Once while on a first date, I was asked, “What do you want when having sex?” Now isn’t that a loaded question? It’s not that I was uncomfortable; I was unprepared, especially on a first date. It’s a complicated question. He took a bite of his pizza. I cleared my throat. Then I made a couple of jokes about sex, trying to avoid having to be vulnerable. Then he launched into an overly confident speech about his accomplished sexual prowess, while mentioning his penis size more than once. He kept repeating the metaphor “like a coke can.” His understanding about sex reduced it down to performance, technique, and getting-off. I thought, who are you kidding Stud? You’re just as sexually uncertain as anybody (which includes me).

The date ended without ever answering the question; and even today I’m still challenged by it. Only now after my share of empty sexual encounters, failed relationships, and feeling the lack of erotic passion in my life, the question broadens to ask, what do I know about sex and body and desire and heart and love and relationships? Aren’t they all connected somehow? Let me condense this question down to its essence; “How do we integrate fuck and love?”

I’m remembering the film Prospero’s Books when the “The Book of Love” appears on the screen and the late Sir John Gielgud’s voice narrates these words, “There’s certainly an image in the book of a naked man and a naked woman. Everything else is…conjecture.” So that’s it – conjecture? We’re left to guessing?

I think there’s a cultural (or maybe human) misunderstanding that assumes our ability to have sex means we’re capable of being in love. So naturally many of us follow the path of sexual desire in hope of finding love. Many of us know this approach rarely works, yet it seems to be our default M.O. We fumble around in the dark unzipping flies and loosening buckles, hoping the heat from our bodies will eventually warm our hearts too.

I’ll be honest with you. I don’t have a neat answer to this dilemma. However, I do know whether gay, straight, or queer, you too will grapple to integrate fuck and love – to balance sex with tender-heartedness, to feel cock emotionally inside love’s body, and to bleed vulnerably while mixing sweat with semen. Integration means bringing the dark, wild shadows of pleasure into the ecstatic light of your own heart’s passion. And until you do this – until you integrate fuck and love – heed Paul Monette’s words from his book Becoming a Man when he writes “love [will] be sexless and sex loveless!”

While this dilemma in many ways is universal, I want to focus on gay men. Most of us learn early on from our parents, society, and religious institutions that we need to disconnect from our sexual desires. We learn to hide and deny sexual feelings, exiling them to secrecy. We learn that our desires are unwelcome, wrong, and for some of us evil. We are forced to abandon our heart’s truth and cock’s expression, forging a distinct separation between the two and creating a false self in the process.

It is my personal experience that this separation is quite challenging to undo, unify, and heal – but not impossible! The separation is rooted in abandonment of one’s self and predicated on shame – shame about the body, shame about sex, shame about love for men, and shame about one’s identity. Shame is the great wedge separating the heart’s passions from the body’s sex; shame is the wedge separating you from yourself. Identifying this shame is very good news, because with awareness you can now do something about it.

When we acknowledge our shame, the separation can begin to dissolve. The polarities become less extreme and the gap narrows. We slowly begin to re-member our passions; we re-member our bodies. Integrating fuck and love means becoming whole again. It means knowing our truer natures. Perhaps this integration will be life-long; it is a process that is layered, complex and even mysterious.

Now although integration might sound appealing to some not all men want the two to be integrated. My argument here is based upon an assumption that integration is somehow necessary or desired. Also of course, not all men live with as much shame as some of us do. (Are shame-free gay men an oxymoron? Discuss.)

I once was in a significant relationship with a man who loved me and I loved him. After a year of building a foundation for our relationship, our sex together dramatically changed. It became hollow and distancing. My experience was as if he somehow was now absent during sex – disassociated. Or was it me? Had I changed? I asked him about it; I inquired. I said, “Sex feels like we go efficiently from point A to point B. We go immediately to fucking. What happened to our relating and to our playfulness? Sex feels like a destination – what about the journey?”

At first, he denied noticing any changes; but eventually did agree with my observations. He said, “I love you more than I have ever loved anyone before. And this closeness and love I feel for you, especially during sex is scary – at times, it’s painful. Therefore I’ve decided that I cannot be as emotionally available anymore.”

His words were confusing and ultimately a great loss. We never recovered our relationship after that moment. To this day, I am still dumbfounded at his reasoning and lack of options for a better solution – for a solution that would welcome love and not push it away. Perhaps at the time, he didn’t believe he deserved to feel such depth of loving; or maybe for a more matter-of-fact explanation, he simply wanted to keep fuck and love separate.

For me however, I do not! I strive to integrate fuck and love. And for encouragement, I defer to our gay ancestor, poet Walt Whitman, to teach us all about how to celebrate the love of men’s bodies and hearts as one. From Song of Myself Whitman writes; “Welcome is every organ and attribute of me, and of any man hearty and clean. Not an inch nor a particle of an inch is vile, and none shall be less familiar than the rest. I am satisfied – I see, dance, laugh, sing; as the hugging and loving bed-fellow sleeps at my side.”

Now go out there and fucking love each other.

Alan Robarge is a Philadelphia-based Psychotherapist in private practice and also offers an on-going relationship discussion group for gay men titled Boyfriend University. Learn more at www.alanrobarge.com or www.boyfriend-university.com