Tag: FreeThinking

mld, August 11, 2000 at 5:50:00 PM CEST

Part VI - The Lover's Cross

This is from an email to a former love - I called her Sirena. Her words are maroon, mine in green. I want to say that although my experience has been limited (this you know) I am good friends with many people that have “open marriages”, and frankly, the man often seems much happier about it than the woman does.

Men are by nature more promiscuous, but I believe this is largely because of cultural conditioning and biology. In many primitive cultures, the women are as rarin' to go as the men.

Furthermore, in situations where the arrangement is common knowledge, the women get negative feedback from their more conventional peers, while men get, “Whoah, dude, how'dya pull that shit off?” Social pressure is the most difficult aspect of it all.

The last sentence says it all.

I have always wanted to believe that I will be so important to one special man that he will have very little desire to be with another woman, especially if he is well satisfied with me. I'll certainly enjoy your efforts, but you're pushing a boulder up a hill natural selection has been piling sand upon for about three or four million years. We horny men stickin' it in anything that would hold still (Hey, a joke, I'm not near that indiscriminate) outbred all those well behaved mates that kept it at home.

It's an instinctual desire hard-wired into the little reptile part of our brains just as closely as fear of heights and the “fight-or-flight” adrenaline response.

Any man who tells you otherwise is either lying through his teeth, or one of those few individuals that can be considered “asexual” due to some hormonal or mental abnormality.

Let me explain. The capacity for love in the human heart is not a finite quantity. We are all capable of loving as many people that we find lovable.

I don't think when my brother, her number two child, was born, my mother all of the sudden loved me, her number one, half as much.

However much love I could ever grow for you is not affected by how much I like or love someone else. So if I can grow to love you 768 units of love (we'll call 'em “amors”) the 768 units it is.

And if I loved Dale (my ex) 568, or 968 amors, then that's how it was, and you didn't have a thing to do with it. If I love my daughter a googol amors, then you didn't have a thing to do with that either.

OK, Sirena, there are things I find lovable about you. You, I'm sure, would love a detailed list of exactly what they are, but I don't have time to write a book right now, as you are eagerly awaiting this reply.

So I'll just mention a few of the most crass and obvious ones:

You're beautiful. You're artistic. You're intelligent.

Now, you don't a monopoly on those qualities I find adorable in you.

There are prettier girls, smarter girls, more creative girls.

The odds of finding a girl like that with just those three qualities in a greater quantity or quality wouldn't be impossible, albeit difficult.

Then there are the things I don't find attractive about you:

You live far away from me. You have baggage. You can't find your pictures. :-)

Conversely, there girls who live farther away, have more baggage, and lose their pictures longer.

Those are just some of the thousands of different qualities that you have, in greater or lesser degrees, all mixed up like a smoothie, that make you a unique, never to be replicated again in the history of the universe, individual.

The odds of finding a woman just like you, but even more so in the ways I find attractive, and less so in the ways I don't, are vanishingly small, but there might be a half dozen women on the planet that qualify.

Now, suppose I met one of those girls, we'll call them Super-Xelas.

She has just ten percent more of the qualities I love about you, and ten percent less of those I don't. She's you for dog's sake, just a little bit more the you I love than even you are.

If I am truly attracted to, and love, you, how on Earth could I not be attracted to, and love, her also?

Similarly, let's suppose I'm hiding a terrible secret from you.

Did you know I have a twin brother?

He's Super-Marcus.

He's just like me, but a little taller, a bit more handsome, a little bit more witty, intelligent, funny and romantic.

IF you love me for having the characteristics I have, for being the unique person I am, how could you truthfully say that you don't/couldn't love him, too?

Just because you saw me first? Be real.

You couldn't love me without loving him also.

Love is not a dichotomy, a yes/no switch.

It's a spectrum. I find lovable qualities, and some level of attraction, in nearly any woman I meet.

This fiction that we have in our culture that there is One True Love out there for each of us, and only one, is positively ridiculous, and by the way, traceable back to one of my very unfavorite Greeks, Plato, but I'll leave that digression to another time.

There are hundreds, if not thousands, of suitable lifemates out there for either of us, partners with whom we could be very happy.

So, we travel through life, meeting these people.

We decide how lovable we find them; how well they fit into that template each of us carries about in our head of our ideal mate.

Anyone much past their teens will realize that this idealized person does not exist (Sorry, Plato) and that we have to compromise.

Furthermore, each person we date or come to love helps us along the voyage of self-discovery to refine our ideas of that perfect mate, and that ideal we seek becomes a moving target as we grow more aware of ourselves, or as the circumstances of our lives change.

At some point in life, most people meet that “special” someone. They decide that this certain person is as close as they are likely to get to their ideal mate, and will propose a life-long companionship.

Where I think we run into problems is when we choose a partner, enter into a relationship, then, sometime later, run into a person we find attractive, on a level ranging from romp in the hay, to good friends, “bed-buddies,” I think you call them, to someone that you would like to love on a long-term basis.

That's where our cruel cultural conditioning kicks in. We drink it in with mothers milk. We grow up immersed in this impossible fantasy of Romantic Love. Hollywood and the other media are as at fault as religion in this area.

We are taught to see the attraction for the other person as an indication that there is something wrong with our present relationship.

We are taught to feel guilty over the attraction.

We come to resent our partner for keeping us from responding to the attraction.

We lie about it, in the very least in the sense of not discussing it with our mate. We don't want to hurt their feelings.

So we suppress it.

We writhe in pain, nailed to the Lover's Cross.

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mld, August 11, 2000 at 5:43:00 PM CEST

V - Who's Your Daddy?

“The lack of emotional security of our American young people is due, I believe, to their isolation from the larger family unit. No two people—no mere father and mother—as I have often said, are enough to provide emotional security for a child. He needs to feel himself one in a world of kinfolk, persons of variety in age and temperament, and yet allied to himself by an indissoluble bond which he cannot break if he could, for nature has welded him into it before he was born.”

—Pearl Buck

I grew up in a sea of aunts and uncles and cousins and grandmas and they were my playmates and baby-sitters and role models and disciplinarians and teachers.

Precocious as I was, I was always, as a young boy, running up to the tallest human around, book in hand, asking, “What's this word, Uncle Mike?”

Ever wondered why black people to this very day tend to refer to other blacks as “Cuz,” or to my “Auntee,” or “Uncle?”

In the pre Civil War South, when slave families were commonly torn apart by death and separation, black children were taught to address all of their elders in this manner, so that when/if Mom was sold off, the older adults present would feel some sort of kinship to the manufactured orphan, and adopt them into their family.

(To be fair, it wasn't much better for Southern whites at the time either, so they did he same thing. The average marriage lasted, you guessed it, seven years, and the odds of a child growing to adulthood with both his birth parents were abysmally low.)

But I digress, as I am wont to do.

As the economies of the West have morphed from agriculturally based through the Industrial Revolution to the Information Age, families have morphed from extended to nuclear to subatomic.

The safety net of economic security for the family is gravitating toward the state, and emotional security is largely just being ignored.

I decided that there was no more obvious case of a totally dysfunctional human institution than that of lifetime monogamous marriage.

Of course we don't really have that now, though we all pay lip service to it.

We Have To.

Everybody Else Does.

What we in fact have in our culture today is serial polygamy, multiple spouses in succession.

In this way, we can all pay homage to the whitened sepulcher of True Romantic Love.

This has horrific consequences for the welfare of the children of the marriage.

To summarize, since about the age of eighteen, I have not believed that our Western Judeo-Christian concepts of marriage and monogamy, as defined by having sex with only one partner your entire life, are conducive to either happiness, or mental health, or for the best interests of the offspring of the relationship.

So, I resolved that I would live my life ethically, but healthily, and ruled by my own notion of ethics, as opposed to the dictates of those ideas in our culture that are clearly at odds with human nature.

I've never since my early twenties, ever seriously dated a girl without discussing this at length. If they had a problem with it, well, oh well, not the girl for me.

Of course, as it turns out, this is much easier said than done.

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mld, August 11, 2000 at 5:37:00 PM CEST

IV - The Deed of Darkness

Of course, I continued to read. And search. And wonder. WTF? WTF? What are you going to do with your life? What's worthy?

Sometime during this period, puberty finally kicked in, the testosterone started pumping, and I discovered this new animal roaring in my BVD's.

I had grown up learning about sex from a very early age, courtesy of the encyclopedias I'd read. I knew all about what went where and why long before I was old enough to do much about it.

I had my first sexual experience.

I recall thinking how much more fun it would have been if someone else had been there. :-)

I remember my smartass reply to my dad when he clumsily broached the subject. He told me he wanted to talk with me about the birds and the bees.

“Sure, Dad, whattya wanna know?”

This to the father of six.

He popped me one. End of discussion.

But now my dry academic knowledge became, shall we say, an order of magnitude more urgent. I needed to look into this sex thing.

While I found a lot of hypocrisy, weak theology, muddled thinking and outright lies, nowhere did I find the teaching and doctrines of the organized Xian religions more screwed up than in their attitudes toward the Deed of Darkness.

They contradicted everything scientists, biologists, or anybody with an objective view had to say.

The Church preached that masturbation was bad, psychologists said it was healthy.

Preachers said homosexuality was a sin, biologists reported that same sex behavior is observable in nearly all species from insects on up, and seems to be due to random genetic mix-ups.

Gee, do beetles have Original Sin, too?

The Scientists had Proof. The Church had Faith. I knew who I was betting on.

I read the Kinsey report, Masters and Johnson, and all of the other sex surveys I could find.

I read about the rates of divorce, of adultery, of all the, “deviant,” behaviors. I read everything I could get my sneaky little hands on, and I knew the library pretty well, as you might guess, and I babysat for the neighbors, who always left a copy of Everything You Wanted To Know About Sex, But Were Afraid To Ask on their coffee table.

I decided that there is no area in which our society is more neurotic than that of sex. This neurosis manifests itself quite openly.

This is where I need another 10 pages on idiotic nudity taboos, sexual violence, prostitution, censorship, yadda-yadda, but breathe easy, folks, I'm not gonna go there …

I was maybe fourteen.

(A funny aside here. I knew what and where a clitoris was, what it looked like, on paper, anyway and what you were supposed to do with it, when I was about nine or ten. But I didn't know how to pronounce it! It was years before I ever got the nerve to ask. Why I didn't look in the dictionary, I'll never know.)

I finally got to use my booklearnin' at about age sixteen, when I finally stumbled across, (in drama class, funnily enough) an older girl who took enough of a liking to a bookish little runt from the boy's school next door to hers to let him get some real life experience.

I dated her for awhile, and then through the rest of high school had several more relationships, all of them pretty pleasant.

My book learnin' was serving me pretty well, as I've been told since most adolescent males don't really have any idea what the hell they're doing.

I went to college, finally got a growth spurt, started pumping iron, and filled out. I was pretty cute in them days. I could make 'em laugh, and that's halfway to their bedroom.

So, while all this philosophical disquiet simmered on the back burner, I stayed pretty busy chasing that bird dog whenever he started barkin'. :-)

But not so much that I stopped reading.

This being the 60's and 70's, the Hippies were revolting, preaching free love, "Open Marriage" was a best seller, and several outspoken primatologists were discovering and reporting that our closest genetic relatives, the bonobos, are very promiscuous indeed, and based on common physical traits, a substantial degree of promiscuity would be predicted in humans.

More grist for the mill.

In high school and college literature courses, I learned how the notion of lifelong romantic attachment was a modern invention. It's a derivative of the concept of courtly love, pretty much a fiction of some sixteenth century Italian poets, popularized during the Renaissance by authors such as Shakespeare.

I learned that throughout most of history, marriages were arranged, for economic reasons, and the idea of actually being in love with your husband or wife was pretty unknown. It is surprising to many people that have not studied the issues to note this: today, the rate of successful marriages, in the cultures where arranged marriages are still common, is about the same as when couples choose their own mates.

Well over fifty percent of all marriages fail. We would not tolerate such an abysmal rate in nearly any other human institution, yet we are so conditioned not to recognize the truth that few see it, and even fewer are brave enough to speak out and say that the emperor has no clothes.

Amazingly enough, people still seem to assume that when a realtionship dies, it is somehow due to the nature of those in the realtionship, and not the nature of the institution.

I read of alternatives to the nuclear family, of new (well, not new, rediscovered) types of marriage; polygamy, polyandry, communal marriages, line marriages, open marriages. All of them seemed to have both strengths and weaknesses, but most of them seemed to be clearly better alternatives to the high divorce rate, broken homes, single parent households, and all of the other difficulties that our present system breeds.

Even at that age, I knew that what my parents have was very rare, and bound to be even more so, as more women began to work outside of the home, thus giving them the economic freedom to live independently.

This is the dirty little secret that no one, (or few, to be fair) wants to shout. The traditional marriage was economic subjugation of the female, and women have long been forced to remain in unhappy marriages or starve.

But this economic liberation is not without it's drawbacks.

Now they get only a slightly less palatable option, work and pay a minimum-wage stranger to be the mommy, the Child Care Solution. Or course since Everybody Does It, it Has To Be Good.

Don't even get me started, it drives me into a Fucking Rage every time I think about it. Kids need a parent at home until at least he age of six, and no, I don't give a cat's ass which one it is.

I also knew from my childhood how happy and secure it was to live in a large extended family.

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