I’ve been thinking about sex lately. (No surprise; I think about sex a lot.) More specifically, I’ve been thinking about sex in the context of relationships, and about why it’s so important.

I grew up being really afraid of sex. Sex seemed wrong, bad, an act of misbehavior. The idea of sex or sexual desire made me feel incredibly guilty.

Lately I’ve been reading The Tristan Chord: Wagner and Philosophy by Bryan Magee, a book about the opera composer Richard Wagner and the various philosophies that influenced him and his work – particularly the philosophy of Arthur Schopenhauer. The other day I came across a sentence in the book describing one of Wagner’s views about his Ring Cycle:

“[Wagner] is saying that sexual intercourse is the highest of all human activities provided it is an act of love embraced freely on both sides.

That left my mind reeling.

Sexual intercourse! The highest of all human activities! Wagner said this! A creator of some of the most sublime and complex operas known to humanity – high art on which countless academic treatises have been written – art which upstanding members of society dress up in their best finery and congregate in ornate, bejeweled opera houses in order to experience – music one can spend a lifetime studying without uncovering all of its secrets – and one of his great themes is sex and how holy it is! Crude, raw, unabashed sex!

The dichotomy between, on the one hand, my deep-seated negative feelings about sex, and on the other, Wagner’s elevation of it to a theme of great art, kind of threw me.

Later in the book I came across this passage, which absolutely floored me:

It is not given to many people to be mystics… there are other ways in which it may be possible for the rest of us, says Schopenhauer, to see into the heart of things, if only momentarily. These are, to state the matter baldly, sex and art…

Schopenhauer was puzzled that philosophers had given so little consideration to sex… philosophers have thought and written endlessly about death, yet they have given scarcely any consideration to conception – which is even more important to us than death, surely, and every bit as mysterious. Each human being who has ever lived was created by an act of sexual intercourse. There must be, so to speak, a metaphysics of this… [Schopenhauer] thought that for most of us the sex drive is the strongest impulse after those whose concern is the self-preservation of the individual, and that awareness of sex is ever-present, albeit subliminally, in our minds – which is why any allusion to it, however oblique, or any double meaning, however accidental, is picked up instantly. Decades before Freud, he regarded sexuality as something that tinges the whole human personality, and he perceived an element of sexual motivation as ever-present in human behavior. So he believed that understanding an individual’s sexuality was essential to understanding that individual. The fullest expression of the individual personality is in a loving sexual relationship, in which, perhaps paradoxically, the barriers and limitations of selfhood are transcended, the individual loses his sense of self and experiences oneness with the other person in the sexual act. [Schopenhauer said:] “If I am asked where the most intimate knowledge of that inner essence of the world, of that thing in itself which I have called the will to live, is to be found, or where that essence enters most clearly into our consciousness, or where it achieves the purest revelation of itself, then I must point to ecstasy in the act of copulation. That is it! That is the true essence and core of all things, the aim and purpose of all existence.”

I didn’t really have sex until I was 24. I was terrified of it, and it certainly didn’t help that the sex I was thinking about was gay sex. But what we fear is what we crave. And once I came out at 24, everything changed. Not right away – my first few sexual escapades left me terrified, for no good reason, that I might have caught a disease (a fear that’s never really gone away). But once I accepted myself and my sexuality, I felt a change within myself. Up to that point, I’d been a divided person. I’d had an internal barrier. I was my own enemy. But once I came to accept who I was, everything inside me unified. I became a whole person. And part of that was an enjoyment – no, a love – of sex.

What I love about sex is what I used to fear most about it. At its best, sex makes you step outside yourself. Well, that’s not really accurate: what I mean is that it makes you step outside the self that you present to the rest of the world. But what I really mean is that at its best, sex makes you become yourself. To have really great sex, you have to let yourself be taken over by, you have to give in completely to – not merely the other person, but the act itself, and the emotions, the sense of being, the sense of you, that it creates. In the best sex, all the barriers you normally put up against the rest of the world are stripped away, and there you are, in all your raw, chaotic self-ness. You’re completely vulnerable.

And since sex is something you have with another person, the best sex necessarily requires you to open yourself up to that other person. It requires letting that other person see you in all your vulnerability, all your rawness. Letting that other person see you.

When you have sex with someone for the first time, whether you’ve known that person for minutes or years, you’re really encountering that person for the first time again. You see the real self inside that person, unmediated by any social niceties or civilizing influences. You see into that person’s inner depths. You see, finally, the person.

That’s why sex is such a necessary part of a loving relationship. If people in a loving relationship are not having, do not have, sex, they’re withholding essential truths about themselves from each other. They’re withholding themselves from each other. There’s not a real trust. It might be there on a conscious level, but not on a deeper level. Something is missing. It’s not complete.

That’s why sex is necessary. So you can be who you really are.

So you can be real. Together.