Passion Addiction

Of course between our desire for something and what we think we desire there may be some wiggle room. The missing puzzle piece on the interior may be love and affection but we may think what we need is sex and sexuality; perhaps we have specific love symbols that work for us and unintentionally focus on the symbol more than the love. Or perhaps we intentionally try to use something like sex as a substitute symbol, even though we know the interior 'hole' is for something different, because we sometimes can only use the symbols that are currently available to us.

And sometimes our mental wires just get crossed, we might even know they're crossed and simply cannot manage to uncross them; we may know our interior need and inside need is for something different than what we find ourselves wanting, but we cannot manage to stop wanting what we desire even if it doesn't wholly fulfill that 'hole'. In a way perhaps sometimes our frameworks addict us to certain symbols because it just isn't flexible enough in some area to accept other symbols; and all frameworks have areas of comparatively more or less flexibility and even the occasional blind spot. Thus a symbol may fulfill our needs just enough to keep us going back for more in a sort of symbol addiction of the mental framework.

Yet we all want meaning, need meaning, in symbols we can understand, and in this regard I rather think we're all symbol addicted, we just don't usually use the word 'addict' to describe it because we're all in the same boat, all having an interior reference framework telling us we're missing some semi-specific piece of lived life coherency, some particular experience, value and worth. And though many of us may be addicted to symbols involving behaviors less than physically or mentally healthy or sometimes to behaviors and symbols that do not actually fulfill the interior 'hole' very well at all (porn or other women, etc.), yet when a symbol really works for our interior need and desire, it really works and we know it.

I recently read "I do have a sexual addiction. By this I mean that I'm not totally on control of when I seek out sexual material and I think about it way more than I would like to". I immediately saw this as an interior description of a 'need' for symbols one can understand (all actual behavior aside), and it made me wonder if we only use 'addict' when we understand, or are suggesting, the interior symbol the external behavior represents isn't working well enough, or clearly enough, or healthy enough, etc.

Yet when the external behavior is working for our interior symbology and mental framework, we may make cheeky reference to 'addiction' but we don't really mean it and we'll go on to try describing the ineffable goodness of effective exterior symbol to interior symbol through mental framework fitting: "The fact that we were there together and that she was really truly enjoying herself […] was what satisfied me. […] It's not that I'm selflessly giving her pleasure -- it's that she's sharing with me her sexual energy and getting so into it that she is ... Something. I can't really express what it is about that moment."

I can't really express what it is about that moment either, but I know what he means because I too have experienced it, and this is why I rather don't think of it as sex addiction or even an addiction to sexual energy; sex by itself does not equal the erotic truth or the desire dynamic I experience. I (now) think of it as a passion addiction, and this I believe is the culminating point of this past week's worth of posts (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6): as all people have their framework symbol addictions, the particular form of my framework symbol addiction is to want, desire, and love passionately my wife, and to want to experience the same (or a similar) desire and passion of my wife. (I wonder if this compaction of our simultaneous separate passions is related to, possibly an expression of [?], the sensed unity of partners that we express as 'being soulmates', cf. Love's Fate, Love's Destiny)

And I rather wonder how true this 'passion addiction' is of submissive, uxorious, female led men in general - regardless of the variant exterior behavior symbols by which they express and communicate passion with their partner.