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.

I Can Read Your Mind, Darling.

No I can't, sweetheart, so it would be easier overall if you just told me what you were thinking.

We have such difficulty doing this though, don't we? And when we think we know what we want, something in our head flips and there's another set of stuff we want. Dammit, this affects me at least as badly as everyone else, so I doubt it's a sex-based thing. My suspicion is that desire-drift grows from mental rootlessness - in other words, lack of a spiritual anchor.

There are two problems here:

1. Not knowing what we want.

2. Inability to communicate today's (or any) specific want.

The latter is a limitation of language. At the best granularity, I doubt we ever move beyond 80% efficiency when trying to get our thinking across to another. If the former - the actual meat of what we're looking for from the other person - changes direction like a school of fish, we transmit almost nothing.

Consistency is the answer. I should decide upon what I want, and tell the people who need to know what those things are. After a while, the message will get through.

Or I could find a woman who can read my mind




Bottoms Up, Communicators!

Pic from here.[link]

Change Gears

Repulsion and attraction rest upon the smallest particles. Loving a woman can be about the way she tilts their head. Loathing a woman can be about the way she closes a door. It's ridiculous when placed on a plinth like that, but all my observations and experience tell me it's true.

A lot of the stuff that we might label 'small' is right on the edge of consciousness, too, in my opinion. I don't know exactly what it is I like about her...I just know. Detachment and self-examination are needed to figure out what our brain is filtering out, and what it's including. The answer is there, but we need to point the flashlight at the edges of how we think, towards the less obvious nooks and crannies of our personality.

This is the reason I dislike the standard online dating architecture. The profiles are all about big-picture things, painted with a large brush. Unfortunately, the paint is water-based, and washes away with the first exposure to rain. Yes, I like sailing and martinis, just like you, but where's the hook in that? I have just described about a billion people. Small is special and big is...well, it's just big.

The real point I want to make about this is that because my attraction for you is about the small stuff, you are entirely unlikely to know ahead of time what those small stuffs are. That's why it is such a waste of time to spend time thinking about your shortcomings - as, remember, you see them, not anyone else - to the detriment of being the best you can.

I have discovered this, thousands of years late, but it's worth repeating: change what you want to and accept the rest. Oh, and don't worry about what other people find attractive or repulsive. You have no control over that.

Martini, anyone?

Bottoms Up.




Woman contemplating from this man [link]