DAY 273: SPIRITUAL SUNDAY
Building the Long Desire: Attraction Plus Obstacles

In The Erotic Mind, Jack Morin posited this simple formula for hot sex:

ATTRACTION + OBSTACLES = EXCITEMENT

Romantic comedies are created on the concept. Once the attracted couple overcome the obstacles and get together, the movie ends before the excitement cools. Sometimes it seems that modern Western society must be the most (foolishly) romantic of all time. But the ancient Egyptians were as sentimental and romantic about love as we are.

Their word for love, loosely translated, means “a long desire.” Their love poems—and Shakespeare’s plays, for that matter—are filled with separations and calamities that keep lovers apart. These sometimes tragic lovers exist in the state of ragavat, the passionate love of the Kama Sutra, born of intense physical attraction.

What is the message for a couple trying to balance love and life and hoping to create and sustain a long desire? Great sex—the sustaining of ragavat, or the long desire—requires balancing intimacy and separateness. In America, we overemphasize intimacy at the expense of separateness.

“Let there be spaces in your togetherness,” Khalil Gibran said in The Prophet. Space is an aphrodisiac. Give each other some space today.

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