Essay: Heartset-How Do We Move From Lust to Love?


Do you know the difference between lust and love? Lust is your eyes, ego, and genitals activated first and leading. Love is your heart and mind activated and leading first.

I’ll go with the hard one first; Love.

Love is when you want to take time to really know someone, to care about how they feel, what they need, and what makes them tick. You want to be their friend. The problem here is that friendship usually turns guys off because they want to get kinky and nasty with their fantasy brains too much too quick. Sometimes, women do, too. That can get mean, which I don’t feel is part of friendship.

Friendship is the basis of all lasting, lusty, good relationships. It takes time and maturity to grow. Lust is everything else. Anything that’s not love is lust. Lust is the emotion behind most human interactions and has the face of greed, trolling on social media, offloading on strangers and the like. If you have no foundation of care and face-to-face friendship with someone, you are indulging in instant gratification lust, and there is nothing loving about it.

This issue has been challenging for me. I’m a very passionate, physical woman and have no problem lusting after men who are very attractive to me. I don’t act on it; it’s just fun. My personality and values are all about love. There isn’t really any other material thing I lust after unless I’m really hungry. then I lust after food.

Food hunger is almost exactly like sex hunger in the brain. And notice how many people overeat when they just need some love, affection, and sex. We’re looking for a serotonin spike and some other juicy brain chemicals that make us happy. I know I am. Food doesn’t come close to making me happy as intimacy and love do. I don’t even like bothering to stop and fix food because I’m busy with my projects, writing, chores, and things I love to do! Why do I have to stop and eat? I’ve always been like that. I’m not terribly fond of slowing down.
Now we see a problem here; denial of human need when you know it’s not likely to be easily fulfilled!

I’ve been married three times to great men and had several great boyfriends. I’m still not satisfied. They weren’t perfect or didn’t satisfy me the way I really wanted to be. They didn’t make my brain and body explode with happiness. Love is the sexiest thing going.

It makes me wonder about eating disorders. If you take that denial of the need for love, warmth, and affection far enough, it would make your brain, or specifically, the hypothalamus gland stop craving food. So the emotion of lust would be good at this point versus the emotions around deprivation.

I’m not into deprivation at all but I am sorely afraid of loving a man, pulling him to me, and pushing him away because I need to be alone with my ideas, my mind, my life, my work, and my writing. I don’t want to hurt him. There has to be some intimacy and some time shared with your loved one, or they will go away. I hate that. I think I’ve stayed alone in my brain because I’ve lost too many people I’ve loved. It’s like a car idling. My life isn’t idling, but my feelings about bonding in a relationship are definitely idling. Maybe I’m stuck because it’s emotionally safer. Therefore, I’m celibate. I’m not using men anymore, or they me and calling it love.

There is no risk of having your heart ripped out and stomped on the floor by death and life itself if you don’t go into love gear and really start driving.

Intimacy; Gray Area Between Relationship and Hookup?


I wrote this in 2020. I am not the same in 2025.-L.T.

I have to admit, if I’m not looking for a committed relationship with a man I don’t pay much attention to personally. I’m looking for an attraction for sex or a lover. Women are no different from men sometimes.

Having touch and sex is a health issue. We all need it! I’m not throwing guilt in there but I do notice that the emotional detachment with a man turns me off no matter how hot he is. I appreciate the beauty of a man though just as much as men do with women. Yet, it’s not even close to being like love.

Things get tricky when a man is your friend and you have things in common and have known each other for a while. If he has a disposable hookup habit with women who are not friends how will he handle sex with a friend? Another notch only meaner? He gets double points for disposing of a female friend? Ultimately, she’s only a woman and nothing stops him from devouring as much as he can for free.

Being women, we do have the ability to make a man fall in love with us by loving him from the heart, talking to him, and being irresistibly sexy even while we’re free spirits and have no intention of having him on a hook. Personally, I have no desire for a man around just as I have no pet in the house. I’m busy with the work I love. But I’m not sure I want the burden of a man in love with me to weigh me down.

I think you have to be ready to lose the friendship on the sex altar. It happens on the attraction and flirting altar too. That just ended one of my friendships. We didn’t even have sex but we may as well have because the energy and affection were there…then it left. It was his doing because he decided to hook up with someone else much easier to handle, blonder, and more tattooed likely with piercings in all the gross places. Lol. She was his level.

There is a gray area in there somewhere. I just haven’t found the sweet spot. Que sera sera.

Essay: Heartset-How Do We Move From Lust to Love?


Subscribe to continue reading

Become a paid subscriber to get access to the rest of this post and other exclusive content.