Love? Or Sex?

The words twanged out from the radio, "I'm gonna lay you down and love you right" and I giggled and thought to myself, "If you're gonna love her right then you best give her a back massage, a neck massage, and a foot massage and let that poor woman go to sleep." Somehow I doubt that I am the intended audience for that song.

Typically, very little shocks me but I have to admit that I am, not shocked, but baffled. I really, really do not understand the obsession with sex and the confusion of sex with love.

I mean, the phrases are everywhere. "Make love," "Gonna get me some lovin'," "She loved him up and turned him into a horny toad," (name that movie). But they don't really mean love, they mean sex.

It isn't that love and sex are mutually exclusive, they are not. In fact, they were designed to go hand in hand in a very specific relationship. But things have gone all wonky because we desperately crave one, or both, and just lump them all together in one tangled up knot of dysfunction.

(Disclaimer: Now, I know that y'all might not think I know much about the topic but, seriously, I managed to conceive, grow, and birth 4 babies so I must have a least a bit of street cred on the subject. And don't worry, this is not going to be the typical lecture about sex and marriage and what all God intended. Most of you have heard it all before. I don't need to reinvent the wheel.)

I don't know which is worse, really. Calling sex "love," or totally disconnecting the two completely. I am working my way through the seasons of "The Big Bang Theory" and, while I love the characters and find the show is hilarious, I grow quite weary of the constant, never ending, sex theme. Even a legitimate and apparently loving relationship gets defined by sex. Seriously? Get a life!

Now, I know that the desire for sex is a real, legitimate desire. And the desire for love is universal. But we have to be careful how those two play out and how we seek to meet those needs. Think of yourself on a raft in the ocean. You are thirsty. Really, really thirsty. You know that help is on the way, but you don't think you can wait. So you do what makes sense to your thirsting body; you drink sea water. It satisfies your thirst for a bit, but then you are all the more thirsty. And if you continue on, with no intervention, drinking the sea water will KILL you. You will, while remaining desperately thirsty, drink yourself to death.

Whether what you really desire is to be loved, or you actually do crave the physical release of coitus, going after sex outside of a specific, loving, committed relationship (hint: marriage) is like drinking gallon after gallon of sea water. You will always want more and it will never satisfy.

So don't be fooled by the lyrics. The movies. The television shows. The culture at large. Sure, "everybody is doing it," or so they say. But "everybody" seems really thirsty to me. And never satisfied. I think there is a better way.

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