LOVERS BREAK UP OVER CONFLICTING INTERPRETATIONS OF QUANTUM PHYSICS
[Written between Saturday, May 27th, and Saturday, July 22nd, 2023]
Perhaps the break-up of their fifteen-year love affair could best be understood by those last few months…when he thought the sex had been the hottest and the love the deepest…but that’s not what it had been. While the love, quite apparently, turned out not to be so deep, if ever there at all…the sex had been very carnal, intense, a little rough, even the way he licked and sucked on her thighs, her relentlessness when she was on top, moving up and down so hard and fast. The thought that the heightening and intensification of their sex life seemed to lead straight to the end of the whole fifteen-year affair… this haunted him for a while…sometimes…you know…this delusional fear that hot sex and true love weren’t compatible…that “hot sex” was actually the manifestation of an anxious attachment style. As Dr. Emily Nagoski writes in her book Come As You Are: The Surprising New Science That Will Transform Your Sex Life:
“most of us will find it easier to crave sex, for what it’s worth, when our relationships are unstable — either new or threatened… People with anxious attachment styles are the most likely to engage in anxiety driven ‘solace sex’ — that is, using sex as an attachment behavior — which can make sex more intense without making it pleasurable.”
Dr. Emily Nagoski also mentions that “A 2012 review of the research on the relationship between sex and attachment found that secure attachment was associated with every domain of sexual wellbeing you could imagine” (see page 135 of the 2015 Kindle book version of the Simon & Schuster Paperbacks edition).
And so in hindsight, while contemplating these points in Dr. Emily Nagoski’s book, he thought, perhaps what really had happened was he’d been very oblivious to the instability of their relationship, the broader context, which for him had only started growing clear when they’d reached the tipping point that served as the official sense of their undoing: their differing responses to both Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle and the discovery of the so-called Observer Effect in numerous so-called Double Slit experiments conducted by quantum physicists.
The implications of quantum physics were highly controversial in those days. For him, and many who deduced that panpsychic interpretations of Quantum Physics (that consciousness is a physical and energetic thing affecting, even shaping, co-creating the rest of both energetic and material reality) probably made very good sense, there was a clear connection to broader understandings of “energy,” as interpreted, for example, by Buddhists, Yogis, Tantrikas, Qi Gong masters, and as interpreted by so-called “New Age” folks into the so-called “law of attraction,” manifestation, shadow work, energetic healing modalities such as Reiki,
But for her…all the aforementioned fell under the umbrella of “new age woo-woo bullshit,” and she would not stand for what she believed to be the delusional thinking, pie in the sky, religiosity, dogma, excuses to sit around and do nothing… “surrendering to the universe,” waiting… for some “manifestation” to just happen.
