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From: wfi@rti-sel.UUCP (William Ingogly)
Newsgroups: net.singles
Subject: Re: Nominally single????
Message-ID: <437@rti-sel.UUCP>
Date: Thu, 3-Oct-85 14:46:04 EDT
Article-I.D.: rti-sel.437
Posted: Thu Oct  3 14:46:04 1985
Date-Received: Sat, 5-Oct-85 14:53:57 EDT
References: <285@whuts.UUCP> <533@oakhill.UUCP> <286@whuts.UUCP>
Reply-To: wfi@rti-sel.UUCP (William Ingogly)
Distribution: net
Organization: Research Triangle Institute, NC
Lines: 132

In article <3072@ut-sally.UUCP> pooh@sally.UUCP writes:

>>No one is ready for a sustained and giving relationship with another
>>person until he is happy with his own life and likes and respects
>>himself as a person. 
>
>Or in other words, you're not ready to live with anyone
>else until you've lived alone enough.  
>
>Wait a minute. . .that doesn't sound right.  How do you
>learn to live with someone except by doing it?  ...

Nope. You're misinterpreting what I'm saying. Many people feel they
can't live by themselves because they're insecure or immature. Or
because they feel that life without an SO is less than satisfying.
These people approach potential relationships with a lot of fantasies
built up in their heads that a new relationship will somehow make
their life better. A relationship based on fantasy will sooner or
later come to a bad end. My claim is that a person who is happy with
his own life is secure and mature, and will approach relationships
with realistic expectations.
 
>>many live dissatisfied after the
>>initial sexual glow wears off; many more flit from relationship to
>>relationship searching for a One True Love that is a grand lie foisted
>>on us by a thousand-year-old European romantic tradition and mass
>>media ...The relationships that last are the result of plain old hard 
>>work and dedication, folks, with a small element of luck thrown in. 
>>There's nothing magical about sex OR love. 
>
>Yow!  can you say "cynicism"?  
>I'm sorry if you are as disillusioned as you appear,
>Bill, because I can still find some magic out there
>in places.  It's not something that you can depend on;
>it's fleeting, like a butterfly.  But you can still
>find it.

Cynicism? I don't think so. What seems like cynicism to you seems like
realism from my side of the fence.

Note that 'disillusioned' literally means free from illusion or false 
ideas. It's precisely our American illusions about the nature of love
that I believe have led to the brief lifespan of so many relationships
in our society. I wasn't denying that falling in love can be an
overwhelming experience, and one of the most delightful sensations in
life. But True Love has become a fetish in our society, and the
'magic' I was criticising is the false magic of the fetish. Hasn't anyone
ever said to you when you've come off a failed relationship that it
wasn't really TRUE Love, and that you'd KNOW True Love when it came
along?

The myth is this: There is a small number of people out there for each
of us (and perhaps only one) whose natures are so sympatico with ours
that meeting one of them is like having an electric shock of recognition 
run through your frame as you realize: This Is The One I will spend all 
my days with. Many people, doomed never to meet their Perfect Mates,
settle for less. The implication is that marriage to a Perfect Mate is
based on True Love and is likely to last Forever since the initial
'magic' is bound to remain at its original intensity for an indefinite
period of time. 

The True Love myth may have had its origins in the courtly love 
tradition 'way back in the early middle ages. The relationship of a 
knight for his lady was supposed to be a mirror on earth of the 
relationship of a Christian to the mother of God. You might call it 
the ultimate pedestalization of woman. Books were written advising 
people on the proper approach to love; The Art Of Courtly Love by 
Cavalcanti is one famous book of the time, and Dante Alighieri's love 
for Beatrice as he described it in La Vita Nuova is also a model of 
this type of love. The idea is that these people were talking about 
a mystical and idealized form of love that was a lower-order form of 
the love a Christian was supposed to have for Mary, the mother of God. 
Now, this love was at the same time sexual, so you had a mixture of 
the sacred and the profane that the Church found quite threatening. 
It soundly condemned the courtly love 'fad,' and the medieval Trobadour 
was an almost Dylanesque figure operating at the fringes of what was 
respectable.

Needless to say, our current True Love myth retains a shadow of the
notion that lovers are striving for some idealized and quasi-mystical
state. Is this coincidence, or have we inherited a modified courtly
love tradition from medieval Europe through tradition and/or the arts?
I don't know. What's interesting in this context, however, is the
stylized nature of our OWN 'courtly love' myth and its similarity to
the medieval myth. If nothing else, it's a striking example of
convergent evolution (I suspect a more direct connection, however; I
just can't prove it yet).

Our attitudes toward love are also culture-bound. If you doubt this,
go take a good course or two in anthropology. Some languages (Japanese, 
for example, which uses a borrowed word) don't even HAVE a word that 
corresponds to our notion of romantic love. Some cultures view love as 
a form of mental illness whose sufferers are to be pitied until they 
get better. Other cultures view it as a phenomenon of adolescence that 
people outgrow. The belief in the 'magic' of love is hardly a cultural
universal. Many societies view the marital bond as a conjoining of
families; love has little or nothing to do with it.

If you doubt the reality and power of the True Love myth, spend a day 
listening to top-40 songs, reading romance novels, and watching 'romantic'
stories on the television. As a society, we're positively inundated by
pro-True Love propaganda. 

The result is that it's easy to look at rough spots in a relationship
or at a less-than-perfect SO after the initial sexual glow has worn
off and convince yourself that it wasn't True Love after all and
merrily go out to continue your search for the Real Thing. This may be
one of the reasons why so many people seem reluctant to WORK at a 
relationship with problems these days: it's much easier to convince
yourself it wasn't 'real' and go on to something else.

Will I fall in love again? Without a doubt. Will I get involved in
another long-term relationship? I won't rule it out. But I certainly
won't delude myself into thinking that our feelings for each other
will forever stay the same, or that the relationship won't involve
hard work and constant communication if it's to last. I'm not a cynic;
I simply don't have any illusions about what love is or how it works
its alleged 'magic.'
 
>>Like, wow, you've
>>been living by yourself for five years now; you'd better find a
>>housemate or SO soon, or you'll become too INTOLERANT and SELF-INDULGENT 
>>to ever do it again! 
>
>Naaah--you just have to start feeling like you'd like
>to have someone share the mortgage. . .:-)

And that's probably as valid a reason for having a housemate as any
I've seen. It's certainly PRACTICAL, and many young people I've seen
setting up households could use a few lessons in practicality. ;-)

                        -- Cheers, Bill Ingogly