Love Requires Dedication
Dear [Mentat],
Sorry I was a little slow in getting this out. But the hard drive failed on my writing computer and I had to take time to replace it. But I’m back, so let’s get back into this…
In the last post, I attempted to show that mating as a highest life goal is probably no more wrought with problems than any other priority that one discovers as his purpose for living. I discussed the problem of being too well-rounded and spreading one’s self too thinly across many pursuits, and how this impacts his ability to be really good at any one of them. Relationships are a discipline like any career or hobby, and one’s adeptness at running them well improves with time investment, focus, and practice, just as her skill at playing the piano would increase roughly proportionate to how often she plays.
Any discipline carries potentially bad outcomes of craving. So we’re not really escaping the folly of craving by devoting ourselves any less to relationships. Relationships are no more susceptible to the bad effects of obsession than other pursuits, yet they benefit from it just the same. Thus, the potentially negative effects of yearning are no excuse to abandon a dream, just because that dream reveals strong longings.
It’s not clear that relationships work better between well-rounded people, than those who center their existence on their beloveds. Indeed, we can find many fruitful affairs between such people, where careers and individual hobbies take a back seat to mutual interests pursued together. See more on this below, where I talk about the Lions Club couples I’ve met lately.
Further, too many incompatible goals among lovers frequently cause their demise as couples. Women say they like a Worldly, but very often hate his being away chasing other dreams. Neither are men crazy about their wives being away from the home too much. Indeed, the feminism movement has complicated romance by offering women broader horizons for fulfillment outside marriage. Not that this is a bad thing, for it probably raises women’s average satisfaction levels. But it is nonetheless, a distraction to the otherwise marriage-minded and can pollute the purity of family values. After all, more of them can do what they truly dream rather than being funneled into the traditional roles of motherhood against their wishes. Let’s face it. Not every woman is (or was) cut out to be a mother or a lover. Even in antiquity, some women loathed their assigned stay-at-home-and-raise-children duties. These malcontents had little hope of realizing their actual desires. But today is different, at least in the West. Ladies who don’t want to be serious lovers have many other society-sanctioned choices. Even those who initially want the traditional relationship are discovering and exploring other desires, and acquiring different priorities. Very often, their passion for love does not survive the assaults of unrelated yet compelling opportunities. Thus with more career choices now, women on the whole aren’t as likely to prioritize mating as highly as they once did. Their overall devotion to relationships has therefore, fallen significantly while their lusts for achievement outside the mating realms has risen. With fewer women whose hearts beat for mating the loudest, it’s understandable that friction and divorce rates run so high among couples today. Now the more numerous the pursuits outside the relationship, the greater the chances of incompatibilities are. So being Worldly indeed has a downside.
The pool of men and women who supremely value romance and family seems to be dwindling in the US given these abounding prospects. The lowest birth rates in history in this country today would tend to support this.
But some dream not of high power careers with difficult responsibilities. They just don’t delight in traveling the world or in finding ways to define themselves strictly in terms of themselves alone. They don’t cherish the rewards of living without a mate’s dependence, and don’t want the material goods that careers bring within reach.
No, in fact, some people want to be needed. They long for lives of minimal stress and simple pleasures, modest homes and just a few bills each month. A girl at work named [Marsha] comes to mind. She spent almost her entire working life at [that company] (about 20 years) as an administrative assistant. Now in this position, skill levels are considered moderate to low, because so many people can do them. Starting salaries barely top minimum wage, pay increases are few, and promotions don’t happen as much as in the engineering or management fields. Yet being a secretary was all she wanted, at least at work anyhow. She didn’t gripe about her pay or how she wasn’t moving ahead fast enough. She never complained that her job was beneath her, though she was clearly capable of so much more. She was rarely stressed or angry at anyone, and left work each day with the same sincere smile she’d brought to it. She got along well with almost everybody, and occasionally would chuckle as engineers argued before her about how a program would best be written. She just didn’t see why it mattered so much. She never sweated the small stuff.
However, don’t think her passions anemic. She was extraordinarily zealous about her husband and family, from the day she met him. In the lunch room we’d hear her telling her friends what she and [James] did together the night before, with her face consistently aglow. She drew strength from him as he did her. Meeting for the first time in 1989, and uniting in 1991, they were still happily married as of 2003; still in their modest home, and still driving their used cars, yet also, still very happy.
[Marsha] and [James] showed that fierce dedication to a lover, while shying away from pursuits that would pull them apart too often, can (and often does) work very well when the lovers have compatible values. So though the trend today seems to be away from the traditional family and more toward career, we must be careful not to underestimate the worthiness and happiness potential of traditionalism. A life devoted to a love relationship indeed has lots of opportunities for supreme happiness, and many would argue that for them, it’s the only pursuit that does.
As also discussed, water can never quench a thirst for fine wine. Thus the notion that one can achieve maximal happiness by diluting the pursuit of his Big Dream, by chasing numerous other fun, but less meaningful dreams, is gravely flawed. You can’t bag an elephant when hunting for flies. While a breadth of pursuits can serve as effective diversions when the quest for the Big Dream gets hard, it’s important not to confuse the temporary relief of entertainment with the genuine, longer-lasting gratification of the Big Dream coming true. We can be reasonably happy and fulfilled by chasing little dreams. But only realizing the Big Dream makes our hearts and souls resonate with the unmistakable tones of jubilee. The thrill of diversion cannot substitute for the bliss of living our dearest dreams.
A wide breadth of experience can help a relationship in its infancy grow into a productive union. But once some shared experiences occur, any Worldly advantage to the relationship diminishes, and eventually becomes insignificant. Once people “grow” together, their pre-relationship life is less preeminent in their interactions.
I concluded the last post by saying that neither breadth nor depth singularly makes for the best way to run a life. At times, breadth is best. At others, it’s depth. The best run lives combine both in highly productive, fulfilling ways. It follows that the concepts of Worldly and single-minded obsession are not mutually exclusive. Worldly needs obsession, and both are necessary to achieve anything meaningful. Both Worldly and a unary focus on relationships seem to have good and bad ends. So the decision of which way to practice seems arbitrary and highly subject to personal values. Well, my values direct me to choose the focus on relationships over Worldly pursuits because this just happens to be my Big Dream. I’ve learned the pitfalls of neglecting the Big Dream and so choose not to do that anymore.
While the arguments that the vast majority of relationships fail, are fine ones for pursuing love less, why marriages wither isn’t so much obsessive dedication, as it is differing levels and ways of dedication between lovers. When their commitment to the other varies, such as when disagreeing on how often to have sex, or how much to spend on the house as opposed to his golf days, we’ll often hear one person gripe that the other is either too obsessed, or uncaring. They shame him for wanting too much of their time or for spending too selfishly their common resources. But there’s nothing inherently wrong with either the man who spends $500 per week on golf, or the woman who wants to have sex five times per day. The contention appears when mates want more than the other is willing to give, or vice versa.
Barring harmful behaviors, the degree of our individual romantic obsessions, or the forms they take, is neither good nor bad. It’s only labeled meaningfully as such once a specific lover comes along to judge it. If a lady blames her man for excess obsession, is he really just too horny, or is she simply too frigid? Neither party is totally blameless. Neither is either totally at fault. The solution could very well be for him not to tone down his libido, but rather to find a new woman who likes more sex. Likewise, she need not struggle with how to desire sex more, but instead, she might find a man who likes less sex. Maybe he’s too selfish, or she is, or they both are. We just don’t know. Who can say definitively whether Worldly is anymore righteous than the obsessed lover?
Rather than some universal standard, it’s the personality dynamics of the two people involved that determines the appropriateness of a given level of devotion to love. A worldly man has good relations with women so equipped to accommodate his self-oriented pursuits. But too, a devoted man can also enjoy a lasting love with a woman of similar values. Individual values don’t matter so much as how they agree and complement each other between two specific people. It is not therefore a foregone rule of thumb, that the man of many pursuits is more attractive than the one devoted almost solely to his lover. Any level of devotion to love can work well with the right partner. Onward.
