Gender, Love and Sex

Ok I swore I'd clear the backlog of things I want to blog about.

I read this really interesting article about a guy who underwent a sex change, but what got me was the comments. One comment linked to this NYT article on a married couple who stayed happily together after the husband changed his sex. Yet another comment tells a supposedly true anecdote about a hetero female who fell in love with another woman. A reply to this comment argues that either 1) the female is not hetero but is bisexual or lesbian, or 2) the female is hetero but not really 'in love' with the other woman.

So the question is, can you be straight and still love a person of the same sex? And by love I mean what most Singaporeans would see as the emotion that leads boy and girl to date, get married and spend the rest of the lives together.

One particularly favoured response to that question is that our sexual preferences are just general preferences. Meaning that if I say I'm a hetero female, what I mean is that I'm usually attracted to guys, but I might, however rarely, be attracted to and fall in love with women. So some hetero females might be more likely to be attracted to women than other hetero females, but they remain hetero because most of the time they're still attracted to guys. Likewise a lesbian might be attracted to females most of the time, but might occasionally be attracted to a guy.

Now I totally agree with the above response. I think it's silly to believe that even though we may like more than one type of music and more than one type of cuisine and more than one colour, we can only like either males or females, or that if we usually like only males then we cannot possibly like females or vice versa. Why should our sexual likes and dislikes be so different from our other likes and dislikes?

But what I find more interesting is the definition of love and the question of the relation between love and sex.

When I say love, I'm talking about that romantic love that people seem to differentiate from all other types of love, and have amazingly high standards for. 'Love' has to be monogamous (usually), it's special, it's great and momentous and unique, and above all 'true'. You can't merely 'feel affection for' - that doesn't make the cut. 'Love' is greater than that. It's the force that triumphs over death and families locked in violent conflicts and the star-crossedness of all that.

But what is this 'love'? What makes it so special? We all know about 'true love', but what exactly is it? Were Romeo and Juliet 'truly' in love? What makes it not just a crush? What makes it different from other types of love?

One question is, can you be in 'love' and not feel sexually attracted to the person you love? Can there be love without lust?

If love can exist without lust, what makes this love so special? How is it different from the love between family members and friends? Would you marry your best friend if you saw him 'only' as a friend? If you see him as 'more than a friend', what's the extra thing that constitutes the 'more'?

If love cannot exist without lust, then what if someone has well, libido problems? Or is for some reason not interested in sex? Does that mean that that person cannot love? Does this mean that on days when you think your partner looks unattractive (your dress makes you look fat, dear) or on days you simply don't feel the lust (headache, dear) you then love your partner less?

What are the other components of love (besides, perhaps, lust)? Conventionally, one would list things like care, affection, commitment etc. These are things that are common to familial or platonic love. Can we say that familial/platonic love + lust = Love? But what if you have a friend whom you care about and are physically attracted to? Does that mean that you 'love' that friend in that special way? How much must you care about the person in order to be able to say you 'love' him?

The most common way (this is what friends tell me!) of 'verifying' if someone 'truly' 'loves' you seems to be his willingness to sacrifice his own happiness for yours. I'm not sure I quite buy that. When you sacrifice yourself for someone, is it a total loss on your part, or do you actually gain utility/satisfaction from sacrifice/being needed/being perceived as noble and loving? If so, when you 'sacrifice', is it an indication of your love, or your enjoyment/satisfaction from your sacrifice?

In the end I've never seen a definition of love that really satisfied me, and my sneaking suspicion is that love is probably an amalgamation of phenomena instead of the unique discrete phenomenon that it's often perceived to be, and that the composition of love differs from person to person, relationship to relationship. i.e. 'True love' is often seen as special and momentous and more than mere affection or care or lust, but I suspect it's actually just 'great affection' or 'great need' or 'great desire', and that what I mean by love might be quite different from what you mean by love. I do believe that there is no such identifiable, definable thing as 'love'.

And yes, I know the difference between 'cannot be defined' and 'does not exist', and knowing this I still believe that the 'special, momentous, till death do us part, one and only, there'll be no other' love is a myth and a fantasy. At least until I stop thinking and start feeling.