We all want to be loved. I firmly believe there is no greater desire…no greater need…in a human being. I believe the need to be loved is even stronger than self-preservation…the need to survive. And I believe it is for that reason that we have evolved into such a sexual culture. Because we need to be loved so deeply, we can be easily manipulated by sex. Sexual images, sexual messages, from commercials to toys, sex is all around us.  And it’s clear from all the language we use around sex. We want to be wanted, to be desired…to be lusted after. Cheap Trick had it right, “I want you to want me.” We interpret passionate, lustful desire as self-worth.  It validates us…if only briefly.  The need for love is so strong, that we easily ignore or look past or are completely blind to the fact that this desiring, this wanting, this lusting really just makes us objects to be exploited or used. We are not truly desired…not truly wanted. If we were, then the other person, would want us not for what we can give them or do for them (i.e. make them feel good…make them feel wanted).  They would want to say or do whatever is best for us…regardless of the benefit, or the cost, to them. I dare say most of the sexual intimacy that happens in our culture today is not about the kind of love we really want. Its a Band-Aid…a quick fix…a welcomed balm.  It lures us all one way or another.  When you have a hole in you needing to be filled, you welcome the spoonful of water…even though the parched confines of your heart will evaporate it before it even reaches bottom. The truth is…and it only makes sense…that no person can fill this need to be loved…and neither can anything else. The need is too great, the selflessness that is needed is too difficult to be sustained forever…at least by us.  As Pascal so beautifully captured:

“What else does this craving, and this helplessness, proclaim but that there once was in man a true happiness of which now remain to him only the mark and empty trace, which he in vain tries to fill from all his surroundings, seeking from things absent the help he does not obtain in things present. But these are all inadequate, because the infinite abyss can only be filled by an infinite and immutable object, that is to say, only by God Himself.”  ~Blaise Pascal, Pensees

The reality is that we are already loved…we are already desired more than we could ever want and more than we could ever imagine…certainly more than any human being could desire us or want us or love us. But of course that takes Faith to believe….because the paradox is that until we see it…until we accept it…we likely won’t feel it.