“There is nothing holier than a man truly lusting after his wife,” Rabbi Shmuley Boteach, author of Lust for Love: Rekindling Intimacy and Passion in Your Relationship, told Joel Pollak on Sirius XM’s Breitbart News Sunday on Valentine’s Day.
A marriage without attraction is a form of imprisonment, Boteach explained.
“I believe that the single most important word in every relationship is ‘desire,'” Boteach held. “If you don’t desire your spouse, if a man doesn’t deeply desire his wife, if the wife doesn’t deeply desire her husband, then you’re just in a kind of prison. You’re living in a form of incarceration.”
Boteach continued, “The essence of desire is attraction, and the reason why we somehow often denigrate attraction — we speak instead about common values and communication — is because we think attraction is only of the body, the truth is that lust — true magnetic electrifying lust — is the gravitation of the masculine for the feminine and the feminine for the masculine.”
“It’s this electrifying chemical gravitation that makes you so cherish someone that you do feel more complete around them,” Boteach added.
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Mutual complementarity between men and woman — driven by multidimensional attraction — is the resolution to loneliness, Boteach remarked.
“Love is the solution to humankind’s oldest problem … which is loneliness,” Boteach said. “God says to Adam, ‘It’s not good for man to be alone. … I shall make for Adam a mate to stand with him through every aspect of life.'”
Boteach added, “Judaism has always promoted this idea of holy lust. … Jewish mysticism speaks so often of this idea of [the soul’s] deep-seated yearning for God, which is a metaphor for a man’s deep-seated yearning for his wife. There is nothing holier than a man truly lusting after his wife and thereby being granted a certain immunity towards attraction towards other women.”
A man’s intense attraction to his wife offers a degree of protection against temptation toward adultery, Boteach stated.
“Lust is more important than love,” Boteach remarked. “Attraction is much more important than commonalities.”
Boteach concluded by explaining attraction between husband and wife as transcending the physical. “It’s a spiritual attraction,” he said. “It’s a psychological attraction. It’s an emotional attraction.”
“What we’re doing between the sexes in America and in Western society is kind of almost trying to erase gender difference, whereas in reality, gender difference is the spice of life,” Boteach concluded.
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