My Unapologetic Refusal to Sanitize Love

Criticizing the currents of trendiness that smite the passions: what would a resurrection of zeal do for your life?

Artwork “The Eye of Passion”—painting of the eye from street art in Εξάρχεια, in Athens, Greece. Photo taken and edited by Joe Duncan

When did passion become a bad word? More importantly, when did it become such a shunned emotion?

My life has been far from stable from the time, mostly I was young. I spent my early years taking in a world of household instability, alcoholism, money problems poverty, and the litany of predictable consequences of each of these things.

At any point along the way, I could’ve realized that the entirety of my early life was one great big oscillation from one wave to the next, from one current to the next, riding the ebbs and flows of the chaos of my household, and denounced the passions as valueless liabilities. Wholesale rejections of passions aren’t exactly unheard of.

For 2,000 years we stifled human passion beneath the veil of Christendom, the overreaching hand of the authoritarian Church. Sex was entirely transformed into the taboo of self-indulgence. Simple bodily pleasures—and some would say bodily necessities—were transmuted into sins with the gravest of consequences (along with women, who’ve curiously always been deemed “unclean” in every religion that’s cropped up on earth).

Let’s not forget when the early church father St. Thomas Aquinas listed the sins in order of their severity, masturbation ranked higher than bestiality.

At least sex with an animal attempted something resembling procreation, the logic went, while masturbation was pure self-enjoyment, a personal sexual relationship beyond the clutching grasps of a Church drunk with power. The Church maintained this position about bestiality and masturbation for centuries until we all woke up with the great hangover of religious authoritarianism and realized its absurdity.

But rejection of the passions, as Nietzsche showed, isn’t limited to only the Abrahamic faiths. Plato and Socrates, weary of the instability of Athenian Democracy, were very much anti-passion. Socrates’ martyrdom wasn’t all too different from Jesus’ when you consider it.

The through-line is that in a world where things are unpredictable, we sometimes cling to whatever stands still and imbue the world with our own fantasies of orderly sensibility. And now, we see the same passion-denial showing up in our secular Western societies.

Nietzsche called it The Will to a Denial of Life, saying it was a “principle of dissolution and decay,” and, besides extending his conception of life-denial to all human moral pursuits (he was a bit overzealous at times), he was spot on. He observed how many people—now and throughout history—have ardently clung to reason as the murder weapon that would kill their passions dead.

It’s one of the quaint nuances of Nietzsche that he was not so much against religion itself as its insistence on suffocating human passion. In his eyes, this was a systemization of self-rejection that denies the human will to exalt life itself—a sort of emotional suicide.

In this regard, both Church and Reason are guilty as charged.

Don’t get me wrong, reason is among the most noble pursuits. This is The Science of Sex, after all. We should strive to tame the uncaring parts of the world and doing so has brought us to where we are, a place of abundance and comfort which many more people on earth currently enjoy than have formerly known.

But reason itself also has some limits and pronounced drawbacks when taken too far. Reason is one tool among many, one interpretation of the world among many. It’s far too easy to insist on an absolute right to bestow orderliness on the world that it does not possess. In doing so, we must sever parts of the world that do, in fact, exist. When we do this, we inevitably set ourselves up for failure when our idyllic mental fabrications conflict with the harsh realities of existence.

We sometimes do this with parts of ourselves and I see it all the time whenever I talk about love. It’s become fashionable to sanitize love, to strip it of all its raw, unadulterated passions, and to metamorphose it into a facsimile that resembles love, one without the self-perpetuating inferno that intoxicates us so exquisitely.

Let me ask you this. How many times have you heard someone point to an expression of love and proclaim, “That’s not real love” with a straight face? You know exactly what I’m talking about. You might’ve said it yourself.

We repeat the mantra that says that “real love” can’t be composed of X traits and can only be composed of Y traits.

When we do this, we crown ourselves—without the slightest touch of shame—the arbiters of what love means and who’s truly in love and who’s obviously not. In almost every case this is uttered, the intention is the same — to deprive love of its passionate elements and render it little more than a slow, stoic suffering that must be endured, not enjoyed.

The point is crystal clear: that the flames of passion are a sign of false love, of pseudo-love, of something that resembles love but isn’t.

“That’s not real love—that’s obsession, lust, desire, want, illusion, infatuation,” you name, they say. No true Scotsman would agree.

I sense when we do this, we want to take stoic, self-sacrificial love, and make it seem as profound as we want it to feel. But the denial of passion in love isn’t an automatic claim to morality any more than committing bestiality while abstaining from masturbation was an automatic claim to a greater purity centuries ago. It’s not the moral halo we think it is.

We can readily spot the obvious difference between the self-sacrificial love parents often express for their children, but we can just as readily observe countless adults walking around with the scars of parents whose ideas of self-sacrificial love caused actual harm. Helicopter moms and overly strict parents whose kids need a lifetime of therapy are just two examples of self-sacrificial love gone awry.

And don’t get me started on the people who stay together in relationships long past their expiration date for the sake of the children but can’t muster up the selfless decency to act like it. They seethe at one another from across the table as they slurp down their morning coffee. We can try to sanitize love all we want, but there are no guarantees of a happy ending. Those kinds of endings are reserved for fairy tales only.

When did we decide that passion in love was such a dreadful thing, utterly intolerable and incongruent with a balanced life?

Tales of love-driven madness are as old as literature itself. Did Hellen’s face not launch one thousand ships packed with murderous soldiers to the beaches of Troy? Did Cleopatra’s charm not pull the rug out from beneath Marc Antony’s red carpet walk to the Imperial throne? Who are we to suddenly proclaim that this love isn’t real love nearly 3,000 years later?

These are the extreme examples that stand out to us, but I assure you, countless billions of instances of passionate love have occurred between then and now, ones that didn’t result in travesty and thus didn’t make history.

This gatekeeping of love is reminiscent of the idea that relationships that began online are not real relationships but were somehow manufactured by a machine. It attempts to protect the love of those who utter it by conferring a privileged, special status onto the love of the person doing the gatekeeping.

“Those people’s love is fictitious” implies that “mine, on the other hand, is special.”

And just like healthy, lasting, loving relationships can blossom from every single crack in the sun-beaten concrete including the internet, so too, can they develop from intense, powerful, and sometimes uncontrollable emotions that suddenly seize us. To sever this powerful (and sometimes embarrassing) aspect of love from the equation is to castrate love. One could argue here that castrated love is truly inauthentic love, but I won’t go there.

All the haughty proclamations about how such experiences “aren’t real love” are empty gestures because the blossoms of eroticism frequently sprout from these humble seeds. At the very least, the often-turbulent relationships we experiment with because of these experiences forge our own personal Eros, our erotic map—they’re not insignificant experiences.

Lust, desire, infatuation, obsession, and other forms of (arguably unhealthy and certainly unsustainable) love are still very much love, even if they’re merely the seeds that germinate into something purer at some point down the road. They occupy an exclusive space on the continuum of eroticism whether we like it or not.

More often than not, passion leads to commitment—but sometimes, it leads down a road of catastrophe. Are these not the kinds of risks that make life worth living? Are they not the very moments you’ll reflect on when you’re on your deathbed?

What does it say about our love that our tendency is to starve love, depriving it of the very elements of passion that gave birth to it? Are the birthing pains too great for the rich fruit they bear? Must we sever the life-affirming in order to achieve balance? I think not. In fact, I think the opposite. Denying swaths of ourselves will never result in balance, but the opposite of balance.

What would your love look like if you resurrected that passion and stoked the flames that gave birth to your love? Let’s not insist we sever the forest of passion from the trees of more stoic forms of love. To do so is to deny a part of ourselves and neuter our own passion for life, a form of emotional suicide.