In addition, there is empirical evidence that those who have grown up in more secure families are more likely to form deeper and more committed attachments in their own love relationships. So genes are not everything. (I expect to be writing more about these things later.)
Surely, when lovers are unequally committed to fidelity, that can be a source of pain and division. Again, I'm not able to provide much insight to address your question on how that can best be dealt with.
But again, I can provide something from my own experience.
I myself have always been faithful. At the same time, feeling that it is part of being fully alive, I have always wanted to remain alive to female beauty wherever I may behold it. Sometimes, that aliveness felt like a source of distraction from my own committed relationship. But then something shifted as our relationship has deepened over the years: with that shift, I found that any energy stimulated by female attractiveness outside our relationship ceased to be a distraction and has instead just increased my desire for our own "sacred space of lovers."
It's as though the deepening of the relationship magnified a kind of gravity that brings all the energy back into the core of the space.
What was once a kind of unsettledness has become more of a celebration of participating in something of which we two are part. In that context, I resonate to the lines from Leonard Cohen:
I loved you in the morning, our kisses deep and warm
Your hair upon the pillow like a sleepy golden storm
Yes, many loved before us, I know that we are not new
In city and in forest they smiled like me and you...
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Ken Mayers:
I, too, found your argument for the sacred to be effective and useful. But it also got me thinking about the role that authoritative identifications of the sacred and reactions against them have played in our human story. Perhaps you will be addressing this later in the series.
Andy Schmookler:
When you speak of "authoritative identifications of the sacred and reactions against them," I imagine that you are alluding to the clashes of religious dogma that have created so much conflict. (Our dogma is chasing our karma.)
I also imagine that you might be raising the question of whether it is possible to talk about "the sacred" in a way that isn't arbitrary, that allows an escape from "relativism" in the assessment of all such claims.
Those, if indeed you are raising them, are big topics, which I will only touch upon lightly here, to make three points:
As with "value" generally, I believe that there is a substratum built into our nature (regarding "the sacred") that goes beyond our cultural differences.
Another point: many of the clashes among assertions about "the sacred" are founded upon conflicting factual assertions embedded in religious doctrine. When people hold as dogma such factual assertions of uncertain validity, conflicts will occur.
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