I don't think you have an unnaturally low sex drive. Certainly, it's reduced for depression(Been there, still there). But otherwise, I think you're normal, and this is evidenced by the various pressures you feel, including your desire for companionship.
I wouldn't expect it to quite seem this way though, because there's an element that getting in the way. Basically, it's your virginity, and relatively low social & intimate exposure. Your perspective shifts a bit after sex. It varies, person to person, but prior to sex, the topic is quite a bit more ambiguous, amorphous, abstract, esoteric. It rides along with other concepts that are not necessarily the same, because we grow up seeing the concepts attached to each other, bound together by either formal or informal association.
Okay time for another stupid analogy.
Imagine you're partly color blind and you can't perceive Red or something. You can see other colors though, and you've heard plenty about where red is, where to expect it, how it might look, etc. You might be able to go about life without seeing red, but can possibly respond correctly to a red stop light, for instance.
But imagine one day, you suddenly CAN see red. It's probably not exactly how you imagined it, and over time, you start to understand it's context and variability more fully. Over time, it is no longer bound within other concepts like the hexagonal stop sign, or the shape of the apple; One no longer necessitates the other.
Kay, bad, overly-simplified analogy done.
Additionally, to compound matters, guys like me, and some others on this forum, might write about topics involving sex from a very clinical, pragmatic way, totally devoid of any romanticism or thematic or emotional coloring that the rest of the world wants to consider sex from. Naturally, that's gonna be alienating for a guy like you, whose only context for sex is bound within the romantic concepts that our society usually bundles it with. I would drain away pretty much all the romanticism when talking about it, so there would seem to be little commonality between how we view sex. Thus it would seem also that we have very little commonality in which we experience sex, either real or imagined... But that last part's not true.
In other words, we're talking about the same subject in a different language. It makes it seem like you're different, when it's actually guys like me who are seeming to be different by our presentation and objectification of sex, compared to your romanticized view of sex.
Age and experience can also factor in, similarly.
Another dumb analogy:
You said you're in the choir. Say some relatives(with no musical background whatsoever) come in to town and hear some of your work, and afterwords they rave about it and marvel at this and that, and wont stop bugging you about all the silly, basic details that they're enamored with... But you've been doing it for years, and when you think about the singing, you're thinking about different things than they are. Your relatives wouldn't be quite experienced enough to fully appreciate the sub-topics and subtleties you'd want to talk about regarding choir... They're just not exposed enough to be on the wavelength with you, and so they would kinda just smile and nod their head.
Or you hear a joke a million times, so you don't laugh at it anymore... But your friend does, and laughs about that same gag all day. From his perspective, you don't even find it funny. Well, actually, you did... like 5 years ago.
So, no, I don't think you're abnormal, regarding sex drive.
From my perspective .... which, honestly, isn't terribly common... everything is sexuality. I look at the world through sex colored lenses. Sex this, sex that. Nothing is not sex.
But this is not a reflection of my sex drive(and certainly not the common person's sex drive). Just my view of it, and how it subtly saturates life, according to my somewhat odd views.
Other folks may see things a little bit similarly, though usually to a lesser degree, but it's probably enough to make our experience of reality seem utterly alien.
17 Mar 2010, 1:07 pm
