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We all have a certain dichotomy within us consisting of our animal and human sides waging a constant battle. The indulgences of the flesh war against the prudence of rational thinking. For some, the human within us, defeats the beast and we live our lives according to prudence and restraint. For others, the beast is in control, and the human is constantly dealing with the ramifications of what the beast has left in it's wake. Most of us straddle a fine line somewhere in between. For me, especially, this has always been an issue. As much as I like to consider myself an intelligent and moral individual, I am also an extremely passionate being with strong emotions and a lust for sensation. Perhaps it is because I am so acutely aware of my own thirst for visceral experience that I veer so deliberately away from temptation.

As a child, my parents never talked to me about sex. Most of my sexual education was garnered from the medical books my mom had left lying around the house hoping that I would somehow absorb the knowledge within them and embark upon a path towards becoming a doctor. What happened instead was they ignited an abiding curiosity within me. I have always been fascinated with the human body, and most of all our ability and innate need to procreate. As a result of my curiosity, I experienced a fairly early sexual awakening. With this confluence of intellect and hormonal development, a bloody battle ensued.

I discovered women, and all the wonderful and terrible things associated with them. Somewhere around the same time I became a christian, which further, and still does complicate my struggle. Everything around me: religion, society, and a nagging feeling inside me told me it was so wrong. But true to the cliche, it felt so right.

Nonetheless, I felt guilty. SO GUILTY. I had these urges that I knew I wasn't supposed to have. I wanted to look at porn, have sex with girls, masturbate. Half the time, I would let myself, and half the time I wouldn't. When I did, I would feel like I had committed a sin, and disrespected my own body and God. I would either repent or turn from religion lest I face its condemning glare.

And for good reason. It wasn't just for the sake of moral purity that I felt the way I did. In those moments that I erred against my better judgement and allowed my flesh to dictate my actions, I nearly always regretted it. I found myself feeling empty and hollow at the end of the day and I attributed it to falling prey to temptation. I recoiled and stayed as far away from sex as I possibly could for a very long time. There were other factors in play, of course, but the result was the same.

It wasn't just religion. I suppose it's the perfectionist nature in me. If I were to do something, I wanted to do it right. The idealist in me, clung fiercely to the idea that it ought to be special, and that I had a finite amount of self to share, and that I didn't want to dilute it by engaging recklessly. At the end of the day what would I have left for another, let alone myself? I wanted the same from whoever I was with as well. Maybe it was just a lifetime of conditioning by western culture and judeo-christian ideology.

Yet I burned. I burned with more desire than I had ever felt, and it was as if denying myself only made the need even greater, and the inevitable bursting of the dam yet more ominous. I was afraid that I would do something incredibly stupid or reckless as a result. My emotional roadblocks held me in check. But they did not prevent me from questioning the very foundations of my personal code. Why, WHY was it so wrong to feel that physical connection with another human being? How could something so beautiful in one moment, become so cheap and dirty in another? Why, WHY would God design us in such a way that we felt such an overwhelming desire to do something that was supposedly wrong? It seemed like the the universe's cruelest joke--to build a creature with an uncontrollable desire to manufacture his own destruction.

Eventually, I broke. I no longer cared. It wasn't so much that I needed to fulfill a need. That need had already been met in one way or another. I was simply tired of feeling so damn guilty all the time. I accepted that this was a natural part of who I was, who each and every one of us is. Sex is not wrong, or bad, or dirty. People are. At certain points, I thought waiting for marriage was the answer, but realistically how can that happen? Of course there are people who wait successfully until marriage, but those are also the people that get married at 21. I am not, nor will I ever be one of those people. When those rules were written, people were getting married right as puberty began. I imagine pre-marital sex wasn't such a temptation in those days. I respect and even admire people who make the choice to wait. But it's not for someone who is now twenty-eight years old, and made his share of mistakes. Not all of us are lucky enough to find true love so young. And for those of us who aren't, should we be punished by being denied the experience of sex?

I have embraced the beast, and tamed it. My rational mind and my animal nature have reached a tenuous coexistence. I still have no desire to have sex outside of a committed relationship, but I no longer feel guilty for wanting. I am okay with the fact that as much as we are humans, we are still creatures of flesh and blood with physiological needs to be met. We can't live an honest and fulfilling existence if we are constantly at battle with our own bio-chemistry and instincts. We lust after one another because it creates the surface component to a much deeper purpose than we often care to comprehend. Without sex, there is no drive to love, to bond, to reproduce. Without sex there are no families, no marriages, no drive to compete. Competition not just for resources, but to improve ourselves in hopes of finding a mate that is our match. We are human, therefore we err. In doing so, we may not get it right on the first try, but that shouldn't keep us from trying or cause us to dwell on those errors. Sex is a beautiful thing, embrace your inner beast and share it with someone deserving.

In trying to convince my friend that she needs an iphone...