I have a troubled friend that loves to — and seems to live to — boast about his many sexual conquests. He brags endlessly about the number of women he’s had sex with: mostly strippers, prostitutes, drunks, drug addicts, and the generally desperate.
I know from several conversations with him that, in reality, the reason he has sex with so many partners is because he hates sleeping alone. It frightens him. As a child, he slept with his grandparents nightly. He freely admits to me that most of his sexual conquests in college occurred because he dreaded the prospect of sleeping alone. In other words, the frightened little boy grew up to be a frightened young man and is now turning into a frightened middle-aged creep.
I see this same phenomenon play out among gay women as well. Some “players” I know are simply frightened little girls who can’t tolerate sleeping alone. In frank, lengthy, and often booze-fueled conversation, these “players” will often admit that they cheat / prowl because they assume the women they’re currently with — and they’re always with someone — will cheat on them. They need attention from a variety of women as a defense mechanism against the prospect of being alone. They are also almost always in a relationship. “Single” doesn’t work for them … obviously.
Sad.
As with my friend, there can never be too many women, too much attention from them. And the sheer number of women is never enough. They remain frightened creatures who are searching for some guarantee that they are loved, needed, and safe — all the while pretending to be free-wheelin’ sexual Conquistadors. The irony, of course, is that their inability to remain faithful will guarantee that they will rarely be loved, seldom be needed for long, and discarded at will.
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Examine the Deadly Sins closely. Fear is the root of all evil, folks. Our fears morally bankrupt us and rob us of the pleasures that every single living day on Earth affords.
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I am a HUGE devotee of William Faulkner. The following is an excerpt of his 1949 Nobel Prize acceptance speech (given in Stockholm in December 1950). He is addressing young writers, but, really, we can apply the same sentiments to all those who live and labor in constant — often cloaked and subcutaneous – fear:
“Our tragedy today is a general and universal physical fear so long sustained by now that we can even bear it. There are no longer problems of the spirit. There is only the question: When will I be blown up? Because of this, the young man or woman writing today has forgotten the problems of the human heart in conflict with itself which alone can make good writing because only that is worth writing about, worth the agony and the sweat.
He must learn them again. He must teach himself that the basest of all things is to be afraid; and, teaching himself that, forget it forever, leaving no room in his workshop for anything but the old verities and truths of the heart, the old universal truths lacking which any story is ephemeral and doomed – love and honor and pity and pride and compassion and sacrifice. Until he does so, he labors under a curse. He writes not of love but of lust, of defeats in which nobody loses anything of value, of victories without hope and, worst of all, without pity or compassion. His griefs grieve on no universal bones, leaving no scars. He writes not of the heart but of the glands.”
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Don’t be afraid. Don’t be a slave to the past and past fears. Identify and conquer your fears.
