What's Lust Got to Do with It?

Follow your heart. The meme of many a teen romance and driftwood epiphanies. It may be good advice but less reliable when given about matters of love. For the heart doesn't have much to do with that—aside from getting enough blood flow to the relevant parts to perform the appropriate actions at the proper time—the heart is a back seat driver while lust controls the throttle.

It was lust, not love that brought us into this world. Love may have nurtured us, prepared for us, sheltered us after we got here but lust was a co-founder, copyright holder, the original CEO of humanity and more than likely responsible for a significant number of the critical turning points in all our lives.

It almost always changes the life trajectory of every being in the most dramatic fashion; like in my example changing countries and learning a new language for a beautiful woman as I crossed the keystone of my thirties.

It is easy to write shallow and superficial lust out of a love story, we want to tell the grandkids it was 'love at first sight', 'we connected on a deeper level', 'soul mates' - sure, you can have the fairy tale, but don't forget that ultimately Cinderella and Prince charming were teens high on hormones, running off to get laid.

Why is lust such a dirty word—one of the deadly sins? It is the x-rated coal in the engine of PG-rated love. The primeval elephant in the room. It is someone's lust that defines sexual orientation, whether you will enter a civil partnership with Barry in Basingstoke or have six kids with Bellinder from Brixton.

It also drives the economy. The West constructed its post-war economic model on satisfying one's desires, going after what you want rather than what you should do has replaced heavy industry and empire. The foundation stone of the new year gym membership, coffee culture, the social media mania. Underpinning: the growth of the internet, advertising, fashion, and retail. A global economy built of second-guessing what image we desire in our projection of self.

I’m not saying anything new. However, it is intriguing to consider what little credit I give lust when looking back on why I did certain things. I ‘followed my heart’ Tippex's over the ‘I wanted to do all I could to get in their bed.’ That is a generally more accurate founding statement in most young men's life choices; it can lead to where one lives, what they do, family and fortune.

Following your heart in matters of love is a fallacy in the beginning. Lust is the first note even if it may not be the last. Lust generally goes as an unrecognized co-author of our lives and those of our ancestors too for that matter. We are the product of god knows how many generations where it was lust that drove us to explore, to build, to become, to achieve. We are all the product of a million moments where lust brought two individuals together, in a prehistoric forest, an ice age cave, a dark age roundhouse, the woodshed of a Roman villa, a peasant's hut, a corner of Tudor field, the scullery of their Victorian villa, the back of a ford escort.

Life begins as a child of lust and then it is stolen away and given over to love. It is love that we wish to take the credit, to sign its name in the corner of the canvas. Because deep down perhaps we know that it was watching her arse in tight blue jeans as she walked past that started the story. It was her seeing his shoulder flex as he did a rep at the gym. It was the cute selfie she posted of herself in the white summer dress. It was lust, and light, and the body that set life in unexpected and surprising motion again and again.

I did not love her to begin with; I wanted her, the two are different. Love started only later when I couldn't imagine life without her. So why the shame in lust? It played a crucial part in all our lives, of course, we need the light of love to grow, without it there is nothing, but we also need the dark and dirty soil of lust to set its seed within. Like it or not, there is goodness in both.