SUPER LOVE FOR SUPER SEX: LOVE-MAP LANDMARKS
Posted on May 18, 2009, under General health.
I discussed earlier the concept of love maps, guides for our loving determined in our early development that predispose us to select certain partners to love and determine our own unique ways of loving. To study super marital sex, I designed and administered a twenty-item questionnaire about the ways in which the husbands and wives “drew” their love maps. I found that their responses to these questions were important for understanding their marriage and their sex, for understanding why sexual problems developed, and for learning how to chart new courses for love.
Think of your own love map as a transparent sheet with light trails and dark highways marked on the sheet, each mark placed there by the experiences of childhood and adolescence. Think of your love map placed over the map of your spouse, both held to the light. Look for the roads and paths that overlap, comparisons between the dark and light trails, the more and less frequently traveled roads, the detours and roads under construction or in need of repair. Conceptualizing loving in this way provides a mental set for learning to love together, for traveling down new and familiar roads, major and minor byways.
Remember that the term “sexual preference” is not an accurate way of understanding the final arrival point on your love map. There is more we do not know about our sexual living and loving style, what John Money calls our sexual status or orientation, than we actually do know, and to use the word “preferences” implies a decision that we never really make about our loving style. Our loving style is no more a preference than a mountain “prefers” to be by the sea.
The prenatal determinants of our sexual style are sometimes seen as primarily biological, and what happens postnatally as learned or sociological. You will be better able to understand your own love map and make intentional changes in that map if you remember that learning and socialization have biological implications, too. Again the lesson of love as a system, an infinitely complex socio-biological “dance” among the brain, the body, and the world, is clear. Your love map is always changing, because all systems are constantly changing. There is as much biology in learning as there is learning in biology, so to look for the psychological, sociological, or neurohormonal answer to our sexual orientation, our love system, is to attempt to read and interpret our love map in the dark. The question is not what causes us to love as we do, but how we are loving and how that loving is changing. Everything you do and experience makes marks on your love map, and when you are married, those maps change together. It is impossible to mark one map without marking the other.
To help you understand the evolution of your loving system, answer each of these questions about your own love map before reading what a husband or wife had to say. Unless you understand love-mapping, you may find, as suggested by Gertrude Stein, that when you do get there, there will be no there there.
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