[thoughts from ~burning woman~ by Sha’Tara]
Oh yes, to be in love! Many there are who want to be in love, desperately so; many more who pine for having fallen in love with the immovable mountain; many more in love, feeling both, the ecstasy and the inevitable torment!
It’s not an easy thing, being in love, seeking to ride that enraptured state.
But just as impossible it is to maintain, once it has been found and attained!
It will come as no surprise to those who have read my “essays” over the years that I consider love to be either a joke, or an unattainable state. Joke when all it is, is emotions running wild. Unattainable when the object of one’s “love” refuses to be snared, or plummets the airy romantic inloveness condition into something practical – such as, “Guess what, I’m pregnant” or… I’ll marry you but there are conditions, and I want a pre-nup.” or the worst of all: “I really don’t feel in-love with you any longer. I feel we need to go our separate ways.”
Suddenly the sense of having been in a paradise of the heart acquires the smell of a delivery room … of a bank or of a dank and bottomless well.
Suddenly, reality’s big flat steel-toed boot lands on your toes and sometimes you do more than wince: you want to scream at the loss of your dream. Wouldn’t it be nice if being in-love guaranteed that your life and her/his would continue to be nothing but wonderful bliss untrammelled by the urgent and necessary, or the pain-filled emptiness from its loss?
I’ve been in-love a few times before this time. I’ve gone through some of the above. I’ve seen my dream-of-the-moment vanish in so much invisible smoke painful to more than just the eyes. Being in-love, according to the above conditions, is evanescent. It doesn’t work because it doesn’t hold. It’s the kind of circumstance from which you learn to “settle” for something normal, i.e., something less, oh, so much less, that what your feelings and emotions told you it should be!
Everybody loses the in-love game so when you do, you usually don’t wonder too long, or too bitterly. You go looking for another heart experience or you engage the marriage thing, say the words, smile for the cameras, examine the gifts on the long table and begin walking or crawling the long pretend road of happiness.
Ok, so I’m making it seem so dumb, so dead, so hopeless, so pointless.
But it isn’t, not completely. It leads to the “family” condition, and making babies if you’re of the Christian/post-Christian persuasion means something: it keeps the dreaded Muslim take-over threat at bay for a few more years. And if you don’t have kids, you use the marriage as a business, combining incomes to buy a house, maybe another, and lots and lots of toys and trips. And if you can’t call it an adventure, at least you’ve turned it into a venture. You’re no longer in-love, but you’ve settled, and if you get the message in the movie, “Family Man” well, that’s what matters because that’s what is expected of you. Your love has turned to duty, even when you have no idea what that duty is.
“But when duty and love are one, grace is within you.” (The Painted Veil – W. Somerset Maugham)
What does that mean? Does it mean that you can “love” without being in-love? Dutifully loving? Lovingly dutiful? Semantics? Can you love without feeling, without emotion? Can you perform a duty and discover true love within that act? Should such questions be asked? I don’t know that it matters much. If I see a duty that needs doing, I know that I have no choice but to perform the dutiful act. I have worked to develop such a quasi-autonomic response for decades. Why? Because it saves me having to wonder whether I should do it or not. I removed my choice because I didn’t want to have to think about it and in doing so, make the wrong choice – a choice that would seem right in the moment but would torture my mind for a long time afterwards. I hate going through recriminations: I have a very active and healthy conscience.
In a few months I will have invested sixty seven years in this one life. Not a long time, but considering the rivers I paddled in that time, enough to gain some pretty serious insight on how it sort of works.
“It” in this case, meaning love, or the state of being in-love. Up until now I had given up on love. I watched how Earthians interacted with each other; how their love worked out, short and long run. I was less than impressed. Even less so when I discovered that even with the most extreme of intentions to keep it going, I couldn’t do it either: it always degenerated to the lowest common denominator and I had to “settle.” I hate settling, it’s not in my nature. So I began to experiment with other ways of making love work. First, of course, I had to throw it all out – baby with bath water and all that. I didn’t miss it because, as I said earlier, I had developed a sense of duty that could quite easily take up the slack. Interesting thing about duty is, it works without much expectations in return. Duty is something you do (or pay, but that’s another story), not something you get. Duty properly exercised is utterly selfless. I recognize the danger of pride – and I’ve seen it – for those who parade their dutifulness to the world – but what talking about is duty without expectation. Duty where the right hand does not know what the left hand is doing, and doesn’t care. Duty for its own sake.
And here’s the funny thing. In the performance of this duty I began to see those to whom this duty was done, or given. And gradually, I began to realize that when I focused on these people, I began to get a feeling akin to inloveness. I was falling in love. Not in an energy depleting kind of selfish burning, but in a warm and safe kind of place. These people I served did less and less “wrong” in my eyes and I felt a comfort being near them, around them, or having them around me. It wasn’t a need, more a completing of a pattern. It had nothing whatsoever to do with sex or planning things together – quite the opposite in fact.
I realize now that the duty I performed was all done because I wanted to help these people build a better life for themselves and of course, in doing so, become totally independent of my “help” so to speak. I wanted to see them make it on their own. Then I discovered that the more I helped others build a better life or find some additional independence, the more I experienced same in my own life.
It’s a very exhilarating new kind of inloveness. It’s a small step and it leaves me still short of the ultimate goal, which stated scripturally says, “Love you enemies; do good to those who hate you; bless those who curse you.” … and all the rest of it. Perhaps in the next chapter of this life, or in another life, I will be able to say, yes, I know that now – not intellectually: I’ve known this truth since I was ten years old – but practically. I am quite certain that once I push myself over that wall and fall flat on my face on the other side; once I’ve picked myself up and recovered my senses, I will experience even deeper joy.
That’s the thing about self-sacrifice: it always leads to joy, and what a wonderful contradiction that is.
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I too, have fallen in love, but not without the desire to live with the other for the rest of my life. Instead, it is that innate hormonal thrust that forces the young to seek out strong (and sometimes, wholly different) partners for which to mate and produce offspring. That is why beauty and good health are so attractive. It's all about the selfish gene seeking to continue the genome, stronger than before for survival. I realized the power of this when I became paralyzed at 20 and my sexual attractiveness to the opposite sex plummeted to nearly 0.
Enter the church and morality and we have the monogamous happy family where man and woman fall in love, have as many children as possible, and live happily ever after. That baloney leads young people into the trap of early marriage and scenarios you described. So much hardship and pain. Like you, after I realized that I was no longer hot stuff for the ladies, I gave up trying and only married once because a merry divorcee chose me as an escape from her situation, only to find out that it followed her and I wasn't that knight in shining armor she thought I was.
For twenty years I've been in a loving relationship without marriage and have several lovely people around me treat me well as I treat them. If only everyone would learn the lesson you have described, much heartache and pain would be averted.
Ron
Love ya!
Jane
Well spoken. To be more succinct ...
The difference may be summarized by merely substituting a 'u' for an 'a' ...
RApture ... becomes RUpture !
From Pleasure to ... Pain !
Just a question of ... TIME ... Peace...