Douglas wrote:
>I think romantic love is basically sexual so there has to be an other.
Yes, basically - but the impulse of sexuality is to the obliteration of
the other in the service of one's own desires, and therefore may erase
the other altogether. Carried to its logical extreme, you have the
libertine. Pornography is always anonymous: it may involve other bodies,
but only in the service of a singular desire. The other's self doesn't
enter into the equation.
Love can lift this to a more complex idea of exchange between two
permeable selves: two particular selves, not two exchangeable entities.
I am not advocating an asexualised idea of romantic love, I hasten to say
- far from it - but the tensions in love seem to me to exist between
these impulses, which are contradictory, and hence deeply poetic.
Best
Alison
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