Essay on the Philosophy of Making Love

Since I have recently started having sex with my boyfriend, the subject of making love has crossed my mind several times. “What is making love?” I would think. “What makes it so different?” I would ponder. I have made love- the first time my boyfriend and I had sex, for example- but what made it so different from sex eluded me until one day when I was driving through the mountains at dusk.
It was winter and the roads were wet, but there was no snow on the ground in this particular area. Instead there was a haze of fog in the distance and the vibrant dark blues of twilight that shadowed the earth gave it a powerful and ethereal quality. I was driving in a valley between mountains, a vast, open grassland that stretched on endlessly with views of mountains from 360 degrees around. I was approaching a mountain covered in fog when I noticed something different about it. This fog wasn’t hovering, avoiding the valleys and clinging to the hilltops, like fog normally does. This fog enveloped the mountain, allowing one to see every nook and bump and cranny of the mountain. It covered the mountain in a way that only a lover can, delicately smothering, gently enveloping, hiding and revealing the mountain all at once, a shroud. The thought of a shroud put a morbid thought in my head: perhaps making love holds the same contradictions as funerals and death do.
A shroud hides the body, but at the same time, covers it so closely as to reveal certain secrets about it. What else is that but making love? When two people are entwined in the act of love they cover each other, hide each others bodies but the closeness of the two only reveals the act in which they are partaking. At a wake, one can’t help but look at the body being displayed, even though it holds a sense of the grotesque, an element of shame and horror at trying to reconcile the image of a living, breathing human being with the cold, lifeless item in the coffin. You can’t help but want to make love, even though the act of it seems so shameful and silly. We have been raised thinking that sex is somehow forbidden and that love is separate from it. The joining of sex and love together makes for an uncomfortable situation, one that we can’t ever turn away from or help but want because in our hearts, we all know that the two can’t ever be separate in the truly loving act of making love.
Making love is a contradiction between mind and body, one where the mind says “we shouldn’t” but the body says “we should”. Sex is the body’s love and love is the mind’s sex. Making love is the combination of the two, a combination of two normally contradictory states of being that create, in and of itself, a contradiction. When a couple is having sex they aren’t involved in the other person’s mind, they are involved in the other person’s body. When a couple isn’t having sex, they are involved strictly in a mind to mind fashion. But when two people make love they share the closeness of the body with the closeness of the mind. When two people make love they say ‘I love you’ in unison. They can gasp at the same time. They can cry while they make love because the mind is open and connected to the passion and the joy of the body’s experience. They can experience all of these things because making love is the connection of mind and body and soul.
Soul is the key element of making love. Your soul can think like your mind does. It can yearn the way your body yearns. But it combines the two into passion. True passion. The body’s needs are like a whining child: “I want I want I want!!!” Loud, needy, clingy. The minds needs are too methodical to have life: “I want because of (insert a billion and a half practical reasons).” Practical, pragmatic, lacking conviction. But the soul joins the truth of the mind and the need of the body into passion. And making love is all about passion; the passion for life. And that’s why the death metaphor for it is worthwhile. Because all throughout the grieving process, the process of death, one truly sees life for what it is. It is why we are ashamed to look upon a dead being: why should we try to reconcile that dead flesh with the living human when the two aren’t even in the same realm of existence? We are afraid of not living. But we go to another extreme with making love. This blatant celebration of life and the ability to create life scares people. It scares them because making love is so potent and beautiful and because it is everything that it’s cracked up to be. We are scared of living, but are also too scared not to live while we can. Making love is truly living. It is celebrating life by showing that the truest expression of love can exist, can be the only hope in a world filled with war and pain. Having sex is simply an imitation of making love.