Within One Act

I feel that all sex is to connect you to your significant other. As someone who for a few years considered themselves open and was in the beginning stages of putting it into action, my experience has rectified that.

It was a desire for me to have continuous multiple sexual encounters. It was my view that sex has good and bad and better - it still is my view but with different criteria. My goal was to allow as many people as I desired into my body and space. I wanted to know for myself what that life could bring. So many spaces had bragged about its seemingly endless pleasure and possibilities. For me, I couldn't see the downside.

Or maybe I was too young to understand.

We are all susceptible to some kind of messaging and in this case, I feel that this kind of messaging has succeeded due to the lack of a present two-parent household that avoids taking any child under 3 years to creche every day for more than 2 hours. We have lost empathy for our children and given them to the world to parent. Imagine how many adults your child has had to attach to to survive and then cut that attachment once they move to a different class or next grade, or when a substitute teacher comes in, a nanny, transport driver, etc. Children have been taught to move from one person to the next and to never commit. Doesn't that seem like the actions of non-monogamous folk?

Narcissists cannot exist without others - in fact, no one can. Erica Komisar defined narcissism as a defence against neglect and abandonment. Fundamentally neglect and abandonment create individual islands out of the human that thrives on community.

Erica Komisar, LCSW is a clinical social worker, psychoanalyst and parent guidance expert who has been in private practice in New York City for the last 25 years. She has opinions and suggestions I agree with.

I know it's quite popular to be "self-made", "self-taught" and "solo" in life, but it's all a lie. No one could exist out of community with others, or even acquaintanceships, without completely losing their minds and eventually surrendering to suicide. Yet this is how we raise our children - completely independent and without parents to hold their hand and become the trampoline for when they fail.

This is also how we create success. Hoarding wealth in fear of losing it to someone else, creating seeds that produce fruits and vegetables without seeds creating even more hunger and desperation, nourishing a hierarchy of class creating financial and fulfillment divides leading to more and more individuals moving away from "lower class" tasks that allow our systems to thrive, limiting access to education and activities seemingly impractical and wasteful through increased fees and increased travel distances, applauding innovative ideas to those with the means to present it to a particular group of people that manage the standard of the industry - assuming that the same group of people doesn't regard themselves as the pioneers of said innovative idea once it becomes a certain level of profitable. Yet, any kind of success, cannot exist without comparison against others to some degree.

From gentle parenting to a ruthless executive, a stellar student, or a hard worker - none of those decorated titles exist without comparison to another.

From first-hand experience, you can make your child feel abandoned even with your presence in the home. We all need attention from people we care about, especially if they claim to care for us. It is how we first learn to put ourselves in front of another's attention, receive judgements and learn to discern love from negative intent. It is where we find material to build self, it is where we find criteria for our mate.

When finding ourselves before the gates of intercourse, we seek to express self and engage with the drawn-up criteria of our mate. As parents, what kind of experience do we want our children to have as adults consenting to intercourse?

More sensitively, when our children do choose to have sex as teenagers, do we not want them to have the right information, and understand, as much as teens can, the gravity of their engagement and enjoy the moment of closeness with someone they believe to love?

I know teenagers having sex is something we'd rather believe to be fiction or at least something our own children are choosing to skip, but how else would we celebrate high school sweethearts who have stayed joyfully married until death? How else would we blush when hearing a story about a boy who fell in love with the girl who lived next door from the first time they met as 7-year-olds? True love is real at any age.

On the other hand, modern-day adults are the most recent cycle of feminists. That equals consensual non-monogamy, chest-feeders, pregnant men, puberty blockers, gender reassignment surgeries, and pedophiles demanding to be included in the LGBTQ acronym.

How do we discern the value that shows the richness of finding a lifelong mate without needing or wanting to experience as many bodies as possible?

How do we rediscover the peace of being in the body we were born with?

How do we learn to love the two spirits some of us were gifted in our creation?

Everyone is allowed their decision when it comes to consenting to sex, yet how many of us are aware of the effects of that decision?

The self disconnect, the mood swings, the need to chase, the need to be miserable and in constant conflict, the need to cause chaos, questioning one's feelings and instincts, the slip of one's value causing consensual exploitative behaviour, the body dysmorphia, the discomfort in one's skin, the depreciating standard of what you are willing to accept in a partner and how they treat you, the very heavy amount of pain one is willing to tolerate and call joy - on continues the list.

All of that baggage is tied to your childhood, your family, the materials you received in drafting self, your drawn-up ideal partner, and the societies we build. Not all will be rectified so we cannot rest in our children finding healing in their adulthood. Besides, that is not the weight we want on our children. It's the same weight most of us carry and parenthood urges us to find our healthy selves to give to our offspring. We are capable of that - we deserve it.