Longing and Lust: Progressive, Evolutionary Sources

I share two good sources that offer a potential to inform and assist us with navigating relationships by way of language and science in this post-modern era. Being illuminated on such topics as longing and lust (eros) is so vital today, for many are deeply lonely, many marriages for reasons they know not (mostly conventional and narrow reasons at best) and many are questioning the outdated forms of marriage seeking deeper meanings, fulfillment and belonging.

One source is Christopher Ryan who co-authored with Cacilda Jetha, Sex at Dawn: How We Mate, Why We Stray, andWhat it Means for Modern Relationships. Ryan in an interview on Ted Radio Hour helps us to get at lust and sex with his scientific dialectic. 

Ryan argues, 

“Marriage," "mating," and "love" are socially constructed phenomena that have little or no transferable meaning outside any given culture. The examples we've noted of rampant ritualized group sex, mate-swapping, unrestrained casual affairs, and socially sanctioned sequential sex were all reported in cultures that anthropologists insist are monogamous simply because they've determined that something they call "marriage" takes place there. No wonder so many insist that marriage, monogamy, and the nuclear family are human universals. With such all-encompassing interpretations of the concepts, even the prairie vole, who "sleeps with anyone," would qualify.” 

The second source is “The Transfiguration of Aloneness: David Whyte on Longing and Silence” an article by Maria Popova concerning David Whyte’s meditation in Consolations:The Solace, Nourishment and Underlying Meaning of Everyday Words concerning the word “Longing.”

Whyte provides this insight:

In the longing and possession of romantic love, it is as if the body has been loaned to someone else but has then from some remote place, taken over the senses — we no longer know ourselves. Longing calls for a beautiful, grounded humiliation; the abasement of what we thought we were and strangely, the giving up of central control while being granted a watchful, scintillating, peripheral discrimination. The static willful central identity is pierced and wounded, violated and orphaned into its own future as if set adrift on a tide.

Together these two sources support an inner conversation that may well help us along the path of experience from loneliness unto an unfolding knowing, getting at real substance of the flourishing spirit of humanity.