I will keep this brief, because otherwise I'll get sentimental and mushy. 

The woman in the picture above is my wife Jennifer, though at the time of this picture she wouldn't even call herself my girlfriend. She cruelly made me wait two years after meeting her before she let me kiss her, but this worked out quite well because we did the old-fashioned thing and actually developed a relationship before getting into the sack. 

To those who scoff at the old-fashioned thing and look at sex as a game to play or as a series of adventures, I say only this: you don't know what you're missing. A stable love relationship is no guarantee that you'll be able to work your shit out (in my case, my father/son shit), but an unstable one is almost a guarantee that you won't. 

Want to find your way in this journey of life? Find a love you'll be true to and start from there. Worked for me. I won't say that all the desecration in my life ended when I got married for real, but one thing did end: using women to desecrate myself under the guise of sexual triumph.

(Of course Jen didn't know all the yuckiness in my family, mess she'd find herself mired in when fatherhood eventually came, and all the skeletons in my closet woke up. But that's a matter for the next big movement in this labyrinthine little symphony of mine.)