Is Love Enough?

All you need is love.

John Lennon in 1967

To love is to find pleasure in the happiness of others.

Gottfried Leibniz in 1696

Love has, over the centuries, become the ultimate utility player in the game of life.

Love began as God's go-to starter in an all-star line-up that includes omnipotence, omnipresence and righteousness. Now there's a team. Throw in a little unchangeability and you're looking at an unbeatable outfit. What are you going to challenge them with? Fallibility? Materiality? Mortality?

Good luck with that. 

Which explains why we've co-opted love for ourselves. Love is the most malleable of all the spiritual descriptors, the most likely to forgive, the one that won't judge. Human love can accept a lot of behaviour we might otherwise consider less than godly:

He cheats; but I still love him.

She verbally abuses me; but we still love each other. 

We're alcoholics; and we can overcome that together because our love is strong. 

It's as if love is a kind of clueless fairy floating above everything, ignoring the dark side of humanity, prescribing pixie dust to fix things. Which is fine if you can likewise float about dishing out magic cures, but somehow I think you are with me down here in real life. Our lives are messy and unpredictable, a mystery in almost every way. I think we've adopted love as a code-word for unjustified optimism, to short-circuit disagreement and facing up to shitty things.

But enough negativity. Here's a list of qualities of which humans are capable that in my opinion are more valuable than love, especially in marriage, not least because - unlike love - they're definable. 

* honesty

* patience

* good humour

* integrity

* thrift

* an ability to look life in the face

* a sense of perspective 

and this one, which I stole: 

* absolutely no agenda or ambition for you beyond that you're happy

Which takes us neatly back to the Leibniz quote. In my thinking, a practical love is one in which you wake up every morning thinking about how you can make your sig oth happy.



Bottoms Up, morning lovers.

Nothing Is What It Seems.

Boston's Best Single Girl gets to the nub of the matter: why do we categorize relationships?

To me, the answer is simplistic, if not simple: Because that's the way we are. Knowing in which mental room to place our relationship furniture gives us comfort. That's all. It's housekeeping.

However, something about her post unsettled me. Relationships come in all shapes and dynamics. Each one will by definition be different from all the others, because the sum of two individuals will be itself individual. But why is it that so many liaisons end up in the way she describes, with one side unbalancing things?

Maybe that is the nature of people interacting sexually and intellectually . Perhaps these things are unstable until they reach a common energy level, which can only be found with time and raw feedback. The instability will either resolve or not. I don't know.

What I do know is that mismatched motives are the hidden time-bomb in most relationships, of any length. That's because we so infrequently acknowledge the whats and whys of what we're looking for in another, and even less frequently state them out loud. Partly this is because we're not taught that self-examination - self-observation if you like - is a valuable art, but our biology doesn't value it either. Reproduction and everything surrounding it is Mother Nature's only concern. She's a pile 'em high, sell 'em cheap kind of life retailer, interested only in getting as many new bodies out there as possible.

On the other hand, we have created the culture of relationships. They're an intellectual pursuit in that they rely on more abstract ideas than "wow, she's/he's sexy, I'm horny, let's do it". Unfortunately, we impute the latter criteria as a starting point for the former, which is a little like trying to construct a nuclear weapon by throwing rocks.

The good news is that we can immediately change the way of the future. If you say to yourself (and everyone else):

Okay. What I'm looking for right now in a person is a sexual relationship that has a smattering of conversation about books and wine...

...then that will tell the other person something of the clarity and the specificity of your thinking.

I think what most of us do is to attempt to find the one person who will complement all of our current and future needs. That's the ideal, and a good one. Whether it's practical or not is another question.

That's unsettling.

In any case, go read the Boston Girl. She has a gift.




Bottoms Up, New Englanders.

Tell Him He's Dreaming

 Zarah Pacheco pic credit.

I do it all the time - I get stuck in my head, thinking about meeting the perfect gal, how it would all be so neat and clean and happy ever after. Living like this courts trouble, especially when we're talking the sex and so on, because the mind doesn't own a watch. Time has no meaning in daydream fantasy land, so that when a real life prospect comes along in actual real life, time actually applies and I crash to earth.

Time's important because there's really no fast-forwarding through the getting-to-know-you period. We're not like automobiles; there's no plugging in a computer to check the status and history of all the machine's systems, as fun as it is to imagine doing that with a person.

Okay, Bud, whattawe got here? Alrighty, looks like her history's pretty clean. Body's straight. Transmission's been replaced, looks like it was a warranty job, so that's good. Fluids all clean and changed regularly. Tyres are getting close to the limit, but will do for now. She needs to go for a long ride, I'd say she only does short trips around town, so she needs a good blow-out. Apart from that, I'd say you've got a solid prospect here. 

Wouldn't it be neat to know precisely what you're in for when you meet someone? Of course, there'd be no discovery, but really, revelation's over-rated. History's chock-full of dead explorers.

But back to this planet. We're all PDG at masking stuff we think needs hiding - but not forever. Some kind of universal consensus hovers around the eighteen month mark as about the period required to uncover your sweetie's suitability. That's about the time Magellan took to get half-way around the world.

Just for the record, he died there.



Bottoms Up, Relationship Mechanics.

Plenty of Cheap

Shannon Corey's pic credit.

I log into Plentyoffish and head for the search page. I complete the fields - male seeking female, input an appropriate age range, supply my locale - and here's what pops up;


SEARCH RESULTS - Pages 0 to 9 out of 600+ results are shown below.

Six-hundred-plus women.

Six-hundred.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

One of my arguments against online dating is that it encourages viewing people as a commodity. It's the Walmart Syndrome:

Well, I'm looking for a beach towel, so I can spend twenty-five dollars for one that's well-made and long-lasting, or I can go to Walmart and buy five that are ugly and won't last the summer.

About which one can only say  - yep, it's a low-rent world 'coz everyone wants it cheap.





Bottoms Up Cost Firsters.

Disbelief

Photo of Miss Shahi from here.

I shake my head and close my eyes in disbelief at how we proceed to find partners. We go looking - actively looking - for complete strangers and give them the once-over with an eye to compatibility. We imagine, project, hope, wish, long, mask and guess our way to deciding that he or she might be a good-un, despite evidence to the contrary.

I'm criticizing me and my own behaviour, in which I can confidently assume others indulge.

From my own experience, a few words from someone familiar with dating and mating ins-and-outs would have been infinitely valuable. Parents are supposed to give us a clue about all this...a problematic concept if ever. Relationship education exists, but we need to learn earlier than the point at which, say, I would turn to self-help books or seek the advice of trusted peers.

So that's the thing - trial and error, mistakes and recovery, and hope and optimism are the three Donkeys of Dating Discovery, and 'twas ever thus.

Or is that six donkeys?




Bottoms Up, Eternal Learners.