Lust

I hate the fact that I still can lust.

It’s not just seeing a pretty young woman half my age (or younger) and acknowledging her beauty — it’s seeing her and desiring her. Entertaining stupid fantasies in my head about how she might secretly ‘want’ me, too.

Lust is the imagination run riot, filling my mind with images that are no longer offered to me in the real world.

When I was younger I laughed at middle-aged men who ran off with girls 20 years their junior — what sad fools I would think. I still feel the same, but have a far greater appreciation of why they might run off, buy a Harley and live with a woman half their age.

Today my wife accused me of infidelity. Whilst no doubt she means actually, physically, having an affair — and about which she is completely wrong – I do stand guilty of being unfaithful in my mind. I have desired other women, women half her age, women with breasts that don’t sag, with thighs still firm, with faces still full of hope and not of bitterness and disappointment.

One frustrating element to lust is that when I was half my current age I didn’t appreciate those firm bodies anywhere near as much as I appreciate them now that they are no longer available to me.

I had no shortage of lovers before I married, a collection of experiences that many men could not hope to match in number. I have lived the sexual lives of many men, for which I am both grateful and sad. Sad because I used sex as a way of trying to find someone to love me.

As a reaction to having my heart broken a number of times, sex became its own vindictive goal — the more conquests the better. I stopped counting after 150…

Now that such conquests are no longer available or looked for, and because of the sacredness of the marriage vows that I undertook in front of my friends and God, I truly wish to be married to my first wife until one of us is lowered into a grave.

But lust casts a shadow over my relationship with her, the occasional glimpse of curvy lady lumps on a young body enough to remind me that my wife no longer has the body of a 20 year old. Neither do I, but that matters little to my imagination.

I hate lust — I hate that it has such power over me, that it casts an occasional fleeting shadow over my marriage. Strict self-discipline is perhaps the only answer.

Yet even were I to keep my head bowed like a ‘bloody Pharisee’ so as to avoid seeing any woman, even if I were to follow the strictness of Jesus’ Beatitudes and gouge my eyes out, my imagination would kick in. Blind, I would still be able to attach a lustful image to a woman’s voice.

Tolstoy drove himself mad with his guilt over being unable to meet the stern requirements of the Beatitudes, ending up dying alone and seemingly homeless on a backwater train station.

The only way forward is to either acknowledge my shortcomings and failure to meet Jesus’ standards and to therefore disappoint him and reduce my chances of getting into heaven, or to kill myself now and be done with it to save the disappointment of failing again at some time in the future.

And to realise that pretty young girls want to eventually have pretty young babies — a mental defect that marrying into a family with two teenagers has cured me of.