Vaginas- Getting Back In

I can still hear my old friend Charlie as we sat in a college dorm room talking about girls. What he said wasn't an original thought of his, but it stuck in my head when he said it, so I suppose I feel he owns it. As it pertains to the female genital in particular he observed ," the first thing we do in life is come out of one, and we spend the rest of our life trying to get back in." How true. Simple but profound in its simplicity. Life , from the very beginning, is the search for love and acceptance. And that love is expressed in its fullest in the sexual act. When you do finally "get back in" there is a sense of accomplishment that supercedes everything else. It validates ones existence and stands as proof of one's worth as a human being. It says you belong to the family of man.

I was very ,very young when the specifics of the sexual act were explained to me. A boy not much older than me decided to lay it all out for me, and he did it by using a stick he found on the side of the road and drawing a diagram of the male and female genitalia in the dirt as if he was some learned mentor lecturing at a chalkboard to a student. I remember being fascinated by the whole explanation at the time but I never considered then what it truly meant or how complex the process was to getting to that moment when you do get in. The mechanics were pretty simple but the emotional investment that went with it was a mystery to me.

My first sexual experience was awkward and I'm relatively certain that I am not the only one to ever make that statement. It was for all purposes a huge disappointment for many reasons but above all it revealed to me that love and lust were two separate entities and ultimately had little to do with each other. They are at first glance emotional twins but in the final analysis they differ in huge monumental ways. Lust is a pale counterfeit to Love. It becomes painfully obvious after the fact. Lust makes one turn over and fall asleep or, worse, hit the floor running and never look back, while Love requires one to stay and cuddle and connect.

Lust is about conquest, and Love is about surrender. When one looks at it like that, the two are actually polar opposites.

But let's get back to the basic question of what "getting in" really means to me specifically. If Love were a competitive sport ,(which it is), then, to extend the analogy, the vagina would be the goal post, or the basket or the home plate. We actually do refer to "getting in" as "scoring" so I know my analogy is valid and recognized universally. While others may savor the mechanics of the act I always looked beyond the act and to what it's implications were toward me. I have always enjoyed the hunt and the pursuit and all the charm and romance that is a part of the process and the game. The sexual act itself, however pleasurable it was or was not, was secondary to the act of surrender and acceptance of me on the most basic of levels. As I said before, "getting in" , for me, is about my personal validation by another human being. It's beyond mere friendship and at its very core takes me back to the warmth and security that I felt in those moments prior to birth, poised in the fetal position, serene and insulated from the world ... and wanting nothing more.