To Have Loved and Lost:
"It is better", a widely accepted dictum claims, "to have loved and lost than to never have loved at all". Maybe. But when the dust settles nothing is ever too clear about love. Perhaps it should read: "It is better to have been loved than never to have been loved at all". That rephrased dictum is hard to refute in any any aspect of it's implications.
Love is one of those terms which is hard to define but we all know it when we feel it. I don't know how much love drives most human mating. For the most part few are able to really select the 'love' of their life. When young people date or socialize or dance etc. it is quite a complicated process. First you have to painfully sort out where you stand in the attractiveness scale. The imperfectly contoured are not really free to approach the more perfectly contoured for dancing, dates, or any other kind of social adventures. Lot of daydreaming during youth. For all practical purposes, with precious few exceptions, one really figures out how far above your own attractiveness level you can possibly reach, or how far down from your own attractiveness level you are willing to fall. Then you have to add personality factors. In the end, whatever works, works---at least for a while. I personally find it hard to comprehend how most people tangled up in life together can genuinely be in love, as least as we learn love from movies. Something else seems to keep them together, maybe a fear or realization that left in the open market they might do worse or come up empty handed. This co-habituation of humans is probably the most complicated and least logical of human endeavors. This does not demote its importance.
Organized religion doesn't help much. One more damn mitigating factor. Of course "what God has joined together let no man put asunder". Please, spare such nonsense. If God were really joining couples together there would be no divorces. I mean, we all see the rampant absurdities in who marries who and this is God's doing? This image of God pairing up couples and then deciding which sperm fertilizes which egg and personally bringing to term each of us via His will is really a remarkable self deluding self centered belief. Nothing about the little we understand about God's evolutionary process leads us to remotely believe God is meddling much on any individual basis with His laws of evolution. I have no idea upon what basis we can conclude we are even favored over any other species let alone be favored on any personal basis, one person over another. Still, having said this, I know we need believe in something or we might go crazy. If no one else really loves or understands us at various moments in our lives, at least God does. I accept this as an obligatory crutch. Like who amongst us, in one form or another, doesn't have mental 'conversations' with God? At least, many believe, if God doesn't communicate with us, He certainly does with the Pope or a minister or an Ayatollah, or a Rabbi, or Billy Graham, or Mother Teresa, or whoever wrote the Bible we accept as the Word of God. It is less clear why God would permit a legitimate Bible to contain elements of absurdities and moral deviations from the Golden Rule. Like so many other aspects of life, we believe what we want to believe in any Bible, and ignore what seems an ill-fit to our own notions. Sometimes when I struggle to comprehend God, in the end I believe I need to take a nap. Others I guess feel a need to join a crusade to persecute heathens---God's will must be done. You know, I kind of feel God's will has been and will be done and I don't think He depends on me to in any way control His own laws of evolution. I really would like to be more important in the total scheme of things, at least understand things more clearly, but settle in the end for just playing the cards dealt to me as best I can. In the end, AMEN.
But back to love. As powerful as love is, the consequences often are disastrous in one way or another. Love, more often than not, ends---either with developed---even if tolerated---incompatibility, or death of a partner, or forced social separation. Either way your sense of well being and your emotional state are hacked away until parts of both are irreparably gone. Gone with the wind. The sad truth is that in some cases a love would have been better to have never happened. The consequences can often be catastrophic to your future capacity to love or trust or forgive whoever is perceived to have caused the bubble of love to burst. The scars from failed or denied love can go deep. Few people in life seem more emotionally deranged than products of a bitter divorce. And the more bitter they are the more other people avoid them.
If religion is a mitigating factor in love, then sex is the loose cannon. All this noisy intrusive turmoil about gay and straight love/sex is really some kind of lunacy contest. Sex is not exactly a logical reasoned judgmatic activity in humans controlled exclusively by hormones as in most other animals. I doubt it is even possible to have any intellectual conversation about most any sex acts except the act required for reproduction, and that kind of conversation is hardly titillating. If people don't talk much about their sex lives to others it is for good reason. They don't want to sound like fools. What is a turn-on for some is a turn-off for others. If someone has a foot fetish it just is, and if they find feet sexy I guess the matter is closed. And despite hysterical claims that some forms of sex between consenting adults, or who loves who destroys their own marriage or situation in life, it just doesn't seem anyone's marriage breaks up because of the nature of someone else's marriage. That is pretty farfetched. If anyone is going to lose sleep over love and sex it probably need be restricted to their own love and sex life. I know, God is supposedly angry and furious about certain kinds of sex acts or love mates existing as part of human nature. I presume, by definition of God, God could put an end to just about anything regarding His evolutionary process if He so desires. To insist God depends on me or others to effectuate his own wishes is really preposterous. Whenever anyone claims they are doing God's will I immediately become suspicious. More likely their own preference in the matter is now energetically camouflaged as God's will. In all of history there have been endless 'witch burnings' in one sense or another ad nausea. Every culture creates it's own witches. Man's inhumanity to man is probably more common than any humane treatment amongst diverse humans. The same people who truly choke up about unfortunate breaks in life for themselves, their own family, their own country, their own ethnic group, etc. are often the same ones most determined to punish any diversity from their own personal beliefs. Of course there are so many believers with so many differing inherited beliefs, all with God on their side, that it becomes some sort of Laurel and Hardy show without the humor. OR, maybe this just proves God has a sense of humor and we all are Laurel and Hardy.
The relationship between love and sex is simply too unpredictable and labyrinthian-ally gnarled for any measurable correlation. Clearly one can love without sex involved at all---like love for your parents, or friends, or pets, or God, etc. Probably many marriages last because of love and despite sex. I am less sure about the other way around. Based on decades of casual observation I sense many marriages last without either love or satisfactory sex. Frankly I don't know why the State gets involved in what constitutes a marriage at all. If two people of age want to live together and call themselves married, that ought to be the end of it---let it be so. The government could just charge for the marriage license and be done with it. The 'lovey duckies' are making their own bed and ought to be the ones to lie in it. When younger I knew what constituted a good marriage. With time, I no longer have the vaguest idea. I watch a good many married couples and feel lucky to be single. I watch a good many married couples and feel most unlucky to be single. All this watching doesn't seem to bring much enlightenment about marriage. Some of the strangest matches last forever, some of the seemingly best matches end abruptly.
Like most people I don't really like to talk about my own experiences with love. If there is any topic which no one will understand except yourself it is your own experiences with love. Even a simple 'love affair' with a pet is a matter between you and your pet. Try showing up at a gathering and blah blah about how much you miss your pet and all the reasons you miss the pet---blah, blah, blah and see how fast people disperse to the other end of the room. A dead parent or spouse and the dispersal will be respectfully slower. Talking about a former love affair which painfully ended will generate an almost angry dispersal to the other end of the room. The more painful the separation, or the most unjust circumstances which forced the separation, the less anyone wants to hear about it. Some things in life you need shoulder alone, try to keep things in perspective, attribute any injustice to the imperfection of human nature, and play the cards left in your hand as best you can. The worst, of course, is when the lost love affair is your own inability to do the right thing for the object of your affection. You know where the blame lies and you, whether you like it or not, will pay the price and be haunted with all the what if, could have, should have, would have, etc. Some mistakes you pay for---for the rest of your life---and you accept the price to pay as a permanent part of your life.
To have loved and lost is the risk of having dared to love. In the end, if honesty rules the day, most all of us are more like Terrell Owens---he is up front about it---he loves himself. Someone once claimed masturbation is nothing more than having sex with someone you love. Ok, this discourse was bound to deteriorate given the topic. Say goodnight now to ____________(your own choice) wherever he/she is.
