I think that if we were to choose the greatest breaker of romantic relationships is applying work division principles to chores.
If you’re after the increase of efficienciencies while playing house, you will get either one of divorce, therapy or a dysfunctional family — given the exception where both parties are high functioning sociopaths.
When playing house efficiencies should be sacrificed for the activities of bonding and the creation of any possible opportunity for bonding. That’s the whole goal of living together, of making a family and all that.
Work division puts pressure on the one not doing said chore to not break the focus and rhythm and plan of the one doing said chore. This then becomes a work relationship and you end up getting appointments with your lover. Sure we don’t call them like that, but step back and think about it:
— how many people fight because only one person cooks all the food in the house and the others won’t eat it?
— how many people end up in rage because one person in the house does all the cleaning in the house and the others keep creating the mess to be cleaned?
— how many people live in constant stress because only one person in the house pays all the bills and the others constantly whine that there is no money to spend on indulgence?
This list is endless.
If one person is in charge of all house cleaning, and another person is in charge with all child delivery services, it is a given that the other person’s mess and the other person’s other delivery needs will drive the one in charge farther away day by day.
These things we have to do to play house need to be shared, playfully chaotic and taken lightly.
Relationships are about letting people inside your self. You will try to be a good host, but given the long time they’re supposed to reside there, at some point you will cease to be a good host and develop expectations, king among them: trust. So, both parties need to do as much as humanly possible to not create any situation where the other one’s self becomes annoyed or messy.
Many people bond in many ways. There is no recipe. Some bond while fighting lightly just to make up later, others having daily family dinners, others having often date nights out, others by building companies or research projects, others by completely giving themselves in to their children.
No recipe on bonding is. But the work division on chores mistake is a force that breaks apart bindings. The world is made in such a way that survival, health and self actualisation are complicated, most times for no real reason, time consuming, emotionally exhausting and mentally depleting. The least you can do is to preserve ease and thriving inside your own cocoon with whomever you’ve chosen to share it with.
Yeah, another misconception about a common human thing:
The act, any act, cannot be immoral by itself until it is merged with intent. That is why we don’t apply moral standards to animals.
Wikipedia is so wrong here. Lying can be done without the intention to deceit.
In brief, lying is a form of manipulation and manipulation is always a two player game. They say manipulation is always done with the agreement of the victim. Agreement, not consent.
Deceit on the other hand removes this agreement as it presents an alternate reality, the deceiving one, the illusion inside the illusion.
The act of lying is about manipulating through distorting reality. But it is important to discern which reality: the visceral reality or the shared reality. The border between the visceral reality and the shared reality is called privacy.
Where does lying stop and deceit begin?
Deceit begins where intimacy ends.
Honesty is possible only after you communicate clearly where your privacy line is drawn, that is where your intimacy begins.
Sincerity is scalpel sharp because it is revealing by brute force what privacy keeps cloaked and intimacy pampers. That is why it should be used just like a scalpel: to cut off the diseased soul or open up pathways for caring.
Each person has their own scale and scope of their intimacy. That is why privacy is so complicated, but not complex. Privacy is a moving line and it depends on so many things.
Trauma creates a web of privacy lines and hence a fibrosis of intimacy, which is why psychoanalysis is a lifelong procedure, not process. Repeated trauma, intimacy cirrhosis.
Because most of people are sane and want social acceptance, and exceptions found in the mentally ill or sociopaths rarely influence averages, I can even go as far as to make a list of probability split between probably deceitful, and probably not deceitful lies.
Probably not deceitful lies: Bad faith, Economical with the truth, Exaggeration, Fib, Half-truth, Honest lie, Jocose lie, Lie-to-children, Minimization, Noble lie, Pathological lie, Polite lie and butler lie, White lie.
Probably deceitful lies: Barefaced lie, Big lie, Bluffing, Bullshit, Contextual lie, Defamation, Deflecting, Fabrication, Fraud, Lying by omission, Lying in trade, Memory hole, Misleading and dissembling, Perjury, Puffery, Speaking with forked tongue, Weasel word.
I would be curious if this idea holds in the future: sociopathy is a personality type not a personality disorder. A sociopath simply has nutshell sized intimacy.
Accepting our averageness and stepping away from the stupid inoculation with perfection and ideal, from beauty to brains, from courage to love, will allow a wider embracing of lies as actions and make us all more receptive to intent. But as we are in general locked into expecting perfection and ideal, days, people, experiences, weather, whatever, we’re numb to intent and rough in our attempts to classify interaction.
So, coming back to the main idea, lying is moral, deceit isn’t. As long as we’re in the realm of intimacy and resist privacy breaking incursions we’re on moral ground. Sure, like anything there are exceptions to the rule to document, but averages are what will always survive and move the story forward.
“Advice is a form of nostalgia. Dispensing it is a way of fishing the past from the disposal, wiping it off, painting over the ugly parts and recycling it for more than it’s worth.”
Here is some advice. I don’t know better than you, and I did not achieve the art of following my own advice.
Also, I have opinions about some things I know through reason, yet I did not have the visceral experience of these things (like my own children, for instance). However, that should not make you nervous, but instead you could try to take it as a perspective opportunity, a way to peek into a different lens.
Life is like music: for every song there is only one score.
For virtuosity with any given score, you must play those exact notes and do your best to not play others by mistake.
Virtuosity is what success is: you are playing life exactly as the score says.
First, all people start early. Just like virtuous musicians.
All these millionaires and billionaires start in their 20s, as well as others who don’t make it. All these globe trotters start early, as well as others who don’t make it. People raising five children start early, they don’t make five children in their 40s, as well as others who don’t make any. And do not start to point out the exceptions here. Early start is the rule.
Second, the difference between the virtuous at life and the ones who suck at life is that most people abandon plans, stray from paths, switch directions, or simply stop. Consistence in life is not about staying stuck in bad conditions, it is about knowing what score you’re playing and not fucking it up.
Do you want to be rich? There is one score to play and the notes include grit, wit, persistence, failure, ass kissing, immoral actions, pride, self loathing, fear, uncertainty. You can’t pick and choose what notes you want to play, because inevitably you’ll sing a different music.
Do you want to be good at something? There is one score to play and the notes include boredom, nitpicking, stagnation, tedious repetitive tasks, ten thousand hours of no progress, failure. There is no way to sing performance without them.
Do you want to have freedom? There is one score to play and the notes include poverty, fear, uncertainty, searching for talent and realising there is none, observing the absurdity of life, observing the absurdity of yourself, existential crisis, self loathing, self love, feelings of grandeur, humility, mistakes, repeated mistakes, loosing people, loosing love, loosing money, loosing faith. Freedom is a wonderful song.
Can I compose my own music? Yes, of course, go ahead. Just don’t expect to churn out a masterpiece without the magic potion made of luck, divine grace and serendipity.
Be good at what you do. This is the best money advice you’ll ever get.
It is not enough to have skills. Be top notch. The better you are, the more money you’ll have. It doesn’t matter if you like it. It doesn’t matter if it is interesting or not. If you have access to better trades go for it, but if you are socially and economically stuck in lame trades don’t despair: improve!
Know your shit. Be up to date. Practice. Be good.
Never stop learning. I did for parts of my life. I remember how a friend and business partner shouted in awe: “There is a shitload of money, here just learn how to work with this”. But boredom got the best of me. It cost me time. And time is the only thing you cannot buy back. If there is something you can learn to become better, don’t think twice.
Great skilled people will only make more money even when robots will invade the workforce completely. Who manually made watches was in a dire position a while ago, today they are the select few producing ultra expensive products.
It doesn’t matter if you wash dishes for a living. Wash them really good and really fast.
The better you become at work the more it becomes creation instead of work. That is the secret. All art evolved from greatly skilled work. Still does.
Pay attention and suddenly life is better.
All parents are tired. Everyone is overworked. We’re all sick.
All parents are tired because they don’t pay attention to their children.
Everyone is overworked because they don’t pay attention to their work.
We’re all sick because we don’t pay attention to our bodies.
If you pay attention you will improve your condition. It’s a built in function of your humanity. That’s why we’re still around despite being born as weak naked pink blobs.
If we pay attention we begin to improve our condition. Pay attention to everything, everyday, every time.
Your child will tell you what to do to not be tired. You’ll enjoy your child then. Your job will tell you what to do to finish the work. You’ll benefit from your work then. Your body will tell you what is wrong. You’ll feel good about yourself then.
But where to get all the attention from?
Train your will.
Attention is the aptitude of the will. Just as resistance is the aptitude of action. It’s different aptitude, but an aptitude nonetheless. That is also why some people are talented: natural attention wranglers, amazing multi-taskers, true Lean In folk, the “have it alls”, and so on.
We the rest train our will. Normal, average, people need passion, love, drive, interest, hope, desire, belief, curiosity or lust to power up their will. And it’s fine! Whatever.
Feed on what your will needs so that you can pay attention to buy your life back from time.
Make all bathrooms unisex, and stop fetishising the dick.
Sex segregated bathrooms is a relic of religious guarding of sexuality, a practice that continues to convert intimacy into shame.
Do one thing every day that scares you.
Look at a dick.
What is wrong with people who don’t see how random sexual restrictions are? For example, you can’t show dick but you can show pussy on TV before 10 PM. This regulatory randomness is mind numbing.
Also, you do not have intimacy in a bathroom because there is nothing to feel ashamed about. You can have a private space in a bathroom, because what people do in bathrooms is unflattering, and we do not want to waste our short life reconstructing social status after every burrito we eat. But a private space is completely different from intimacy.
People who seek intimacy in public bathrooms have intimacy issues. Intimacy is different from sex. You may seek consensual sex in a public bathroom because it is one kind of many human sexual fetishes. But, at the same time, no one is sane and expecting sexual behavior just because they’re in a bathroom at the same time.
Anything not consensual is a problem which segregation does not solve.
Be like Elsa: let it go.
You are neither a sponge, nor a box, you are a flowing state.
Look at people founding things and how they introduce themselves. 25 years at Linked In, 40 years at Google, a century of advising at Andreessen Horowitz. What does this mean?
You’d think these people are filled with answers. But they are not. They are people who have had one thing: consistence. Some also persevered. From consistence and perseverance comes great intuition.
Intuition is the correct guess. Top notch players have higher odds of making correct guesses because they are trained well by their assimilated experience.
Everything that happens to you changes who you are. After each experience your state is different. You don’t offer value by articulating things people can find in compendiums. You don’t become a linchpin because you’ve absorbed indicators and methodologies.
You are priced based on the quality of your experience distilled into intuition. You sell intellectual booze.
Stop fact checking the bible, it is stupid.
These people who feel so smart that they start proving the great flood was impossible make me nervous. Why? Because they’re supposed to be smart.
Fact checking the bible is one of the worst possible ideas, starting from discussing the logic of divine existence, and ending with counting years since creation, as if that’s what counting years means in the bible.
The bible, the vedas, the talmud are not reliable history to prove, nor are they cookbooks for civilisation, like other idiots think. They are politics manuals.
Except for some revelation, which is personal.
Stop preaching what you do as a source of truth, or people will secretly hate you.
OMG. That guy is great. OMG. This girl had it worst. OMG. They made it against all odds. I got it. I got it. BUT I cannot imitate no one, and no life, made up of some random list of friends and foes, give anyone any moral superiority.
I’m ashamed to say: the fact that an, in any way, handicapped person is better than I am at whatever, fills me with awe for that person, but at the same time lowers incrementally my self-esteem. I am not ashamed to say it and I believe this is how it works for everyone.
That is why I think personal example is problematic and why archetypal stories have mythical heroes in them, not real historical figures.
Get married and have children, because you are free to divorce.
Jesus fucking Christ. Stop it with the stupid advice of “don’t marry, live your life”.
People don’t want to marry by default, no impulse to not do it is required. But not getting married or being a childfree progressive, or a childless conservative, is no key to happiness.
If you’re a woman, chances are you’ll be fine after birth. The younger you are the greater the chances. Careers do not stop with children. Neither do they fail to start. It’s just that you need either a supporting husband or be alone and happy. Don’t stick to fathers who are tired of your breastfeeding. Don’t let go of your dreams just because there is a newborn around. At the same time, remind yourself, from time to time, that there are things which are better done at a young age. Like drugs, serial drunken lost nights and children.
If you’re a man, stop being a large kid and own up to your balls. Help the mother of your child, or let her be. Don’t be Elon Musk who thinks he should be more with his kids after “they start forming their consciousness,” aka after the shit and pee is over. Be wiping shit or thankful she does it all the time.
Stop this stupid idea of marriage as a trap, no one is out to get you. Unless you marry a psychopath, you can end it.
Think for yourself and you’ll see, there is nothing wrong with marriage or with having a family. It is an experience well worth it. Just don’t make a tragedy out of it, when, and if, it ends.
Divorce is not a bad event. Unless you married an asshole. Both sexes can be a real pain the ass when you must split random matter between appartments.
The real advice seems to be: be careful who you marry. That’s it.
And try to have children young. Diversity does not solve low natality. Low natality sends entire cultures into the drain of history. Just like colonialism. We’re too far to count on technology yet. Ask from your society child support. Be politically active.
BTW polyamory is very complicated. Polyamory is hard. Because emotions are wrong, because passion hurts, because biology doesn’t care, because polyamory is natural and monoamory isn’t, but humans love to try impossible things.
The solution to the fact that marriage is a totally unnatural and hard life experience, is not to refrain from it. This is one thing, among others, that conservatives have gotten right. Even if you’re polygamous, marriage is a good idea, even if fictive because of law constraints. The making of families, gay families, straight families, poly families, S&M families whatever floats your boat, is a wise move, it creates social foundation and social foundation is what holds the thing we call world standing.
The solution to the fact that marriage is a totally unnatural and hard life experience is to embrace the potential failure of it.
“Maybe you’ll divorce at 40, maybe you’ll dance the funky chicken on your 75th wedding anniversary”.
Who cares?
The opposite of freedom is boredom
Freedom is the most important thing for an aware and intelligent creature. For an aware and intelligent creature freedom is more important than being alive.
Freedom is a sentiment. Freedom is not a state.
Because freedom is not a state, you cannot “bring freedom” anywhere, it is either felt or it isn’t at all. Because it is a sentiment, it’s close to impossible to have a general recipe for freedom and one can be free in a cell, while another is not free in a paradisiac landscape.
The opposite of freedom is not captivity, which is a state, nor oppression, which is an action.
The opposite of freedom is boredom, another sentiment.
Boredom is the sentiment signalling your lack of freedom.
People get bored wildly different. Some people get bored in five minutes, some people get bored once a year, some people get bored at forty, for about three months.
We’re optimising for routine, because we consider freedom to be a state. And states need stability. Yet we’re wrong, dead wrong.
Sentiments need change to be experienced, which is why routine results in lack of freedom.
The world stands on huge routines, it is mostly a place of repetition, endurance as virtue. If you can do the same thing over and over again for as long as possible the rewards sometimes crawl beyond expectations.
But this is wrong, because it is boring, wich means we’re trapped.
Love is sold cheap so you buy into slavery
I have some beef with this easy love thing.
Why are there all these kinds of “loves” available to buy? They’re all on display and you must choose and consume each one of them, and, worse, opine on each.
First, love is cheapened by consumerism.
Don’t you just love beards? Don’t you just love black bezel glasses? Don’t you just love roses? Don’t you just love ice cream? Don’t you just love my Instagram?
Second, love is cheapened by sexual fidelity.
Sexual fidelity is completely its own thing. Sexual fidelity is not a given. People forget to celebrate the fidelity of their significant other as if love is a chastity belt. It isn’t. Fidelity is an effort that ought to be appreciated.
Third, love is cheapened by the institution of marriage.
The evolution of heterosexual relationships towards asexuality is defining the reason gay marriage is morally fine.
Fourth, love is cheapened by exaggeration.
For a long time, I used to think that being content is synonym with giving up. But in time I realized that contentment is the launchpad of happiness.
Can you launch a rocket from a forest? No. You need a plain field to fire up the boosters and not destroy everything around in a wildfire. That’s contentment: the plain field.
But contentment also has the power to ignite love. And that’s why people find it so hard, so late, so many bruises later, because everyone is stumbling and rushing to “find” love in the forest of life events, when in fact there is nothing to be found.
Nothing. Love is ignition. Which brings me to fifth.
Fifth: love is cheapened by complication.
Compound basic attractions evolve into love. Just like you.
You are, after all, the result of compounding small interractions. From protein to love story, what an architecture!
All in all a basic advice for life seems legit: just go along and don’t ever, ever, loose yourself. That’s about it.
And remember:
Your choices are half chance. So are everybody else’s.
So I wanted to comment on the highlight above, but then this comment thing got my attention:
There is also no evolutionary purpose to the in love feeling lasting longer than it takes to produce offspring, Sara Lynn Michener said in her article.
And raise them, and provide for them, and protect them. There is an evolutionary reason, thnidu appropiated swiftly the idea of Sara’s love
Pretty sure that comes from the “nurture” side of things rather than nature, and sociology statistics back me up on that. But the nature/nurture argument is obviously a bigger debate 😉 Sara Lynn Michener replied
Here is the thing, if there are any aliens in space and they also have brains and conscious phenomenons like we do in those brains, I bet there is a nature versus nurture debate on other planets as we speak.
Maybe their subjects are different: do we love to invade less evolved civilizations because it is in our nature or because we’ve been nurtured into it, might such an alien astronomer wonder, while gazing at the star map showing the bounds of their galactic empire. But the theme is the same if they are self reflective creatures like us, also known as beings.
Unlike creatures, beings have a very weird geography of knowledge, like: mountains of misunderstandings, valleys of ignorance, plateaus of facts, rivers of ideas, seas of wonder and canyons of identity.
Canyons of identity are the saddest and, at the same time, magnificent part of a being’s geography of knowledge.
The recursiveness inside our heads makes us have ourselves perceiving ourselves, this creating the ego. We have one personality. The personality is real. There are two mirror reflections of our personality one inside, the ego and the other outside, the identity.
Identity is the internal representation of an external personality. Thus, the others create one’s identity and the experiences create one’s personality. Hence the conflict: socially you are what other people make of your personality, aka your experience, while they have had none of your experience. You’re defined by noobs. [Evolving, god! I am citing myself, the shame]
A canyon is the erosive effect rivers have on rock during huge periods of time.
A time limited being, such as a human, does not have huge periods of time as a direct experience, but we get them as an indirect experience from society through education and entertainment. So we feel as if we’ve been here forever. Sadly we also feel like we will be here forever. It is often perceived as if we’d be moved back one thousand years ago we’d feel weird but quickly we’ll be like home, especially if one likes to read up on history. It is a continuity sensation that ties our small flicker in the universe’s timeline with the past we never lived and the future we’ll never live.
At the same time we are idea factories. Our brains make all these ideas, that all flow together, like rivers do, into our seas of wonder. The more ideas we make, the more fresh water our wonder will get. But because of the continuity our social behavior creates, we get connected to rivers of ideas that belong to our entire species’s history: humanity! We inherit this geography of humanity’s entire knowledge from the human peers that groom us for the life among the living
Some rivers of ideas are so old, much older than one human will ever be, they dug huge canyons in the plateaus of facts and in the the mountains of misunderstandings. Some of these canyons are dry, no ideas flow through them for centuries but they still are deep cracks in the way we see the facts and connect the misunderstandings.
The there is one such canyon that is so deep and so long it basically allows one to live off intellectual tourism to it: the nature versus nurture debate. It was once a river of ideas, fast and swift in its flow, with frothy little cascades here and there, ever since we’ve moved our eyes towards the heavens at night and wondered what does that twinkling light could be, or that blue gem sitting proudly next to the shiny circle that kept us safe at night. So we began to create culture, because that is what we do when take sail on our inner seas of wonder.
In essence, what we call nurture is our mirrored selves, our mirrored creation, the effort we make to rise as high as required to be the giants our future generations will stay on. What we call nurture is the collective reliance on our ancestor’s best guess, which we call wisdom, but which is seldom so. Nurture is the the screen saver that shows up in our minds where we’re not working on it consciously. Alas, we can only think about nurture like this, just like I am doing here, writing this.
But we feel nurture differently.
We feel as if it is our creation, our brainchild, the thing which we “teach” others to be, or the thing they are “taught” to be by their experience. We separate it and cherish it so dearly. But this separation is false.
Nurture is a mere side effect of nature.
Nature is the all encompassing circle of effects of existing as a living aware being, including nurture. You cannot have a score board between the two, because nurture is nature, just retrofitted with the models our brains require to predict what’s next. Nurture is nature with bells and whistles. We sure like bells and whistles. But take them out and nurture is just plain old nature.
See the paragraphs of words above all written as metaphors? As you see you need not talent to make metaphors, we all do it.
Metaphors are the maps we use to navigate the geography of our knowledge.
Bam, another one. If you liked any you’ve been exposed to nurture.
Everything is natural, including things we don’t like. This is the reason that the single valid moral argument is the golden rule. Everything else is debatable, specifically because everything is natural. Once we acknowledge nurture as a simple side effect of nature at work, we’ll stop taking refuge in arbitrary moral rules to selectively approve worthy humans that are having experiences we know nothing about.
It is natural to raise a child to be adapted to the society they enter into, the act is natural and the result is natural. It is natural for social beings to groom others for stability, it is natural to behave according to your models about your experience (which include sexuality, the big bugaboo) and some of all the natural effects of your existing and of the other’s existing intertwine in a common timeline, which help us thrive as long as we don’t fill up the atmosphere with too much crap, or kill off all the bees who have no way to moralize us and ask if our ruthless expansion of habitat is nature or nurture ….
At this point I feel like Fabiana Cecin said some place, pouring ideas out like notes to self. Yet, I couldn’t skip again laying out my dislike for this concept that is so common and dry: nature versus nurture.
So, back to the main theme.
Now, my question was: isn’t polygamy about monogamy, relationship exclusivity, and polyamory about sexual exclusivity? I mean all this mixup is confusing. You can be monogamous and polyamorous at the same time. You can be ploygamous and you’ll NOT be ployamorous by default, ask Suleiman the Magnificent who despite a great opportunity at polyamory chose monoamory 🙂 Is monoamory a thing?
If you are that person, who has ended a long-term relationship over not feeling the magic, then you owe it to yourself and others to become a polyamorist.
This should be the most highlighted sentence,
A
P.S. For the folk to read this and have an ad literam background process that skews their metaphor perception so that all roads lead to Rome:
I used the word “our” about 21 times in this and yet I don’t mean to generalize but to involve the reader in my worldview
I don’t endorse generalizations and labeling, but we must trust and / or train our (22) billions of neurons to discern when that happens
Lovers are those two providential meetings between two musicians who have a blast. I remember one of our local greatest artists, Gyuri Pascu, was once telling a story how once he had a jam with a female singer, and they sang so well, eye to eye contact, perfect pitch, unison chorus, that he realized that cheating on his wife was nothing compared to what he experienced without any kind of touch or even conversation involved.
You suddenly get in a serendipitous sync with someone, maybe you both play the same instruments, maybe you are the voice and they are the bass, or you are the cello and they are the piano, you get the idea. The tunes you sing now will stay with you for your entire life, even if you leave, even if you split badly, even if they make you feel like trash, because, be warned, love is not reciprocal by default, and some folks know all the strings and sing all the songs and we’re deluded to think they sing with us or for us.
Relationships are a jazz band. Now it is all improvisation, so a good jazz band. Late night jams with booze and smokes. That is where the perfect time for honesty arrives. Do you secretly want to try polyamory, talk about it. Do you want some specific sexual experiences, talk about it. Do you want a lifetime of travel and leisure? Do you want kids, take a pet as a couple. In the relationship stage we are open to these things, open to improvisation which is creating novelty as we go, because we feel safe in our still existing independence.
Sure, this doesn’t mean that after marriage you can’t or shouldn’t do these things or that you cannot marry and preserve your independence, but it is childish to not reckon the increased difficulty and slimming resources which the activity of planning a single life together will bring on board.
When you marry you are an orchestra. No more improv, you will assume the hard work of playing a score written by someone else, someone you’ve never met. You are both the orchestra and the conductor. The instruments are all the aspects of life that suddenly must keep the tempo, be in tune, miss no note and know exactly when to start and when to stop playing. All your hopes and dreams are the conductor.
The first thing you’ll notice is that some scores get you raving reviews, other scores get you tomatoes. Some conductors suck as people but they make the orchestra be out of this world good. Some conductors are mediocre and some are having good and bad seasons. But the force of the conductor in the marriage symphony is not external, it is in your both’s hopes and dreams.
That is why exploration inside marriage is so hard. Because you need a conductor (common hopes and dreams) who wants to work on new and experimental stuff. Sometimes you make a bric-a-brac of some special hopes and dreams and get a conductor that sees how most of the classic masterpieces have been done over and over by others, done exquisitely well sometimes, before you, and now the standards are so damn high that it accepts the experimental method.
Married with children is like being managed by the NASA control center. Once you have children you are guided by people you don’t see in a pitch black space where any mistake leads to a horror movie level implosion. Causality in space is very hard to manage because you depend on a plethora of information coming from the control center on Earth. The mission is the child or children and it happens very often, as you see the Earth spinning below you, that you realize you have no idea what you’re doing, and wonder with deep puzzlement why did you think this was a good idea in the first place. But you are the heroes of humanity after all, aren’t you?
Now, instead of an ending, a bit of algorithmic. Music is a lot about order. Read the following keeping in mind that man and woman, can also mean male and male, female and female, because gender is a social convention, which means man and woman is a metaphor for a couple. Here it goes:
When you are lovers you are first man and woman, and second humans. In a relationship you are first humans, and second man and woman. When you are married you are first humans, second lovers, third man and woman. When you are married with children, you are first parents, then human, then man and woman, then lovers.
We badly mix the order of these states. We also try to mess with their order because we feel like we want back to the original state: first man and woman, and second humans. But just as you will never feel as comfortable as in the womb of your mother, just as so you cannot go back to the primordial good and safe place we’re mesmerized by. There is nothing wrong with how things fall in their place as the adventure of a couple progresses, we’re just fighting them or not paying attention.
There are enough hours in one day to be anything, so want everything!
The thing is love does not solve problems. Love makes life worth living, that’s it. Love doesn’t solve anything. Being in love, feeling love towards something, for something or someone, is not an indicator of compatibility.
Love does not solve relationships. As thick as it may sound, relationships have nothing to do with love and it is often that they are hurt by love, more than they are helped.
This is not a popular view. The unattractiveness of this idea is because love confers meaning to life itself. Then there is yet another, more deeply rooted, belief that meaning will solve problems. Of course, it doesn’t. Meaning by the way, creates more problems. Just ask any committed person about the sacrifices they made. Ask any artist about how their emotional life is. Committed people and artists are some of the most meaningful people and yet this doesn’t fix anything for them. On the contrary, it is a constant struggle to keep the meaning afloat in the ocean of meaninglessness.
People use to say: if you love me you wouldn’t do this this for/with/to me. People also use to say: if you love me you should do this for/with/to me. Some people even say: if you love me you will do this this for/with/to me.
And this is where it gets complicated: we do everything. We can do anything. But relationships are not about what we do but about how we act.
How we act in a relationship matters more than what we do. The acting part is that “for/with/to me” part. You can do anything. But you will act a certain way when you do it for someone, or with someone or to someone. And “the way we act” is a nice popular way to talk about: behaviors.
Strong relationships have compatible behaviors. Compatible feelings do not help the relationship, they just start it.
Behaviors are very complex. They are hard to discover in the first place. They are embedded in our personality and they always, always show up uninvited. Then they cover multiple areas at once. A behavior that breaks everything at work, is great at home. A behavior that solves your sexuality wreaks havoc emotionally. While being good somewhere and bad somewhere else, behaviors must be active in both places to work. You cannot deactivate behavior by just deciding if it applies.
Behaviors are very complicated. They stem from early childhood. They are interconnected and intertwined. Most of the times they inherit from other behaviors, and the root ones are heavily influenced by parents and extended family. Behaviors sometimes grow branches and become impossible to remove because you cannot devise a smart enough incision into your personality.
Love is patient, you are anxious because life is short. Love is kind, you are mean because you are defensive. Love isn’t jealous, it doesn’t brag, it isn’t arrogant, it isn’t rude. But you will be, no matter how hard you try. Jealous because you are insecure. Bragging because you don’t know who you are. Arrogant because you think you know who you are and rude because you do know who you are. Love doesn’t seek its own advantage, you do because you have a subconscious plotting its own life. Love isn’t irritable, but you are throwing tantrums when the world doesn’t stop for you. Love doesn’t keep a record of complaints. Oh, but how accurate you are, wishing inside to never hear the things you can’t unhear. Love isn’t happy with injustice, but it is happy with the truth. You are the one who can’t handle the truth and who’d do anything to sweeten the justice. Love puts up with all things, trusts in all things, hopes for all things, endures all things. But you put up with some things, for a while. You hope for whatever will prove you right. You endure what you can’t avoid and resent every second of it.
Love never fails. You will fail because you are not love, but a mere human trying to cope.
Coping is the basic behavior and it is formed when you are a bundle of joy horrified of starving to death. All the ways in which you’ll act exactly not like love, will be the slow, certain death of your relationship. 1 Corinthians 13:4–8 describes this dreaded path in its purest form. Love is this bully that snaps you from the strings inside you never knew you had and puppets you into being everything you’re not.
Keeping the relationship of your life is a far greater achievement than finding the love of your life. But love makes life worth living. There’s our riddle.
