Hey there,
My name is Ben, and I think there should be a course on love at UCR. There should also be courses on beauty and love and sex. With love as the biggest course. And I could be the teacher. I do not have much experience with love, but a good friend of mine called Andy Warhol once gave me some useful tips on this subject, and now I consider myself an expert. If I were the teacher of this love course, I think I would show the students how to make love, and then demonstrate to them once and for all that it is ‘nothing’. I would teach the students that fantasy love is much better than real love, so that the students would discover that sex is more exciting on screen and between the pages than between the sheets. I would tell them that it is more fun to laugh in bed than to doing ‘it’. If you plan on going to a lady of the night, I think you should pay her to tell your jokes in bed.
To illustrate my lessons with videos and documentaries I would show my students a real sex movie: a flower giving birth to another flower. And I would bring two birds in class, because the best love story is just two lovebirds in a cage. I would also draw on my own experience regarding love: I get very nervous when I think someone is falling in love with me, because I am always afraid real life love will not be able to meet my fantasy love standards. My fantasy gives me problems. I really think that in general, people’s fantasies are what give them problems. If you did not have a fantasy, you would not have problems because you would just take whatever was there. But then you would not have romance, because romance is finding your fantasy in people who do not have it; so the trick is to learn how to deal with your fantasy. I do not think I know anybody who does not have a fantasy. Surely everybody must have a fantasy – so everyone should learn how to deal with their fantasies. Everyone should take this love course at UCR.
Now, to be honest, I do not think this course will ever be included in the curriculum, because love and sex are business. Students should stay in the dark about it, because if you knew that it is ‘nothing’ , sex and love would not sell anymore. And then the economy would collapse. But then I think, maybe it works out just as well that nobody takes you out of the dark about it, because if you really knew the whole story, you would not have anything to think or fantasize about for the rest of your life, and you might go crazy, having nothing to think about. Life is getting longer anyway, leaving so much time after puberty to have sex.
So I guess I will not be your love teacher anytime soon. Instead, let me give you two final tips before I finish this column. The first tip is for when you really like someone else: never doing it is very exciting. The most exciting attractions are between two opposites that never meet. And the second tip is for when you want to be kissed: people look most kissable when they are not wearing makeup. Marilyn’s lips were not kissable, they were photographable.
Corstiaan van Pelt, class of 2016, is a Social Sciences Major from Zwijndrecht and loves Andy.
