Lust vs Love

Original upload is November 12th, 2022. 

Hi guys! In today's episode I explain the differences between lust + love, the purity of being in love, and how discipline plays a role in containing our lust.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:20

Hi you guys and welcome back to a very late episode of Through Our Twenties. I know I'm very late, very, very late. It's almost six o'clock. Um this week is about well, this episode is about lust versus love. Um I want to talk about the importance of knowing the difference between the two. Because for one, there's no denying how easy and accessible things are for us now. In our generation, we have so much access to nudity and pornographic images and videos that many of us are desensitized to it. And not in the sense of it being pushed to the side because sex and nakedness is natural, but in the sense of hypersexuality being normalized. Lust is accepted into a lot of our lives because we think it doesn't hold nearly as much power as love. But lust can bring in just as much attachment as love can. It's a very fast-paced emotion, it's very forceful, and if you're not disciplined in your mind, it's hard to detain it. Love gives you all seasons, it gives you more of an experience, it gives you more of a story. Stories and lust usually end the same. Love is a very, I'd see, yeah, I'd say it's a slow-paced emotion. It's an emotion that is built on by constant admiration. It's pure and you cannot force it. It consists of an endless amount of encouragement and genuineness, and it does not hurt you. Love is never supposed to hurt you. It's the people that are hurting you. People use the power of love for their own good. Now, lust is basically guaranteed to hurt you because it's not. Yeah, I wouldn't consider it as a total focus on a person. If you're dating someone and the only thing you enjoy doing together is something sexual, you're not in love, and you're not dating that person, you're dating their body. I really feel like to be in love with someone means to be totally enamored by them. All you can think about is that person, even flirting with someone else, will like disgust you, you know? And maybe that's just for me, but I'm different, I understand, but I know I'm not the only one that feels that way. And I understand that everyone else is different too, but the power of love or at least true love will always overwhelm any desire and attraction. I just feel like if you can even think about someone else the way that you would think of your partner or touch and hold someone else the way that you would touch and hold your partner, there's no way that you're in love. There's just no way. And in some cases, you know, it doesn't even matter the difference between a woman and a man cheating or why they did it. If your heart belongs to someone, your spirit will not allow you to act upon the feelings your flesh has for someone else. If all it takes is for someone to be physically attractive in order for you to engage with them in a certain way, you're gonna be in a lot of trouble when it comes to dating because there's a lot of beautiful people in the world. But once you act upon that attraction, you have a problem. For our generation, we really want to highlight the importance of internal beauty, but no one really cares. Internal beauty will always be something that someone will take for granted. Because we as a society are way more moved by someone's external beauty more than anything else. And for some people, it's not even that. Lust is easily pushed into the minds of men with fantasies and seduction. A lot of the time, all men can see is a woman with a nice body because sexuality and the excitement that surrounds a woman's body is brought to a man's attention at a very young age. You know, we don't we don't even tell boys, you know, to wait to start experiencing with sexuality. It's encouraged actually. The normalization of I'd say yeah, extreme sexual desires for men is kind of infiltrated into their brain at really young ages. And I'm not at all saying that women are exempt from those feelings, it's just not as acceptable for us until a certain age, and even then it's kind of awkward. Um, another thing is a lot of unhealthy and inappropriate habits start at very young ages. If you give a child a tablet or a cell phone with no restrictions, which is really common today, at that point everything in the world is on clear display. And sometimes you can't avoid your child being exposed to certain things because if they don't know about it, granted, like most likely some el someone else's kid will. So I think it's very important for us to not only have certain talks with our kids or eventual kids, but to also help them understand the importance of not letting certain things rough their mind. But if we're on the road of doing that, we also have to check ourselves and understand what these things mean to us ourselves. Because a lot of us don't see a problem with having an addiction to watching certain stuff, or you know, we don't even we don't even consider ourselves affected by it. Some of us don't think that it's a problem or that there's a problem with only wanting to sleep with people and sleeping with them and saying that they don't feel anything. And I just really feel like if you're able to ignore your emotions and not be emotionally attached to someone after sleeping with them, that's that's not a flex. That's not cool, and your spirit will always disagree with that. No one is emotionless, they just ignore it. Sex is not and has never been an emotionless act, it's a very spiritual thing, whether people want to see that or not. So I don't understand people that will say, you know, I don't want to be attached to someone, and then they go and have sex with someone. What kind honey, what kind of sense does that make? I don't want to be attached to someone, so I'm gonna go have sex with them. What? That is the literally the most attaching thing you can do. And a lot of the time we think that we're bonded to someone because of the way they can make us feel, but it's really because some of their emotional hardships have seeped into us. You have people walking around trying to figure out why they're depressed and angry after sleeping with someone and they go, Oh, well, I know what that means. I need to have more sex. Honey, no, you need to have less sex, you need to be celibate. You have some needs that need to be fed in your mind and not your body. We are so obsessed with our physical needs that we abandon our minds. And as backwards as it sounds, sex is the bare minimum today. In the dating scene, even if you're from the outside looking in, so many people are so messed up that the only thing they have to offer is sex. There's rarely any thoughts or conversation that stimulates your mind. There's no consistency. There are very little people that want to be loved, and a lot of people that want to be lusted after. Lust is not easier to deal with, so I don't understand why people put emphasis on it or people go that route. Our world has this thing with altering and defining things on our own instead of taking it for what it is. And what it is is serious. Sex is important and it is beautiful, but there are too many of us engaging out of pure curiosity and lust. Some of us have only dealt with being in lust and have only had lustful sex, we don't know what love is, and that is the whole point of what sex is to share your love in a physical form. It's not always just, you know, you know, sex is sex, they're pretty, or they're cute, I'm gonna have sex with them. That is not to each its own, I'll just say that. If you look at someone and can only view them though, in a sexual way with no possibilities and no effort towards anything, that is the most prominent example of lust. Now, being attracted to your partner or whoever you're seeing in every way, in all of their forms, and wanting to hear their dreams and their goals and build with them and be there for them for a long time, not just in the beginning, that's what love, that's what love is. Infatuation is not love. People get it confused, like, okay, well, you know what? It's been two weeks, you know what? I think I'm in love with this person, and then maybe one day they're not feeling it. They go, No, well, I guess I'm not in love with them. Honey, what why are you making that connection that you're in love with someone after two weeks, first of all? That is not love, that is infatuation. Love lasts for a long time, whether you decide to stay with them or not. And if you're quick to give up on someone when they don't do what you say when it comes to your sexual advances, you only lust after them. You are not looking for love. Love has a lot to do with comfort. I will always say that unless you are stopping someone from hurting themselves, your control is self-centered, and that has nothing to do with love. And when it comes to wanting someone that looks a certain way, it's not always about preference, it's about status and superficiality to a lot of people. We see almost everything on the internet and think that's how life is supposed to be, that's how a woman is supposed to look, that's how a man is supposed to look. When all reality, true beauty is found in the most natural forms and firsthand experiences, and we don't understand that anymore. Maybe we never understand that. We don't understand the diversity of beauty. We want trophies, we want perfection, and it's ridiculous. Perfection does not exist even when you think it does. And we have this we have this idea. I always get so I always get so passionate. Um, we have this idea engraved into our minds that men will be men. So hypersexuality is rarely addressed, which basically means it's acceptable for men to have no restraint or can dis control or discipline when it comes to their sexual urges. And we're all just like, yeah, well, men will be men. It really makes me think how age doesn't give everyone wisdom. Some people don't get smarter as they grow older, unfortunately. And you know, sometimes less can really be such a scary thing, especially when it comes to older women or just women in general. It's kind of a random thing, but I really want to touch on it because women are not always going to be faultless. There are some sick women out there. There's a lot of men that have had their innocence taken away at a young age by older women, and they don't even consider it for what it is. Some men will never consider it as a bad thing, they'll never say that they're traumatized because with those experiences, they it's like a celebration. Some men will tell you, Oh, well, yeah, I started, you know, experimenting at a young age, and you go, Well, okay, wow, how old were you and how old was the girl? And they'll be like, Oh, yeah, I was like seven, she was maybe like 32. What? And it's it's normal to so many men. Like, even if you're like, okay, I wouldn't say for a lot of musicians, but there are, I, in my opinion, from what I've seen, there are a lot of musician, musicians and actors that will say, you know, their first encounters, their first sexual encounters were with older women at very young, tender ages, and it's not okay. It's very sad. I feel like a lot of the time, not only are men taught to not take situations seriously and to just accept them, they don't even understand how messed up things are. And it really just it makes me think about how much of an important job it is to raise a black son. And it's so sad that teaching them to be polite and well-mannered unfortunately doesn't stop trouble from coming their way. But that doesn't mean it doesn't matter. We cannot afford to not talk to our sons about certain stuff. We cannot afford to not educate them. And I'm not just talking about school, I'm talking about with parenting. Parenting is a form of education. And with knowing that all people can be creeps, not just men, I think that'll help them somehow, but we don't we don't have excuse me, almost sneeze. We don't have enough conversations like that. Black women need to be protected, and so do black men. And it doesn't matter how old we get, we have to look out for each other, and especially, you know, look out for adults because you never know who can be a scary person. You never know. So just say, no matter how old black boys get, don't you know, say you're looking out for them when you see them growing up and then they're an adult, all of a sudden it's like, well, they're they're grown, they can handle it. You don't stop having emotions once you hit a certain age. Some people need support no matter how old they get. So if you're gonna support someone, continue to support them and don't wait till they turn all 30. Oh, well he's got it figured out. How do you know that? There's a lot of 30-year-olds that don't have anything figured out. Some people need support. What else do I want to talk about? That was a mouthful. Um, oh yeah, I want to talk about our image. Um, as black woman in the media, I'm gonna try and push it back. I can push it back to lust. Um people think it's cool to have the image of lust parading around black women. Some of us think it's a cool, us black women think it's a cool image to have, and maybe for some of us it is. And um pretending that it is a love of display for what for women, and it's not. Lust will never be a display of love for us. And it really makes me think about how everything sort of ties together in the end, down to our music and our movies and anything that is targeted towards us or pretending to be for us. It's not about being liberating and having the freedom to say whatever we want anymore. At the end of the day, it's a lot of it's still controlled, and it's even more controlled now than ever. And some of us don't even have to be persuaded into making a certain movie or song because being conscious isn't a care to some people when you're being paid to keep black people in a box. You think because we can talk about twerking and partying and drugs and sex that it's because we have the freedom to. No, we don't even own hip-hop anymore. We don't own our music anymore, maybe the sound of it, but definitely not the lyrics. I was okay, really off topic, but I was watching um some clip from like 1994, that's not important, but uh when Michael Jackson wrote, They don't care about us, I never knew this. The media tried to call it anti-Semitic. Very off topic, I know, but he was referring to basically everyone that has dealt with racism and they tried to, you know, say he was being racist, and it's really crazy. I don't understand that. It's very misconstrued, and I feel like for a lot of situations where we're not able to stick our nose into certain topics, it's like go back to where you are, go back to being black. I don't understand that. And you know, maybe I don't know, maybe music is is too far gone for us. Maybe not. We always have the chance to start a new era or a new sound or bring something back, but I don't know, it really feels like the last thing that we have to reach black people is movies. I don't know. Music in movies about partying and our destruction has always been acceptable because we've learned to glorify it. A lot of us think that lust and money and partying is the meaning of life, and if we could see into the spiritual world, we'd be greatly disturbed to see that after all these years we're still going in that direction. So, in short, love is forever and lust is temporary. I'm not saying that to love someone means to not have any sexual desires at all. That is not what that means, but the difference between love and lust is extraordinary. There are very broad examples, and I just feel like you know, if you move in love and you view things in love, you've got really pure intentions and you're on to really cool things. If you move in lust and and view in lust, you're gonna have a little bit more trouble because it's not you're not moving with pure intentions if all you do is sexualize everything and everything is about things that don't really truly matter in the end. Yes, we have a life to live as humans, but we are still spirits occupying bodies at the end of the day. And um we have to learn to change our minds when it comes to the way we think. Just because the world has accepted something does not mean that we have to accept it. Depending on the person, time isn't always going to help someone grow. Sometimes time gives people the chance to be more stupid. We have to do what we can with our time and learning more about ourselves and learning more about our culture and our history and what things truly are and what holds value for us. We have to control our urges and we have to learn about us and how lust after people and money and really satisfaction is such a big thing for us. And yeah, I always, yeah, I always try and and talk about certain things that come to my mind with these topics, but yeah, love is love is uh love. Love is forever and lust is temporary. Um, yeah, I love you guys, and I'm sure I'll be back next Saturday. So peace out.