the body in love

Photo by rawpixel on Unsplash

unpolished thoughts 1/29/2019

Love changes the body.

Have you ever experienced that?

Yes, lovemaking of course, at its best the act of two humans completely accepting and attending to each other.

But what does love do when we are too far away to touch, how does it change us then?

Maybe there is no such thing as too far away to touch when we are in love. Perhaps that is precisely what it means to the body to be in love.

Perhaps our touch is assisted by a telephone, and your voice and mine tickle each other’s ear drums to warm our hearts.

These days, that same device even makes a movie that we can watch, starring each other, interacting with dancing facial expressions or showing each other the new clothes we just bought.

But what is that thing that takes place in the middle of the night?

How is it that lovers touch each other in the dark from thousands of miles away, even giving the sensation of the leaning weight of their bodies?

A wave spreads through the system as if another human was truly there. The heart quickens, the breath deepens or momentarily suspends, muscle fibers shorten and lengthen in the joining of two beings.

It is not a physical accompaniment, but the changing physiology could be easily detected by those who study such things.

The lover also changes our state of rest, even when we are alone.

Because our body knows that we are not alone in the world anymore. There is a place of warmth reserved for us in the universe where we may always return, no matter how far away we may have traveled.

When the body knows this, it knows a different pattern of letting go that it couldn’t possibly have known before.

Of course we all know how love also disturbs us, how longing demands our attention at the most inconvenient moments. We may tell it that we are busy right now, but if it goes it will soon be back, flooding our veins with the anticipation of what is still too much to wait for.

This is only our romantic love, but our body knows every kind of love.

How can any mother’s body not be transformed by her most essential act of creativity? The father doesn’t know what she knows, but he too will never be the same.

We feel ourselves begin to mobilize, to smile, or rush to defend – even just at the thought of our children’s experiences.

Sometimes we do the same even when reading a book, overhearing a conversation on the bus, or eating food prepared by people we will never see.

The body wants to experience love, and it comes in so many forms.

Every one of them is what makes us human.

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