Maybe in order to understand sex fully/one has to risk being destroyed by it.
Interpretation
Understanding sex deeply requires embracing its complexities, even at the risk of emotional turmoil.
This quote by Sharon Olds suggests that to truly grasp the nature of sexual relationships, one must be willing to confront the potential challenges and dangers that may come with them. Engaging deeply with such an intimate aspect of life can lead to profound experiences, but it also comes with the risk of emotional vulnerability and potential hurt.
In practice
In a discussion about the complexities of adult relationships.
Poems come from ordinary experiences and objects, I think. Out of memory - a dress I lent my daughter on her way back to college; a newspaper photograph of war; a breast self-exam; the tooth fairy; Calvinist parents who beat up their children; a gesture of love; seeing oneself naked over age 50 in a set of bright hotel bathroom mirrors.
... sometimes I can feel it, the way we are pouring slowly toward a curve and around it through something dark and soft, and we are bound to each other.
We all agree that marriage is a fundamental right. And in our country, and in our society, there are no second-class citizens.
There is a difference between vulnerability and telling people everything about yourself. Vulnerability is a feeling. Telling everyone about yourself is just facts and details.
In fact, the class divide in the black community is now seen by some as a permanent aspect of our existence.
If you want others to like you, if you want to develop real friendships, if you want to help others at the same time as you help yourself, keep this principle in mind: Become genuinely interested in other people.
It is true that those we meet can change us, sometimes so profoundly that we are not the same afterwards, even unto our names.
Women want everything of a lover. And too often I would sink below the surface. So armies disappear under sand. And there was her fear of her husband, her belief in her honour, my old desire for self-sufficiency, my disappearances, her suspicions of me, my disbelief that she loved me. The paranoia and claustrophobia of hidden love.
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