Page 43 - Advanced Romance

40 Advanced Romance*
holistic, and rarer still based in logic.
Take what it now means to physically love someone
who’s a romantic freethinker. For some, it means the holy beginning of a life-long commitment. For others, it’s a recreational roll-in-the-sack. Sometimes both lovers fantasize both extremes during the same sex act. Light-hearted dalliances flame into sacred oaths, or disintegrate into profane curses. True love may
last gloriously forever, or turn once good friends into alienated strangers.
Formerly happy celebrity couples sometimes become vicious enemies whose fights may be amplified world-wide as prime-time crimes of passion. AIDS and other venereal horrors stalk us like shotgun-toting fundamentalists blasting blasphemous fornication a la Sodom and gonorrhea.
But babies are mostly a matter of choice. Children born into a modern, loving relationship can be one of life’s greatest blessings, or backbreaking straws that lead to the formerly unimaginable crime of mothers drowning their kids. And Syphilis and life-threatening complications from other STDs are as dead as Cotton Mather’s sinners in the hands of an angry God. AIDS is still dangerous, but much less so than when the virus was first discovered.
Yet, to paraphrase the movie mojo-master Austin Powers: Modern love is no longer “having promiscuous sex with many anonymous partners without protection