It goes without saying that one of the absolutely key elements of erotic feeling is desire. In fact, I can hear you saying "duh" as you read that. But hang on...I do have a point to make that you may not have considered about romance, sex, and falling in love.

There's a price one pays for that pleasurable pining. While in the erotic context we consider desire a pleasing emotion, more often than not it's actually unpleasant. It's actually often one of the most painful, distressing feelings we humans experience.

Desire is pleasurable when you feel like you have a shot at attaining its object. It's also nice when you have actually attained said object but not possessed it long enough that you take it (i.e., him or her) for granted. But if you begin to feel the odds are against you, desire remains erotic but is also agonizing. And if you become convinced that yours is a lost cause, that pain can be excruciating.

Especially in women, erotic desire is not the same as mere attraction. We don't want something just because it's pretty--we want it because it fills up a space where we feel a lack. That's what being in love or (in infatuation) is about. Want some proof? Just look at romance fiction. When you read a romance (the hot guy on the cover notwithstanding), you feel desire for a man you can't see. The mere fact that the narrator tells you he's gorgeous doesn't give you an actual picture that you can find attractive...you're taking her word for it. And yet, you get caught up in the romance because you experience his character, his personality, his talents and quirks.

In the Twilight books, Bella expends a lot of words raving about how exquisitely beautiful Edward is. I maintain she could have gotten by with a lot fewer. What makes readers obsess about Edward is the need they feel for such a man: someone ancient and wise, someone abjectly devoted, someone protective, someone who desperately needs them.

So, it is this psychological dependence that makes desire so delicious and so terrible at the same time. When we entertain the hope that the object of desire can meet our acutely important needs, we are ecstatic: this guy could literally be the answer to our happiness. But when we feel he is not attainable, we despair.

And there is a third option as well: the possibility that the object of infatuation is not actually all we imagine him to be. That reality (and most of the time it is reality) is a both potential cure and potential poison. If we let ourselves believe it, it's not so hard to deal with the infatuation and let it go. Problem is, if we let ourselves believe it, we must abandon the hope that this guy is the answer to our dreams. There's the rub: the bliss of desire makes us unwilling to give up the pain of desire. It's very like a drug addiction that way.

While a small percentage of the population gets itself addicted to meth or heroine or crack, a very large portion of us develop painful crushes. I know this because I did a blog post a year ago on "How to Get Over a Crush". and it receives an overwhelming number of visitors every day, visitors so desperate to relieve the pain of their love affairs that they sought help from Google.

All you have to do is read the dozens of comments to get a cross section of the predicaments that desire can create. I wouldn't want to be any one of these poor souls (I've had enough painful crushes myself, thank you very much). The advice I provide in my post is helpful to quite a few of them, but even to those people able to apply it, the road to recovery is a hard, slow, miserable one. Meanwhile, there are others who simply can't let go of that hope that somehow their dream guy or girl is all they need that person to be, and somehow a miracle will make that person theirs.

My best answer is always to recommend finding what you need not in others, but in yourself. In my own life, a big key to that has been imagination. Imagination is what enables me to "hook up" with all the awesome dream guys that populate my stories (as well as some I haven't shared with anyone else!). Imagining the perfect man can be remarkably satisfying, and between that and learning about my own value as a person, I've come a long way to avoiding the pitfalls of erotic desire. Not perfect yet...but a lot better.

All lovers of romance fiction have this helpful element in their lives: imagination. When an Edward Cullen, a Mr. Rochester or Darcy, a Rhett Butler or a Bill Compton is as close as your bookshelf, you may not give in to the urge to crush on your boss, brother-in-law, or other extremely inappropriate individual. You're simply indulging erotic desire in a context that is strictly play and won't (unless you decide to stalk Robert Pattinson) negatively impact your daily life.

The price you pay for pining is a lot lower that way!

Diana Laurence's popular new book, How to Catch and Keep a Vampire: A Step-by-Step Guide to Loving the Bad and the Beautiful was released in September. She is also the author of the Soulful Sex anthologies of erotic romance fiction, and the vampire romance series Bloodchained (www.bloodchained.com), and many other titles. Visit her at www.dianalaurence.com or enjoy her blog at www.eroticawithsoul.blogspot.com.