The diamond of sexuality
Youth /Sexuality

Por: Br. Mateo Arias, LC | Fuente: elblogdelafe

When we talk about sexuality today, society presents us with a diverse range of meanings. In most cases, sexuality is reduced simply to the sexual act and not precisely within marriage, or at least in the context of a mature relationship. Sexuality is also related to the set of actions and decisions that are taken "freely" and that determine the sexual orientation of an individual. Sexuality also indicates for many the mere pleasure that is proper to the sexual act, totally disregarding any type of personal relationship that it implies, even if it is at its most primary level. Although we must also recognize that sexuality is not always understood in a hedonistic and libertine way; seeing it from a more positive point of view, sexuality is understood in other areas as the set of rules that should guide one's sexual behavior with others, in order to maintain a healthy balance that will avoid various problems such as unwanted pregnancies, diseases, abortion, etc. This conception is also reductive and does not allow us to glimpse sexuality as a whole.

 


 

Reducing sexuality only to genitality or a mere moralism, even though both aspects are of great importance, it is not understanding sexuality in its entirety. Yes, genitality without which procreation can not occur as one of the primary purposes of the conjugal act, is an essential part of sexuality but goes far beyond it; the morality that seeks to offer healthy and reliable guidelines for healthy sexuality does not equate to sexuality itself; it goes far beyond morality.

 

Unfortunately this is what an hodierna society has done to us: reduce sexuality to just one or some of its components. However, when sexuality is understood in the totality that corresponds to it, we will find ourselves with a broad horizon formed by diverse realities loaded with meaning and that put in common are like a diamond composed of different faces but all ordered to the beauty and unity of the same.

 

When we fully understand sexuality, first of all we go beyond those biological elements and we enter a deeper and more personal field. Sexuality necessarily implies the understanding of the human world that is constituted of people with a sexual difference. Therefore, sexuality does not primarily evoke genitality or the sexual act. It is something much deeper and is the fact of knowing yourself, man or woman entering into  a relationship with the other sex. In that sense, a man can be defined as a being projected towards women.



 

Following this same line, we can enter another very rich aspect that is an essential part of the full horizon of sexuality: complementarity. Nowadays in the common and juvenile language, expressions like "find your better half" are used. Behind this colloquial expression is enclosed a primordial element of sexuality: complementarity. This is one of the highest degrees of sexuality and consists of those relationships, not necessarily sexual, that are built over time, between men and women where both satisfy this void or concern that only one being of the other sex can fill. These relationships are especially charged with unique values ​​such as trust, respect, affection, openness, the gift of self, etc ...

 

It is at this point of complementarity that the true unity of spousal love can finally be given. This constitutes a "face of the diamond" of sexuality of primordial character. Only when I recognize in a person of the other sex that part of me that is still incomplete, to be realized, and only when I consciously and freely accept it in my life, only then will I become part of his life, allowing that aforementioned complementarity of place at last to spousal love. This will be so sincere, reciprocal and authentic that it will bear fruit a new human life.

 

As we have seen so far, sexuality is a reality that goes beyond a purely physical or biological level. It is a complex reality composed of various elements inseparable from each other that are not reducible, but on the contrary once put in common, allow to glimpse the true human sexuality in its fullness. And when this purely naturalistic vision of sexuality is overcome, then it will be understood that sexuality that has to do with the person and not only with his body, that ultimately sexuality touches the very existence of the person.

 

Certainly when these various elements mentioned above integrate the very experience of sexuality, it will be lived in its fullness. And only then those elements to which society has reduced sexuality, will begin to find their full meaning and to be integrated into the whole of it. For when there is complementarity, understanding of the other in its specific sexed condition, spousal love, only then the genitality, the sexual act, the pleasure that it entails, the sexuality understood as morality and the other elements of this complex reality will have a true meaning and they will be lived in their specific fullness within the fullness of sexuality itself.