remains the implied foundation, and the bedrock of love’s laments incoming to my email box. I’m honored by the confidences but I suspect they come because I’m a non-entity, a faceless page upon which others may write. I write back, metaphors mostly, perspectives laced with truths they may already know but need help sorting out. It’s like spirit writing, transference from painful reality into surrogates, same as puppet therapy for a traumatized child.

Allow me to put the Roman orgy of demigods aside for a moment and tune into a planning/planting meeting for the Garden of Eden. Instead of arguing about how many of themselves can fit on the head of a pin, the angels are arguing about what comes first, seeds or fertilizer [this is a metaphor for love or sex].

[angel names redacted]
“Sex will never reverse engineer into love,” say Angel 1, “seeds come first.”

“Talk about an anti-climax,” insists Angel 2, “it starts with fertilizer!”

The Generator Of Decisions (G.O.D.) settles it in a voice like thunder, of course: “The Order of Being for Man and Woman will be first attraction, then bonding. Sex and love will exist separately, but neither will be complete without the other.”

So, that’s how it’s gone down for us humans everafter. You can’t argue with the Big Mambo. Three independent levels of magic and bonding. Sex…love…and sex-love.

[Orgy update: It’s all about no strings attached. Cupid is stringing his bow, Venus is looking for her G-string, Bacchus is already strung out, and Diana is…where is Diana?]

Not to get too personal here, but what did you make of the world when you still had your baby teeth and sex was just a forbidden rumor? I ate apples but don’t recall ever talking to snakes, and by the time Satan had me by the hormones, I was just confused. Thought bras were for decoration. Then I turned 47 – kidding, kidding. But even as a teen, I was into studying people. Virgins especially fascinated me. Not talking about prudes or innocents willing to go blind but afraid of going to hell. Just people who lived maybe too much in their heads and kept waiting for society to buy them wedding presents, throw rice, and say, “…ready, set, GO!” And there were other virgins who just seemed lost. Their peers had been car-pooling to Sodom and Gomorrah since the first one got a learner’s permit, and still they chose the sidelines. Guess I shrugged them off as dysfunctional dreamers whose peculiar mental passions and emotional aberrations keep them looking for perfect scenarios. Then I realized that was my tribe.

I had already decided marriage was evolving faster than the role model of compatibility my parents had. The rules were changing, and I wasn’t going to be judgmental about it. Didn’t resent the implications for me; didn’t begrudge anyone getting whatever they wanted. I had no intentions of falling into the tender trap. No harm, no foul. Sex would have come easy, but love not so much. Bachelorhood became a synonym for dysfunctional dreamer. Amazingly, I gained a completely unearned reputation as a stud. Guess that’s a compliment from your peers; and to be honest, my non-conforming lifestyle must have seemed like classic young rebellion to many.

So, what do you think of love in the 21^st century? Can you confirm that G.O.D. blueprint of “first attraction, then bonding”? In my observation, the details are currently running rough for the main herd of humanity. Some few decide they must be in love after still respecting each other in the morning, or as Freud once said, “…love is the overestimation of the sex object.” They sign a piece of paper and live happily ever after. Well, mostly. OK, one couple living in a trailer in East Sweet Pea, Arizona. The rest discover that modern love is more of a negotiation for separate agendas complicated by parenting, with sex as a collateral benefit, and fidelity as a symbolic act of discipline.

Ooh, that’s cold. So, what about the dysfunctional dreamers – those tortured souls with unrealistic expectations who opted out of the meat market AND the realistic compromises? More than likely, they count flowers on the wall, read their horoscopes, surrender late in the game, or – if they’re really stubborn – die like 24-hour insects who missed reveille on their day. Damn.

What? No winners? Contrare! Aren’t we all winners? We get what we want when we want it; then maybe change to wanting something else. Just a matter of priorities. Some want #1 to be the carnal thrills, and the echoes thereafter, that drive every bit of protoplasm on the planet. Some want more than anything else to belong to the herd, cloned acceptance with all the sanctioned attributes and facades, whether white picket fences or clandestine polyamory. And some want to keep hope alive for more potent fulfillments that enrich the total beyond the sum of its parts – i.e. the sex-love in G.O.D.’s fine print. Include the poet-philosophers among these last, the lotus-eaters whose vestigial enhancements cascade into sublime torrents or wither like doomed seeds falling in cracked mud. This final category isn’t just for dumb procrastinators. There is no expiration date on romantic idealism, no finite shelf life.

I’ve vastly simplified the infinite variations on all the above, but I’m happy to say it’s somehow worked out for me with the love of my life. This despite having more than theoretical knowledge of sex and love separately and having to customize sex-love. That trio weren’t mutually exclusive after all, it turns out. Too many marriages seem more like leases than deeds these days. Amazing how separately couples may live. You sense large secrets from each other, as if they merely come together for intimacy or public occasions. They communicate more about each other than with each other. Where are the shared interests, thoughts and activities? Is this a strategy to keep marriages fresh, as in “absence makes the heart grow fonder”? Or is it just “out of sight, out of mind”?

In a validation of romantic idealism, I somehow arrived at this point with Golden Ticket intact. You only get one of those, you know, and you use it to bond with your romantic ideal because you can never give that deeply of yourself again. Something of perfection bleeds out of us when that commitment is made. Trust, hope, honesty, full faith & credit are not 100% renewable. They’re like batteries that slowly lose capacity each time they’re recharged until they no longer charge at all. Has something to do with the exquisite heights of vulnerability, methinks. One inamorata per romantic idealist. One perfect charge.

Anyway, sex-love became a quantum moment for me, two states of existence simultaneously. A paradox of freedom and fidelity that I had to learn. Bottom line, Valentine, love is always a zero-sum game within yourself. You get what you give. Not by calculation, negotiation, or emotional chess. But by single-mindedness and the sincerity of your heart.

Oh. About that orgy. Bacchus got drunk as a skunk and bumped Cupid just as he was taking aim. Now they’re crawling around the clouds on Mt. Olympus giggling and looking for the arrow. No one can find moon-goddess Diana either, though it is rumored she ran off with Mars and only comes back once every 28 days to join the vestal virgins. Venus is sober, alone and pissed. Says she might as well cut off her arms. Let that be a warning to you…do not waste your Valentine’s night. 

What do you do when you don’t take any photos for a month? You dig into your family archives. (cf. photo of me with my daughter Colleen draped in my lap to Michelangelo’s Pietà sculpture from the Italian Renaissance.) 

Thomas "Sully" Sullivan