He says’s he’s thriving, but he’s not : The Curse of Promiscuity

He says he's empowered. That's only the surface.

There's a particular kind of person who moves through other people the way you'd flip through channels. (I'll write "he" here, but it isn't only a man's thing.) He can't give a woman a clear yes or a clear no. He leaves things open, vague, half-finished, so the line between them never fully goes quiet. There's always a little pull left in the wire. He tells himself this is freedom — he gets to decide who matters and when, and he calls that power.

Nature doesn't run on that logic, though. I've stopped arguing with the laws that are bigger than me. You can pretend they don't reach you for a while. They reach you anyway.

The slow work of going numb

What this costs him is hard to see from the outside. Iit happens underneath all the fun, the parties, the success, the wealth and status.

To keep moving from one person to the next, he has to keep cutting something. Sex bonds us — really bonds us, body and something deeper than body. So if you want to leave easily and arrive somewhere new without carrying anything, you have to kill the bond before it can hold you. There are two ways to do that. You judge the person, find the flaw, decide they were never that special after all. Or you split off from your own feeling and go a little numb.

Do that enough times and it stops being a choice. It becomes a reflex. You start dismissing the good in people automatically, and here's where it turns on him: the more he practices not believing in the potential in someone, the less he can see it at all — even when it's right in front of him, even when it's huge. The more he practices judging this person, the more he becomes shielded to anything real. After a while nobody is ever good enough. He falls in love fast and falls out faster, and he never stays long enough for love to actually do anything to him. Which is the entire reason love exists.

He keeps waiting to find someone “pure” enough to finally trust. No real woman passes the test, because what he's chasing is an innocence that doesn't survive in anyone who has actually lived and loved and gotten a little broken by it. So he keeps looking, and the more he looks, the rarer she gets. 

And what he doesn’t know is that it is her very flaws he dismisses her for that will rise him higher. He needs her wounds to hurt him back sometimes, so that he can be made into a stronger man, a more conscious and responsible one. He needs her wounds as a force for him to access new insights and develop new abilities, to become the conscious leader he is born to be. It is the process of working consciously through the challenges in Love that makes one develop one’s greatest potential. Because it requires to be both anchored in one’s truth and self-awareness, and in unconditional Love, in hope and faith of the potential of our partner, and of awareness of what is creating the wounds and the dynamic. It makes us see reality more clearly, and pulls us away from the lies we tell ourselves. Love is the Greatest teacher in order to develop into Real Human Beings. To bypass Love’s teachings is to curse oneself into remaining an eternal boy. 

Your body was built to Aim to your potential

There's a real mechanism underneath all of this, and it helps to look at it plainly.

When two people are drawn to each other, a lot of the pull is dopamine — the chemistry of wanting, of chasing, of the next thing. Dopamine loves novelty. What it needs is a challenge. If one is unaible to truly believe in one’s partner’s potential to be “the one” that will lead us the furthest, then one needs a new person to light up a sense of a challenge. It gives a new goal, a new potential to conquer. Dopamine gives a real high because it pushes us to Work towards our potential, to make efforts. 

But what are those efforts good for, if they are constantly interrupted by a desilunionment about the goal (the person whom we judge not being “good enough”). Then one needs to keep looking for another potential “good enough” inspiration. And this goes on, bringing obviously less amazement as one grows disappointed over and over. 

Now if a real hope and faith in one’s (potential or real) partner can be felt and held long enough, it pulls one towards consistent efforts, which produce much deeper results in one’s inner development. 

What is preventing this to occur? All the previous experiences that we haven’t properly digested. Those experiences, if we would have tended to them, should have lead us to new questions and insights, to bring us to a new understanding of love and of ourselves. Instead of this, they have accumulated within us as an awareness that “love is complicated” or whatever else reasons we give ourselves to stop having faith in the person in front of us’s potential. We feel overwhelmed for all the failures we encountered that we never truly understood and transformed into an ability to love more, thus this has stolen from us the very ability to aim higher. 

Indeed, the curse of promiscuity is the very ability to move on without allowing the pain to teach us a higher love when things go wrong in love. 

Your body was built to stay

Dopamine on its own doesn't know how to keep a fire lit. It's the spark, and if we do not feed it new goals and aims, it dies down and we stop working for our potential. 

The ability to stay and actually see deeper in one’s potential is supposed to come from two quieter messengers: oxytocin and vasopressin. They get released through closeness, through touch, through sex especially, and what they do is take all that dopamine reward (the energy one gets by chasing a goal) and pin it onto one particular person. They're the reason a specific someone starts to feel like home instead of just exciting. Oxytocin softens you toward her and builds trust. Vasopressin, in men especially, is tied to the part of bonding that wants to stay close and protect. Together they're the glue. They turn a good night into an attachment. Into the possibility of building something together. Of building one another’s potential together.  

The ability to stay demands the courage to keep looking up, but in return, it gives a different kind of strenght, that is way beyond the strenght of the ability to leave.

Here's where his trouble starts. He keeps the dopamine and refuses the glue, because his unresolved past experiences have killed the ability to hope for him. He chases the spark over and over, but every time the bonding chemistry tries to land, every time his body starts to attach, he cuts it off — leaving early, or going cold on purpose before it can take. He's running the wanting circuit at full volume and starving the bonding one. So he cannot build consistently in a way that leverages challenges to pull oneself higher. He is lacking that stable anchor which harmonizes all the efforts together into one whole : one high hope with one person. 

And the hell with if it gets actualized or not. The aim has never been the most important in this. The most important is what is developed within oneself as we strive for that amazing aim. This is the real gift, and it is fully ours, because we have worked consciously for it. Thus we must remind ourselves that the aim we are called to with this person will bless us, no matter if it gets actualized or not. If we get too attached to the aim and the form it should take, we become blind to its real blessings. The more one truly assimilates one’s past love failures, the more one realizes that they were blessings in disguise. That what really matters is the potential for growth and transformation. That this is worth everything. 

And the body adjusts to whatever you do most. Flood the wanting system with novelty and it starts asking for more — newer, stronger — just to feel what the first time gave him without taking too much emotional risk. That's why the tenth conquest thrills him less than the first. Meanwhile the bonding signal he keeps overriding goes quieter and quieter. Refuse to feel something for long enough and you slowly lose the ability to feel it at all. The glue stops sticking.

That's the curse written into the chemistry. This goes deeper than choosing not to hope and not to bond — he's training his own body out of the capacity for it, so that by the time someone arrives who he could actually love, the part of him that was supposed to recognize her has gone dim. He can’t see pass her defects. He kept the high and burned out the receiver.

He's not the only one who gets hurt — but he gets hurt the most

I want to be honest about the harm done to the women, because it's real. He moves fast. He makes her feel chosen, important, seen, and early — before there's any ground under it — so she opens. Then he holds that opening against her, like she gave too much too soon. When he goes cold and she reacts, suddenly she's the difficult one. She asks for clarity and becomes "needy." She holds her ground and becomes "complicated," or "too much." Her insisting gets renamed as manipulation, when really she's just responding to a door that keeps opening and shutting on her.

It's sad for her. It’s actually devastating. It’s doing to her what he has done to himself : killing the ability to hope and have faith in someone. Because when the desilusionment gets too strong, it hurts too much to have faith. 

But the part most people miss is what it does to him.

On the surface he's getting on with it. Maybe there's a lot of success, a lot of pleasure, the whole look of a good life. Underneath, every time he uses someone this way, something gets eaten. He gets hungrier instead of fuller. Lonelier. More lost. He's making a trade, even though nobody read him the terms out loud: what he takes from these women turns into a kind of power, a kind of wealth — and it curses him in the same breath.

Love is the only thing that hands you good things without a hook buried in them. Real love makes you earn what you receive by changing you first, by burning off whatever needed to go. He doesn't want that part. He wants the reward without the fire, so he goes around it — and going around love drops you straight into its opposite.

And let’s be honest. It’s not because he wouldn’t want to love or be able to love. It’s because he hasn’t been able to heal his love wounds in the first place. He feels unable, yet extremely hungry for love, so he cannot avoid consuming it, and burning it. 

The thing he couldn't see

Her resistance was never the problem he thought it was. It was the gate. It was the exact trial standing between him and the real love he is deep down looking for. Every time she didn't fold, she was handing him a chance to grow up inside love instead of skipping past it.

This gate requires changing one’s perspective, looking at whatever is in front of us with new eyes. To ask new questions to oneself. 

He couldn't see that, and that's almost the saddest part. Constant pleasure, easy release, one body after another — it does something to your eyes. It builds this thick sense of self-sufficiency, like you don't need anyone, like you're already full. That fullness is its own kind of blindness. You stop seeing what's actually standing in front of you. 

This is what promiscuity does once you've also lied to yourself about it. The curse doesn't really live in the bodies. It lives in the story he keeps telling himself so he never has to turn around and look at any of it. And like most curses, the person carrying it is usually the last one to know.

The real gift of Love is Self-Transformation

So what is he actually missing, underneath all of it?

Not the highs. Those are real, and they're lovely, but they come and go on their own schedule and they lean on the other person to keep showing up. It leans on the woman needing to deny herself and her own needs to sustain any type of bond while avoiding the Work to maintain it. It leans on violence done to her, which is the very thing that curses him. Because Love can never take from another, it can only take from itself in order to bear fruits. 

Love, when you stay in it and let it work on you, grows you up. It's the hard parts that do this — the friction, the moments she held a mirror up and you made yourself keep looking, the puzzle to solve by asking new questions, the times you wanted to run and found the nervous system regulation that allowed you to stay. This is gold. This is what makes you become more regulated. More insightful. Wiser. 

Each of those asks you to become a little more than you were. You get more honest about who you are. You start seeing the person across from you instead of your idea of her. You turn into someone who can be counted on. And who can count on himself. And you learn, slowly and usually clumsily, how to love — which is most of what it means to become a full human being.

What makes this the real treasure is that nobody can take it from you. The high fades, circumstances turn, a relationship might end — and you still walk away more whole than you came in. More capable. More able to build a life and actually stand inside it. The other person was the occasion for the change, but the change is yours now, sewn into you for good.

From the inside, this is no small consolation prize. It feels like a bliss that doesn't need anything outside itself to keep it going. You become a channel that Love can move through, and it starts feeding you from within — in your work, in a quiet afternoon, in nothing in particular at all. It stops depending on who's in the room. And it gives you back faith in life. And in what you can’t control.

And the unexpected gift sitting on top of all of it: sex gets better. Much better. Once you've done the inner work, the body opens in a way it simply can't while you're still guarding yourself. It becomes nourishing instead of draining, and satisfying somewhere far underneath the surface. The pleasure goes deeper for the simple reason that you're finally all the way there for it.