Throw Your Arms Around Me

Of all the motivations that keep couples together, I suspect that love - in the sense of romantic love - is the least important. Anyone who has lived through at least one love and falling-out-of-love cycle understands the temporary nature of heart-pounding irrational obsessional love. It's a trick of nature to get us to breed, asap.

So what does keep people together? Despite media hysteria, lots of people find, marry, mate, and stick with one person for many years, if not forever. The secret must partly revolve around choosing the right person in the first place. That choice can naturally be driven by emotion, but relationships so founded require lots o' luck to last longer than their season.

Choosing well means asking difficult questions. All the love in the world won't overcome disagreements over all the other stuff of life, a partial list of which might look like:

~ religion
~ money
~ children
~ politics
~ morality
~ work ethic
~ physical fitness
~ recreation
~ socializing

And so on. No two people will ever agree completely on everything - knowing what are not, and what are deal-breakers is the most important part of all this. That requires clarity on the self-knowledge front, which is quite another field of exploration.

Presuming you choose well and find someone with whom the day-to-day stuff is close to frictionless, there's one more factor that I've learned, and it's this: Happiness and longevity in a relationship occur when folks wake up in the morning and ask themselves how they can make their partner's day better. It might only be making them a morning cup of tea, or sending a chirpy upbeat text for no reason, but the very act of placing someone else's wellbeing ahead of your own creates the right framework.

I think.



Bottoms Up, Huggers.

Relationship Mash-Upship

Sophie Marceau pic credit.

Beautifully matched couples are boring. Kens and Barbies together are meant to be seen as a pair, batteries sold separately. Surely they have their tiffs and differences like any other be-coupled life forms, but it's less dramatic when you know there'll always be someone else. The drama of a bust-up barely registers when the danger is only of when they'll find another one just like the last. Answer: It won't take long.

Couples who are clearly different in appearance raise interesting questions. Do they know they look mismatched? What is it they have in common? Which one of them has the most devious motivation? Are they together out of spite? Which of them is desperate?

[You'll note that I attribute less than honourable motives here. That speaks to my mind, not to our theoretical odd pair.]

In my experience, there are a few broad categories where couples look noticeable. There's the big age difference, the big looks- or body-style difference, and the style difference. A style difference would be, say, someone fully tatted-up with a cleanskin. Cheatin' Jesse James and Sandra Bullock is one example. Less obvious mismatches are those involving social ability, wealth and intelligence. Intelligence is a tricky one, because measurement is so subjective.

Looking around, it's clear that we tend to meld with those who more-or-less look like they belong to us. That might simply be because all we want in a partner is the opposite-sex version of our favourite person. Us.






Bottoms Up, Self-Esteemers.

Siege

A marriage or LTR might be done, over, cooked and stinking up the joint, but no-one is allowed to say so until one or other of the participants says it first.

This public defense of the widely held private opinion is the same mentality that those under siege take. Stalingrad in World War II springs to mind, or Boston in 1775/6.

Gradually the food runs short, so less and less to eat becomes acceptable. (Marriage equivalent: progressively less communication.)

Gradually the fuel runs short, so colder days and nights are taken for granted. (Marriage equivalent: sex becomes less frequent, more perfunctory.)

Gradually the participants daydream about better times, willing the reality to be different. (Marriage equivalent: resorting to drink or drugs or anonymous sex outside the relationship.)

To outside observers this is as obvious as Mick Jagger's lips. We know what's happening in the lives of those close to us nearly as soon as they do, and acknowledge it (out of their hearing) much sooner.

No-one outside a relationship can ever know all the ins-and-outs, but dispassionate onlookers have the advantage of perspective. Nature apparently sets us up to defend indefensible positions - or nearly indefensible, because although the Americans won the siege of Boston, the Germans failed to take Stalingrad. But do you really want to go through that kind of epic horror?[link]





Revolutionary War spy pic from here [link]

Love is Criminal

This book was my weekend entertainment. It forced me to consider the advantages of being a crook, especially a crook who counterfeits C-notes.

There is a downside to contravening Federal US statutes, which includes being pursued by the Secret Service. Did you know that the Secret Service was originally charged with finding and bringing counterfeiters to justice? Only when Mr Roosevelt succeeded Mr McKinley did the Secret Service begin to protect US Presidents from nutters who would kill them.

The upside of counterfeiting is the women. The story of Art Williams[link] is all about women, how they fell in love with him, how they bore his children, how his mother went insane, and how they all helped him in his criminal life. This isn't some fictional tale detached from reality; the truth is that women found this guy attractive to the point where they'd ditch their families for him, break the law for him, and lie to the Secret Service for him.

I wonder: How bad does a Bad Boy have to be before women say no? Is there any point beyond which every woman holds up her hand and says Whoa buddy, this is going too far? (Sex crimes aside, of course.)

There is no conclusion to be drawn, other than love (or its blue-collar cousin, attraction) can conquer even the penal code. But the pervasive attraction of the Bad Boy leads me to believe there's some evolutionary advantage to taking on authority. Either that or bricks of $100 notes to be used for shopping expeditions are impossible to resist.




The Art of Making Money by Jason Kersten. ISBN 978-1-592-40446-9

Jason Kersten's homepage [link]