SMORGASBORD OF LOVE: Overindulgence Is Good For Me. Good For You.

Smorgasbord of Love: Overindulgence Is Good For Me. Good For You.

Lucky for me, if you binge on love, it doesn’t make you fat, it makes you whole. Last night at the IRC conference, we were discussing the Happily Ever After phenomenon in Romance writing today. Critics of romance call our novels trashy and “simple”, and those of you who read or write it, know it is anything but that. Almost like it isn’t cool to say we want more romance in our lives. Makes us needy. I say, hell yes, I love being needy! I want more romance, don’t you?

 I read the following passage from Your Brain on Love, which I referred to in my newsletter last week. See if you can read it to someone you love without crying. I hope you do!

The chapter is called “Sexuality and Spirituality: Divine Balm For Your Soul and Brain.”

Before he starts the chapter, he has this quote: “Eroticism is….where a man experiences a woman with all his senses and not just his eyes. It’s the insatiable desire to know someone completely.”  --Rabbi Shumley

Here’s the excerpt I love:

I was just a sophomore in college when I began working as an orderly in a nursing home…in Mankato, Minnesota….In the home was one couple I’ll never forget: Henry and Martha. I think they were the only married couple in the nursing home at that time. He was ninety-eight, and she was ninety-six. They had been married for more than sixty years. And this was the second marriage! Henry would wait (from what I learned from the other nurses and the other staff) for the day I would be working. I worked the three to eleven shift, and as the clock inched closer to eleven o’clock, Henry would buzz the nurses’ station, and I would go down to his room. Henry always wanted the same thing: for me to help him from his bed over to his wife’s bed. I think he was embarrassed to let one of the female nurses or aides help him into his wife’s bed. But since I was a guy, it felt okay for him to ask for my assistance. (He’d worked out a similar deal with the morning janitor to move him back to his bed the next morning.)

Now Martha was mostly blind, but when I’d help him over to her bed, I’d see this wonderful smile come over her face. She could no longer see him, so she was responding to the sound of her husband coming near and crawling into bed beside her. She beamed when she felt his arms enfold her. They were a part of the blessed few—Master-Level Lovers.

I thought that scene was the sweetest, most beautiful thing I’d ever seen. After all these years, I still think that.

Being a master-level lover is more about the heart than the sex we usually think of as being a master of love. When you analyze it, really, being a master-level lover is being full out. Not holding back. Giving 100% of what you have to give. If you play at 100%, there are no limitations.

Age, space and time cease to exist. This is what true romance is. And what’s good for the heart is good for the brain. What’s good for the brain is good for life itself.

The miracle is we can feel it any time we choose.