Is Kindness Possible in Love?
First presented in a public seminar at the Aesthetic Realism Foundation, New York City.

I've seen firsthand that kindness is possible in love and in sex. In fact, it is crucial if a woman is to have the proud emotions she hopes for. I once felt kindness in love wasn't possible, and I went after something very different. For example, having dressed in a clinging outfit, I remember thinking, "Let's see if he can resist this!"

I told myself I was aching to have real love, but to a large degree, like many women, I used my body as a weapon, to affect a man while I acted cool and aloof. I was after what I learned from Aesthetic Realism is the very thing that always ruins love—I wanted a person to become weak about me. This purpose is contempt. It was mean and made it impossible for me to really care for anyone.

Though I could appear sunny, I worried about the increasingly cold, hard, and sarcastic way I was with men. Often I would drink before sex because I thought it would make me feel warmer. By the age of 23, I was so bitter and ashamed that for months at a time I wouldn't have anything to do with a man.

In The Right of Aesthetic Realism to Be Known #1248, Ellen Reiss explains:

The question about sex...is a matter of the great opposites of Self and World: Do we want to use our self, our thought, body, touch, to be fair to the world not ourselves—to respect it, see it more deeply? Do we want to use our self to have another person be in a better relation to the whole, wide world? Or do we want to...feel that we're finally running the world... [through a person] who—in a tizzy—will make it seem all reality is meaningless compared to us?

As I learned about this choice, my whole life changed. I am proud to be studying what it means to be kind with the man I love very much, my husband Aesthetic Realism consultant and actor, Bennett Cooperman.

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