It took me many years to realise that hope, expectation, and the search for the ideal relationship filled me with more happiness than the possession of the standard, ordinary, “like-everyone-else’s” sort. The state of longing, here and there punctuated by some adventure promising a touch of exceptionality (the most wonderful night of love in my life took place a few years ago in a Balkan village, on a hard wooden bench, in a room through which, all night long, more or less drunken people passed on their way, groping, toward the outhouse in the yard)… Yes, that longing, that trembling — not tremor, but vibration — of expectation now seems far more desirable and life-giving than the marital sex I once practised, consoling myself with the thought that at least it happened on the floor or the kitchen table rather than in bed. Sancta simplicitas! Form — here, as everywhere else — cannot replace the missing content, which in turn can never be captured in a form subject to averaging or bourgeoisification. Love and security may indeed be sisters — but if so, one of them surely bears the name Cinderella.

Ah yes — I forgot to mention the voluntary renunciation of the certainty that quantity sooner or later produces quality. The only “quality” I ever achieved by submitting to that belief was that of the rounded belly, from which I freed myself only when I decisively threw all quantities into the trash and became a convinced devotee of quality. The night of love I mentioned earlier will accompany me to the end of my life. As for marriage and its several thousand nights, what remains are mostly memories tied to the fear that I might lose my children. Surely that is still love — in fact it always is, isn’t it? — but not the kind I wish to speak of today.

There remains, of course, the sense of insufficient sex. Especially when one looks around and sees how buried we are beneath the boasts of the world we inhabit. Sex — bigger than life, bigger even than a Big Mac — today is just as important a status symbol as the powerful car, the big house, or the public-relations connections. Not that I object, God forbid! Only this particular dance is not mine — another thing I began to understand only when life left me no room for deceiving myself with phantoms instead of my real desires and needs. The world of the Many is not my world — even if others label this understanding with words like “sexless,” “sex-starved,” or simply “midlife crisis.”

I only want to say that the phrase “insufficient sex” at some stage of growth suddenly proves to be a contradiction in terms. To speak of insufficient sex today seems as inadequate as to speak of insufficient health (in the sense that, like health, it does not admit of division). Sex — which at my age is refracted into the idea of the greatest possible intimacy between two people of different or the same gender — is without doubt something that requires qualities like imagination, inventiveness, and courage, but not mechanics, not collecting, nor fear of the outsider’s role, real or imagined. Put more realistically: a hundred couplings can hardly replace that vibration in the throat, the vanishing of the voice, the blurring of the gaze that result from… whatever you like, so long as you have the eyes and heart the moment demands.

The most intense moments of intimacy I experience lately are in midnight Skype conversations — with a woman who wants nothing from me but words, however much I try to persuade her of their insufficiency.

Here I reach the next important point, whose discovery cost me many years. It concerns something as banal as it is elusive: the number of partners one needs in order to reach that sense of ideality inseparable from the experience of love, as most of us dream of it. To expect everything — or even too much — from one and the same person strikes me as insane maximalism. That kind of seeking, that kind of demand, only puts the relationship under unnecessary strain, makes people act unnaturally, forces them into roles that neither fit them nor can be played convincingly for longer than a Hollywood film — and in the end leads to collapse, even when the partners are good, loving, devoted, and full of erotic energy.

The only real reason why most people reject this obvious conclusion, in my opinion, lies in its incompatibility with the prevailing models of life together today. That — and the raising of children, which in my own experience is incompatible with polygamy. In other words: the genes impose on all of us their own form of sexual dictatorship, but it is hardly obligatory to live under its law for one’s entire life. Which means that the real, free, mature experience of love — love as freedom, as naturalness, as joy and lightness, as the sharing of that beautiful, intense, explosive energy hidden in each of us — is possible only at a certain age, once one has fulfilled the obligatory, gene-dictated programme of reproduction and is finally able to surrender to the experience in a form freed from the dictate of possession. Banality, isn’t it? Of course — which does not make reaching this insight any easier. Banality is not the same as ease; that much, I think, most of us already know.

How many — and what kind of — partners a person chooses is, of course, a matter of personal choice. As for myself, I lean toward limiting the number of participants in a relationship to three or four (in my heterogeneous model there is always room for only one of one gender, the others being of the other, for an obvious reason: the kind of love I prefer is as far as possible from competition or struggle, including for attention and devotion). With which — and here I dig in my heels like the proverbial donkey on the bridge — I absolutely insist on openness and the absence of lies. If it is to be a relationship of more than two, then it must be one in which everyone has accepted the conditions from the very start. I cannot stand lies, sorry!

Of course, it is not obligatory for people to thrust themselves into each other’s lives. Nothing against the pleasures of gentle, curious, experimental sex with more than two — but equally no need to expect that everyone must rid themselves of atavistic impulses like jealousy or the entirely normal desire for personal, exclusive intimacy. In other words: things are good, beautiful, natural only when they are easy for everyone. If someone has difficulties, if one person feels insufficiently loved, valued, showered with attention, tenderness, even fidelity — for fidelity is an inseparable part of all this, fidelity as the absence of lies — then things must change, including through separation. There is no sense in straining: love is either something infinitely easy, or it is simply not love.

The question of form remains — and here, I fear, comes the sharpest divergence of notions and opinions, simply because form, unlike content, is what most of us use to identify love. The form of closeness, the form of sharing, the form of sex and co-experiencing, are things that today, as always, carry for almost all of us an intuitive certainty that — so it seems to me — only a few are willing to give up, and even then only under pressure of circumstance. Closeness is closeness, after all; it cannot be distance. What is there to puzzle over?

Perhaps yes, perhaps no. I do not claim to have reached all these things by great insight, nor even by free will. And yet, the more I advance along the Path, the more I begin to accept and believe that form is neither obligatory nor unique. I will begin with the simple fact that my relationships with the several women I love — sometimes adore — are all virtual. The space I share with them — separately, I have never demanded any kind of harem, despite the absence of lies — is limited only by imagination and goodwill. Of course, from time to time it narrows into real, physical space — thank God, the world is small — but its normal mode is not that of the shared evening before the television (or in bed).

The drawback lies above all in the sense of excessive difference, of a form of sharing not especially compatible with “normality,” nothing much to boast of, quite the opposite. Perhaps because we are all too young, we often feel lonely, dissatisfied, threatened — each in his or her own corner of the world, each in some form of daily trap. And yet…

And yet — I do not want to speak for anyone else — I feel somehow especially true, somehow very right. I hide nothing, but I do not impose anything superfluous. On anyone. Each of the people with whom I share my life gives me something absolutely unique, something the others also possess, but not in the same, not in exactly this special degree. Wisdom — God, what wisdom! — at times. At other times an enormous, warm, incredibly intense human heart; oh, how I love that vast heart! Or else beauty — dazzling, burning beauty of the kind that launched the Trojan War, mixed with a wonderful, youthful, somewhat immature yet at the same time deeply feminine energy (femininity can never truly be immature, unlike masculinity). I cannot see, nor can I imagine, how I could receive all this from a single human being without being torn apart by fears and complexes — for such flawless perfection would crush me instantly with its unattainable, inhuman weight.

Forgive me, then, for the immodest claim that the Ideal exists. More than that — that most of the time it lies right under our noses. That the only thing we lack are the senses with which to perceive it. And touch it.

It is all so simple. So simple, indeed…

December 2009