Life is hard. The moment we know this, in our bones, when we really let that steely certainty enter our marrow, is the moment when we can love, and truly value the good people in our life, and treat them with kindness, placing no demands on them but accepting their kindnesses with gratitude.

But if we believe that we are entitled to the beautiful life, in this narcissistic age, with the perfect relationship, the perfect career, and the ideal family, then we are roleplaying, blind, demanding, and needy, for we haven’t consciously chosen to love, and do not value it.

We take health and friends and security for granted, and expect our lovers to match our every need, intellectual, emotional, and physical. See what happens when someone fails to live up to that impossible standard: instead of honest communication and negotiation, there’s rage and bitterness and disappointment; fury that the private cushioning dream has been punctured. We blame our partner for ruining everything by permitting reality to crash in, by having an affair or a depression or for being insensitive or fat or not sexy enough or not successful or just plain boring: last year’s model.

We blame them for being human, for having different fantasies of la dolce vita, for not paying enough attention to ours. We blame them for being other, and not playing the part of lover in our mind’s eye that our programming has led us to believe is our right. We become like consumers at the customer service desk, shrilly demanding our money back from the surly assistant for the faulty goods of our disappointing life, shiftily admitting we’ve lost our receipt. We’ve all been there. It’s part of adolescence, to feel shortchanged by everyone and everything. But for some of us, it’s hard to grow up, and we never leave that stage of alternating between sentimental romanticism and bitter disappointment.

When otherness brings rage, then we have fantasy-fulfilment. When otherness brings sweet curiosity and engagement, then we have love. That’s not to say we don’t get pissed off or disappointed – there is no perfect life – but when we disentangle our normal everyday feelings, the everyday ups and downs of a relationship, from the global rage that our life hasn’t turned out the way it was supposed to, then we begin to grow up.

The enchantment of falling in love, when we believe that someone else can protect us from life, rescue us from the existential void, is gorgeous and undoubtedly one of life’s great experiences. But when the enchantment fades – that’s when love really begins, when the honeymoon is over and the gods have been proven, beyond reasonable doubt, to have feet of clay. It’s only at this stage that we develop our capacity to love unselfishly – for, up to then, it’s been the happy collusion of two people playing out each other’s dream lover for each other.

Sometimes, the dream of romantic love can sustain us throughout our lives, never changing, and we skip from lover to lover for as long as the honeymoon phase lasts in each affair, to keep the dream alive, at the expense of serious relationship. This is especially true on the gay scene, or indeed in any nightclub/pub-based scene, focussed on sexual chemistry. The dream lover is a huge archetypal presence in the gay scene and he’s always the handsome stranger who’s going to be waiting for us there tonight. This insistence on dream living takes its toll on us, as romantic love doesn’t allow for the whole person to be seen and recognised, so the “negative” feelings go underground, creating a bad smell in the basement of our psyches. From this murk emanates the perfect fuel for depression and addiction.

John Ryan Haule has written about the erotic in relationship – and how, at its best, the erotic enlivens, energises, invigorates, on all levels, physical, emotional, mental and spiritual. But the erotic can be exquisitely unbearable at the beginning, for it is an uncertain flux of energy between people, without control, without preconditions, without any safety. It is at its creative height when vulnerability and trust is present between two people equally.

The tension can be so much that it snaps, if someone blinks; the most common way the lightning runs to ground, according to Haule, is through either rage or lust. Rage because one’s individuality is being threatened by the desire to merge, to dissolve, to become egoless in a fused ecstatic state with another. Rage because of the loss of control, the danger of dependency, of old childhood needs coming to the fore, the reminder of our helplessness as infants being held and fed and soothed. We rage because we want dissolution and comfort so much and it’s fucking scary that anyone can do that for us; it’s offensive to the rational mind.

The other way we avoid the unbearable tension of true eroticism is by sexualising it. We flee from being vulnerable and uncertain to the relative safety of the sport of objectifying sex. By focussing on genital/visual/sensual pleasures we at least can meet our body’s needs, and can have some fun – but it’s not the same as the sacred electricity of eroticism, and it can feel dull and hollow after everyone’s come if it’s happened too soon, without intimacy, without knowledge of the person inside the body.

When the erotic is sexualised in a subculture – as it is on the gay scene – we learn to leave behind our souls, and focus on our bodies and acting abilities, so we can fix (feast?) on fleeting moments of eroticism, as fast as possible, on demand.

But instant gratification isn’t eroticism. It’s human, but it’s not paying Eros his due, it’s cheapening him. And by cheapening him, by going for colour-by-numbers sex, we cheapen ourselves, and settle for spiritual and emotional poverty. Where do all our souls go, I wonder, in a bar full of gay men determined to look hot and steamy, focussing on finding the right “type” to get off with for the night? Are they, like angels, dancing with us on the dancefloor? Are they beside us in the backroom or sauna, whispering encouragement, as we bypass uncertainty and grab the crotch, wordless and intense?

Or do they wait for us on the street outside, under the lamp-posts, patiently waiting for us to come out sober, drained and spent, and wander with us back home, ever compassionate, ever wise, ever sad?