How to Think More About Sex

What a title! It's not mine, but a book’s. The few friends and kin of Rabbit, who are acquainted with the contents of the groundbreaking study “What Men Think About When They Don’t Think About Sex” will surely be excited to know that there is a sequel.
Technically, not really a sequel - as the author is different, but just look at the title! Even more than ... all the time? The author couldn’t have male audience in mind, obviously, as more is simply not possible in their case.  

And if it is for us, women, then it must be on the topic of time management or something, I thought. How to find time for anything else (for example: thinking about anything) than work, preparing something edible for the kids, feeding the kids, cleaning up the mess they made while eating what we prepared but what they eventually didn’t like, preparing something different, brushing their teeth, putting them to bed, cleaning up the mess they made when eating the "something different", getting them out of bed, bringing them here and there and many other exciting activities related to being mothers. “I could use some time management skills” - I thought, and decided I would use the time gained to think about whatever I want, not necessarily sex. I quickly added the book to my shopping basket, without even reading the reviews. The author, is, after all, Alain de Botton - for me a guarantee of a literary feast. A Swiss-born philosopher living in London and some sort of an atheist spiritual leader - he maintains that the belief in God is largely superfluous, while adhering to a religion is not. Many others claim exactly the contrary. 

It’s quite inspiring to have such a variety of opinions within hands reach. This reminds me of the great Sufi poet Rumi (XIII th century!) who said:

“The truth was a mirror in the hands of God. It fell, and broke into pieces. Everybody took a piece of it, and they looked at it and thought they had the truth.” If only religious terrorists of all history shared this view...

The piece of truth that Alain de Botton took is quite comforting and cheeky at the same time. He writes:
“to fall in love with someone is to bless him or her with an idea of who he or she should be in our eyes; it is to attempt to incarnate perfection across a limitless range of activities (...) Once we are involved in a relationship, there is no longer any such thing as a minor detail.”  (that reminds me, my dear, that our yearly discussion concerning the optimal temperature in our house during the winter months is approaching).

Alain de Botton is full  of understanding for the challenges any long-term relationship poses: “By overwhelming consensus, our culture locates the primary difficulty of relationships in finding the ‘right’ person rather than in knowing how to love a real - that is, a necessarily rather unright - human being”. He finds it a pity that we do not remember what it takes for the parents to love a child - namely, a great deal of work. The ones from whom we learned to love had to endure the sleepless nights, cope with our weird eating habits or square refusal to open our mouth, survive our tantrums and moderate sibling fights. And still we were loved.
With such a training in affection, we should theoretically be ready to love a partner who’d stop us from sleeping at night by playing loud music and keeping the lights on, who would spit out the food we’d prepared or smash the door violently because he lost that card game we were playing. Let alone a partner who would sleep around. But are we? De Botton maintains that it’s a sign of “immense forbearance and generosity that the two parties are mutually showing in managing not to sleep around (and, for that matter, in refraining from killing each other)” and both should be proud of managing to remain faithful most of the time. 

In our culture we take it for granted that romantic love is a basis of a marital union. But there have been times when love had nothing to do with it, and there are still societies in the modern world where spouses-to-be are not even expected to have seen each other much before, let alone have any feelings for each other.
I once expressed my outrage at the institution of arranged marriage to a Japanese colleague. This really surprised him. 
“Why is that so strange?” he asked.
“You’re telling me that if I pointed to any woman in this restaurant and told you: ‘this will be your wife. Go and love her’ - you would?”
His answer was “I don’t know if I would. But what I’m saying is that it is not impossible. Quite likely, in fact”.
“But how?” - obviously, he didn’t convince me. 
“I’ll think about it, and will tell you tomorrow”.

The next day I reminded him about his promise, because my chunk of truth was telling me that I was right and he, my Japanese colleague, with his whole Japanese culture and all his Japanese norms and theories was wrong. You can’t love a randomly chosen person. You just can’t, because ... well, you just can’t. 
To my surprise, he did think it over: 
“It’s like with children. You don’t choose them either, but you learn to love them more than anyone else. Even if they are not pictures of perfection.”

With those words he shattered my piece of a broken mirror. Alain de Botton and my Japanese colleague together picked another one for me. 

The book is really highly recommendable, even if it doesn’t keep the promise contained in the title nor does any good in the domain of time management for working mothers. It didn’t make me think any more about sex - instead, it made me think more about the  “embodied, chemical and largely insane human life”.  Largely insane. I like this description. It’s ten p.m. and I’m done putting my two loved ones to bed and about to have a glass of wine with the loved one who’s not yet asleep. To celebrate all the moments when we managed not to sleep around. Cheers!