Sexuality

The most passionate way people relate to another person is sexually. Nothing except sexual arousal and excitement: rising tension, doubt about what happens next, sudden surprises, and all in a sequence of heightened attention. A similar pattern of excitement also occurs near the end of closely matched athletic contests and in suspense films. That's not to say our excitements at these events are based covertly sexual. The thing is that only in sex is such powerful excitement shared with someone.

Sex is not simply a matter of physical contact, but pleasure that comes largely from how we understand the situation and how we identify the connection to the other. Even in masturbatory fantasy, people dwell upon their actions with others; they do not get excited by thinking of themselves. What is exciting is interpersonal: how the other views you. Some doubt about this makes it even more exciting. Just as it is difficult to tickle oneself, so too sex is better with an actual partner on the other end.

In the arena of sex, our very strongest emotions are expressed. These emotions are not always tender and loving, though sometimes, perhaps often, they are. Such strong emotions bring equally strong ones, excited and exciting, in response. The partners see their strongest and most primitive emotions expressed and also contained safely. It is not only the other person who is known more deeply in sex. Everyone knows their own self better in experiencing what it is capable of: passion, love, aggression, vulnerability, playfulness, joy. The depth of relaxing afterward is a measure of the fullness and profoundity of the experience together, and a part of it.

Sex also is a mode of communication, a way of saying or of showing something more than our words can say. Yet though sexual actions speak more pointedly than words, they also can be enhanced by words, words that name one's pleasure or lead ahead to greater intensity, words that narrate a fantasy or merely hint at exciting ones that cannot comfortably be listened to.

Like musicians in jazz improvisation, sexual partners are engaged in a dialogue, partly scored, partly improvised, where each very attentively responds to the statements in the bodily motions of the other. These statements can be about one's own self and pleasures, or about one's partners, or about the two of you together, or about what one would like the other to do. Whether or not they do so elsewhere in life, in sex people frequently and unconsciously do unto others as they would have others do unto them.

In verbal conversations, people speak in different voices, with different ideas, on different topics. In sexual conversation, everyone has a distinctive voice. And there is no shortage of new things two people can say, or older things that can be said newly or reminisced about. To speak of conversations here does not mean that the sole purpose of sex is communication. There is also excitement and bodily pleasure, desired for them. Yet these are also important parts of the conversation, for it is through pleasurable excitement and the opening to it that other powerful emotions are brought into expression and play in the sex arena.

In this arena, everything personal can be expressed explored, symbolized, and intensified. In intimacy, we let another within the boundaries we normally maintain around ourselves, boundaries marked by clothing and by full self-control and monitoring. Through the layers of public defenses and faces, another is admitted to see a more vulnerable or a more impassioned you. Nothing is more intimate than showing another your physical pleasure.

Not only can one explore in