Don't we all want that healthy, clean, and balanced? Trick question, convinced on 'no'. It seems to me that most build all their ambitions around sex and 'love', literally making them life and death for themselves and others. Cultural obsessions, body shape mania, plots and outlines of emotional ambition, jealous rage and euphoric stumbling...Eris likes to watch. There is hope though that you can be subject to it all (like there's a choice unless you're a bodhisattva) without collapsing into it (wanty/needy enough for two myself); be immersed in it (it = the seductive field that physical intimacy humming with pleasant tension and satisfied ambition creates for mating context), consciously creating it, without letting it control you...so I believe, some sages agree. The tail should not wag the dog, but it almost always does; look around and see the (lack of) value placed on building deliberate healthy and lasting love relationships without a superficial validation requirement...bliss-capable realities competing with hopelessly complicated, ill-conceived (or maybe worse, non-conceived) hormonal ambition; those rising, propped, and falling even among your dearest; fantasy beginnings, Grimm endings. QED.
Worst case we're puppets of the nucleic acids as pure reductionists assert (am no convert, useful base though) right? I suppose there is some logic in doing little but chasing validation while our cradle-to-grave strings are pulled, but no amount of urgency and self-satisfaction will make it a well-spent life (maybe you get a pithy/snarky tombstone quote, congrats on that). Eyes open - many folks doing little but emotional latest-pleasure-seeking or last-pain-avoiding; generating offspring and propelling them into the future to try and scrub the fallout of damage repeated...are things really so bleak that the fight and flight blinders must obscure a sublime better, a way out of that cycle? Something more than trying to win races already run and games long since over. If the future is nothing but constant do-overs...well, what are you mastering there?
Purpose (what is yours? tick-tock) married (a sacred act, not a legal fiction or a safe harbor) to pleasure (created though focus, acceptance, and attention; it's not fated/accidental/predestined if you own it vs it owning you...see addiction, numero tres)...Joseph Campbell calls that a recipe for bliss, and advises we seek it. NOTE: bliss is irreducibly simple and very hard to get at, so no self-congratulatory 'attaboys just cause we're not scared sometimes. He talks about the sacred, the spiritual; relationships that cut the strings and cooperatively, collaboratively exceed the base, the animal. To be a human being, you have to try to be a human being, and you'll need help. Being born a hominid in the here and now is no fast-pass to meaningful/useful life expression, it's just license to consume and grunt while you do the work (or not). There's nothing different about our present/position at all in that regard.
So full circle?
Love...a spectrum of feeling/experience, but a perfectly direct relationship with it is very difficult (even possible? poets and prophets) to consummate as infatuation and wishful thinking pretend to it - shiny! Maya ya'll, that ain't new. So much preexisting noise and little-e go begging for attention in us all. I hate to say it but the book fairly stitches a Freudian afghan of this together with the a-time-for-everything thread woven into the skein of the passion. The inner child should be remembered fondly but not heard...we shouldn't raise good kids, we should raise good adults ready and willing to create/destroy for more than tingles and flutters, especially in ourselves (lateral props also to Kung Fu Tze and my Moist brothas on this one)
and Sex...wonderful stuff. But...if it's not sacred play (i.e. orgasm-obsessed, tainted with needy validation or control, a means to an ambition)...I'm old enough now to realize (and care when I'm not drunk on lust...happens) that it's often relationship-corroding self-negation. I don't think most folk know or care...understandable considering the distractions; mortal coils and life's demands.
