by Susannah Indigo
(07/04/01)

There is this marvelous moment when you are with a new lover-to-be, sitting over dinner or drinks, sipping champagne and laughing, or maybe slipping oysters from the half-shell into each other's mouths, giddy on the touch, the feel, the promise of the heat that is to come, high on the prospect of slippery bodies folding into each other in the dark of night, and you think, "God I love this man," and you smile, and you kiss, but you never say those words out loud.

So much weight is attached to the word love. When does a person truly become your lover? When you get naked together? The first time you have mind-blowing sex, or even just pretty-good sex that sticks with you for at least a day? The first time you share a secret, the kind that requires real trust? Or is it the first time you can tell him that you love him, without censoring your thoughts? Does it matter? After all, we can have sex with fuck-buddies, partners, mates, one-night stands, spouses, and even by ourselves, and sometimes it seems to work well to keep the emotions in check -- though I do believe it's always good practice to say "I love you" to yourself right after you masturbate.

Life is a such a banquet, an erotic feast, a panoply of sensual riches just waiting for our consumption. But how much is enough, and what happens when you're eating like crazy from the buffet of sexuality and you're still starved? Can you have too many lovers, or only too many people with whom you have "non-lover" sex? If you could only love enough, you would be the most powerful person in the world, a philosopher once said, and I agree.

I've talked with a number of sexually-active teenagers lately, and they almost all say, "No! I don't tell her I love her, even though we've been having sex and 'going out' for six months." That idea makes me sad, though I understand their wariness -- not much has changed on the side of caution since I was a kid, yet the sexually active side has increased greatly and starts at a much younger age. "Tell her you love her before, during, and after sex," I suggested to a seventeen-year-old boy, "or else think about why you don't." You can imagine the roll of his eyes.

Love is not a pie, says a woman who's had a long-term affair outside of her marriage in one of Amy Bloom's short stories, as she explains to her grown daughter, when asked, how the mother could possibly have done such an outrageous thing as to love two men. There isn't some limited amount of love to be divided into pieces and passed around, and then you're fresh out of love. The more you love, the more you can love. The heart expands.

I have had plenty of sex in my own life, but only a few lovers, and it no longer interests me to spend my valuable time with anything but a real lover. I often think of that when I watch the popular HBO series "Sex and the City," where the women also have many sex partners but very few lovers. A recent episode showed the girls squicking at the thought of rimming -- it was okay for the guy to do it to them, but no way would they do it in return, and the whole idea ended the possibility of love -- and I thought, that was not a lover, that was just a body in the night, not much different than a good Pocket Rocket and a fantasy all by yourself. A lover is someone you can't get enough of, someone for whom you feel that every inch of their body represents the eighth wonder of the world, someone whom you would prefer to eat up day and night rather than any other possible banquet item available at the feast.

It may seem that beneath my own overt sexuality I'm just an old-fashioned romantic girl, but I'm not really -- although I am romantic, I don't believe in "owning" people, and am constantly astounded at the continuing belief in our society in the institution and "forever-after" projected-romance of marriage (including being astounded at my own thoughts about it sometimes), given all the evidence to the contrary .

But I believe in love, and I believe that there is enough love to go around, and that there are not enough people in this world expressing their love for others. I believe that we all could stand to dive a little deeper into our sexual relations, taking giant, delicious gulps of passion and joy from the feast that is offered to us each day that we are alive, and today, tonight, tomorrow and every single day to come, take that opportunity, and the risk, to say I love you to someone we're with the moment the thought crosses our minds.

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