Cold Shower 16: "But have you made love to her?"

Cold Shower “But have you made love to her?” Vol. I, Article XVI

This is a column by Dr. James R. Fisher, Jr., industrial psychologist and former corporate executive for Nalco Chemical Company and Honeywell Europe Ltd. For the past thirty years he has been working and consulting in North & South America, Europe and South Africa. He is the author of five books and more than 200 articles on what he calls cultural capital – risk taking, self-reliance, social cohesion, work habits and relationships to power – for a changing work force in a changing workplace. He started as a laborer, worked his way through college, and ended in the boardrooms of multinational corporations. These columns will answer questions troubling modern workers everywhere.

Question:

Dr. Fisher, I have read all your books, and you write a lot about love: work is love made visible, love is the sinew missing from the muscle of today’s organization, love of work, life, friendship, and being useful. Lust, greed and pleasure are void fillers for those afraid to love, and so on. My question is how would you define love, and what are your feelings about pornography and all the forms of assorted violence and abuse associated with it?

Dr. Fisher replies:

From the beginning of time in human history there has been this battle to understand love. For me love has less to do with sex or physical pleasure, both of which are important in their own right, but more to do with the spiritual side of being human.

True, we refer to the physical embrace as “making love.” We say, “I love you,” when we mean, “I lust after you.” When things go awry, we think by being an accomplished lover, we can put the relationship back on course. Physical endowments of the male and female are celebrated and envied because we associate such endowments with being “great lovers.” As a consequence, severe pain and discomfort are endured to make the body more attractive to potential lovers. Since love is associated so uncritically with the body, not the soul, aging is considered an enemy and all sorts of infantile behaviors are manifested. Moreover, when the ardor for physical embrace wanes, panic sets in. This finds lovers quantifying the times and the lengths of their embraces, and then bragging about them to associates. Physical impotence is the enemy of society while spiritual impotence is accepted with casual grace.

Were this a startling new development in human history we might have pause for concern, but it is not. It has happened often and usually in a time of physical and mental fatigue, or when the demands of change appear to accelerate, and the capacity to husband the associated stress of these demands appears to diminish.

When Europe was straining to pull itself out of the Dark Ages of medieval society, two apparently incompatible characteristics were exposed to the light of day: lofty ideals represented in the Code of Chivalry, and a sexuality often marked by an unrestrained wildness and the practice of perversions unknown in earlier times. Thus pornography was born. Seemingly blameless activities such as dancing in the streets, public bathing, even processions of religious flagellants could, and often did become riotous orgies. The Black Mass and witchcraft were widely practiced. Their most spectacularly notorious exponent was Gilles de Rais, companion-in-arms of Joan of Arc.

Historians have placed much of the blame for this behavior at the door of the Christian church. In teaching that sex, except for the procreation of children was sinful, the Church locked love outside society’s normal and natural activities, and added an extra spice to forbidden pleasures. Its insistence on celibacy in the enclosed and overpopulated society of nunneries and monasteries served only to increase the incidence of sexual relations among the clerical orders.

The reason for this libidinous society can be traced to the effect of the Bubonic Plague and the pox epidemic, feudal laws which allowed the lords to do as they wished with their serfs, the misery and poverty of the great mass of people, and the influence of the Middle East with its freer attitudes to sex and luxury.

Western society today is reaching out to the Far East and embracing Hinduism and Buddhism for precisely the same reason. Ironically, pornography was first invented in Europe and has always flourished there, whereas the need for it in the Far East is much less apparent. Pornography is an outcome of societal repression, or a symptom of an up tight social climate where incompatible attributes are in conflict. It is unwise and uncritical to blame pornography for violence and psychosexual abuse. Nor would I repress it. Pornography seems more likely an aphrodisiac for an impotent society, which lacks the imagination, will or sensual energy to raise the physical embrace to the denouement of spiritual communion.

We seem terrified of intimacy. Human love to me is basically a relationship consisting of two critical factors: the ability to be truly intimate with another person. That means exposing oneself to that other person as one actually is. This forms a bond of trust between one and another. You open your heart to that other person and become vulnerable to his or her caring. And secondly, you accept that other person as you find him or her, warts and all. You assist that other person in being comfortable and accepting in what he or she is. This will enhance love in all its forms because unless one is loving of oneself as he or she is one cannot be loving of another person as that person is found. Love has nothing to do with changing a person to one’s ego ideal.

To put this in perspective, a friend of mine has had an intimate spiritual relationship with another person for several years, as his marriage is a barren wasteland. He admitted his love for this person to his wife. “But have you made love to her?” she asked. He hadn’t and admitted so. She smiled in triumph, not knowing her marriage was a hollow grave.



Copyright (1996) See The Taboo Against Being Your Own Best Friend (1996) discounted at $12 (shipping & handling included).