by David Deida: Truth: Sooner or later, even sex with someone you love can become a routine.Sex seems to promise so much. Skin aflame with unbearable bliss. Sobbing embraces of vulnerable rapture. Transcendent merger as utter oneness. But usually, sex is fairly mundane.

Men get hard, pump and grunt, squirt out their tension, and relax. Women get wet, moan and hump, seize and weep, and snuggle in warm comfort. At first exciting, sex can become quite predictable. Even good sex can become standardized.

In this way, sex is like the rest of life. It’s actually less than you hoped. For almost everyone who reaches middle age, sex and life become a customary enjoyment, an habitualized routine of pleasure, comfort, and pain that is consoling at best, and often meaningless.

This is good. Meaninglessness is a sign of growth. When something becomes boring it means you are ready to go deeper. When you are humping away but still unsatisfied, you are ready for deeper sex.

Sex that feels empty reveals a deeper truth: Sex is empty. Just like any other moment of life.

When you allow yourself to feel sex completely, you feel two things. On the one hand, your genitals are engorged, your chest is heaving, and your passions are inflamed. On the other hand, so what? You’ve been there before and nothing fundamental has resulted. This moment of sex–like every moment–is amazingly rich and deliciously textured, but also strangely vacant.

Eventually you realize that nothing specific is missing from your sexual life. You can certainly improve your sexual skills–communicating your emotions more fully and enjoying multiple orgasms that last for hours–yet, when your fascination with new pleasure and achievement wears off, you become re-aware of a haunting sense of emptiness.

The truth is, every sexual moment is empty. Every moment is empty, insubstantial, unreal. And every moment is full, tangible, explosively alive. Like a vivid dream, each moment is intensely impactful, spontaneously dynamic, and instantly gone, as if it never occurred. Sex can be tender, a miracle of love, yet vaporously inconsequential, a wistful deja vu. Simultaneously, sex is intense and vanished; even when utterly blissful, it is also utterly empty.

Naive youth gets lost in the brief rush of pleasure. Depressed grown-ups linger in the not-enough of vacant embrace. The truth is that every moment is tangibly insubstantial. The true lover surrenders beyond all hold, as naked life is.

But to get to this point requires outgrowing your grasp on feeling good–or bad–about sex. Early in your sexual life, enjoy the thrill of romance and fascination for as long as it lasts. Then, frolic in the middle days of unsatisfying but decent sexual routine.

Eventually, when hope has worn away, when you have no other choice, relax in the coat of emptiness you already wear. Don love’s open bliss. Bear edgeless luminosity. Sex is a revelation of what is, intensely.

–Excerpted from Blue Truth by David Deida.