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Saturday, October 21st, 2006 12:32 pmThere's something odd about my emotional and/or mental associations and disassociations between "arousal", "sex" and "being cared about" (ie. perhaps "love").
I think that when I feel sexual arousal in response to interactions with someone, I am likely to start feeling intense emotions for them... I start "caring about" them. And I may start feeling that the other person "cares about" me. Ie., I may start feeling that there is some kind of desirable connection between us, some kind of "love". This is probably similar to how other people respond to sexual arousal from interactions with someone else.
But sexual acts themselves... as other people think of sexual acts... seem to often have an opposite or partially conflicting effect on me. Perhaps because these sexual acts by themselves are generally not directly arousing for me? When we start engaging in those kinds of sexual interactions, I feel that the other person doesn't really care about me. I feel or think that they just enjoy being aroused, and our interactions provide the arousal, and I'm just a means to an end. Therefore they don't really care about me, but rather themselves. Yet the other person, in this scenario, is probably just like me... the things that arouse them make them feel cared about, and make them care for the other person.
Maybe I wouldn't have this problem, if the things that were arousing to the other person were the same things that were arousing to me. Maybe it's just that I am still turned off by certain things, for whatever reasons. And I can't feel good about the other person when our interactions make me feel turned off, even if some of our other interactions make me feel turned on. Maybe the connection/love/care I feel is directly related to how turned on I am versus how turned off I am. In other words, it is a very sexual thing, in spite of my mind somehow correlating sexual activity with the other person not caring about me.
Of course, there are also non-sexual factors involved.
I think that when I feel sexual arousal in response to interactions with someone, I am likely to start feeling intense emotions for them... I start "caring about" them. And I may start feeling that the other person "cares about" me. Ie., I may start feeling that there is some kind of desirable connection between us, some kind of "love". This is probably similar to how other people respond to sexual arousal from interactions with someone else.
But sexual acts themselves... as other people think of sexual acts... seem to often have an opposite or partially conflicting effect on me. Perhaps because these sexual acts by themselves are generally not directly arousing for me? When we start engaging in those kinds of sexual interactions, I feel that the other person doesn't really care about me. I feel or think that they just enjoy being aroused, and our interactions provide the arousal, and I'm just a means to an end. Therefore they don't really care about me, but rather themselves. Yet the other person, in this scenario, is probably just like me... the things that arouse them make them feel cared about, and make them care for the other person.
Maybe I wouldn't have this problem, if the things that were arousing to the other person were the same things that were arousing to me. Maybe it's just that I am still turned off by certain things, for whatever reasons. And I can't feel good about the other person when our interactions make me feel turned off, even if some of our other interactions make me feel turned on. Maybe the connection/love/care I feel is directly related to how turned on I am versus how turned off I am. In other words, it is a very sexual thing, in spite of my mind somehow correlating sexual activity with the other person not caring about me.
Of course, there are also non-sexual factors involved.