Tom's Love Quest

Dear [Mentat],

The only problem with trying to   take charge   of social evolutionary forces is that we would likely not realize the fruits of our efforts, which might not ripen for generations. Though social or cultural evolution would seem to occur more quickly than biological evolution, it still takes decades to modestly change public attitudes (abortion rights), and centuries to alter them fundamentally (civil rights), though this lag might shorten in the future thanks to mass media and the Internet. In the meantime though, the need for love appears deeply entrenched in our psyches, and I don’t know if you could preserve the positive side of pursuing a need while omitting the negative, especially in level three and lower needs [referring here to Maslow's hierarchy of needs triangle]. If you could, then the need really wouldn’t be a need anymore, since there would be no negative consequences when thwarted. Removing the negative effects of a need would seem tantamount therefore to eliminating the need itself, which, as noted, is quite an undertaking, and perhaps more difficult than biting the bullet and just gratifying it.

At any rate, for us, it seems that whatever path we choose (to seek a happy life either with or without a mate), we’re talking about a grueling journey. It isn’t easy no matter how we go. Which way to actually go boils down to personal preference, for by the time one weighs the known pros and cons of the single and the mated life styles, in the end the decision to the outside observer seems about as arbitrary as tossing a coin. A therapist in Philly used to assuage my anxieties over such choices by pointing this out. She thought that if we understand that much of what moves us to choose as we do is beyond our conscious comprehension, and thus unpredictable, that this would help us blame ourselves less for choices that turn out to be wrong.   [We'd thus] fret less over those future choices that might be wrong.

I don’t know that this worked all that well for me, but I saw where she was coming from and in certain circumstances at work, found that I could make impacting decisions more decisively and quickly, simply by going with my gut and taking a let-the-chips-fall-where-they-may attitude. Indeed, once I moved into higher positions,   any   decision generated opposition. No matter how extensively researched a choice was, when that choice affected others, as high-level decisions invariably do, people fight it. So it doesn’t make sense to agonize over it too much. No matter how good it is, you just won’t please everyone. The important thing is, when possible, to please yourself.

I believe the choice to seek the mate we need, or to seek not to need one, is such a choice. It’s a gamble for sure. But one sure thing about it is that no matter how we choose, there will be pain. And who’s to say that one outcome is reachable with any less hardship than the other? I suppose that it really depends on the   guts   of the individuals choosing – those seemingly irrational forces that sway us one way or another though we can’t express exactly how or why.

Now we’ve turned this choice upside down and inside out over the past few months, and exposed plenty of good reasons and bad for choosing either way. It was a good exercise and certainly not a waste of time. However, I don’t think, given all this, that further justifying my position will do any more good. Quite reasonably, it doesn’t make sense, for all the reasons you’ve cited, to keep trying for something [a life of love with an attractive mate] that probably can never happen. But in spite of all the rationale and empirical data we’ve exchanged that would seem to place us at a severe disadvantage in the mating arena, my heart still longs for my dream girl. Maybe this is a shortcoming on my part. But it’s a part of me that I must cater to since it dominates my life.

I know you understand what I mean, because your choice of careers in college would seem most unlikely for blind men to pick, much less succeed at. Yet you persist and have done so for going on three decades now, to get it right. You know that no matter the odds, you just can’t turn your back on it. I’m the same about my dream girl.   I’ll either make this happen or die trying.   You’ve apparently made progress because your grades are better now than in the 90s, your overall level of depression is lower, and your psychical disposition is healthier than you’ve ever known I suspect. And as I’ve said, I’ve made progress too in that the amount of time I spend with ladies is higher since 2000 than at any time previous. Plus, I enjoy it more because the ladies I’m picking are closer to my ideal. Our respective goals may not be instantly achievable. But we’re both progressing, and that’s the real bottom line.

Tom Hesley

Dear [Mentat],

A person need not be   ideal,   so long as they’re good enough, which is, I suppose, an ideal itself, though not as restrictive as seeking the best possible mate. Likewise, as you suggest, there are degrees of self-actualization [referring here to Maslow's hierarchy of needs triangle], the highest of which are unattainable by virtually everyone. But reaching the absolute highest level of it is not as important as reaching   some   level of it, that fulfills us most of the time. The same is true of women.

Tom Hesley

Dear [Mentat],

The word “loftier” may have been a bad choice. What I meant to say is that seeking to do better than [an unattractive mate] is to me, a more achievable (less lofty) goal than to attempt to rid ourselves of the need for love through any other means than sheer gratification [...]. It seems far less likely that I would ever stumble upon insights that would banish the love need from my heart, than it would be to actually find the girl for which my heart longs. So perhaps you don’t agree with this clarified version of the statement at all.

Yes, only time will tell. I sincerely hope that you do figure out how to become self-actualized without a mate [in reference to Maslow's hierarchy of needs triangle]. It may be that someday, I’ll tire of the quest for my dream girl, in which case I’d become your student of how to reach the top of level five after having skipped level three.

Tom Hesley

Dear [Mentat],

Yes, a great many people suffering various mental sicknesses would remain unhappy even if they got into a healthy relationship. This is true of many pathologies. The person who eats the wrong foods, though he might stay sufficiently nourished to stay alive and provide enough for himself to sustain a secure living environment, would still not [...] realize maximal potential at the higher levels [in Maslow's hierarchy of needs triangle]. I’d argue therefore, that food that only keeps us alive while retarding our progress at the upper levels doesn’t count as a true level one gratifier. Indeed, many anomalies have malnutrition as their roots even when the individual appears otherwise to be well-fed. In this case, a relationship won’t solve the person’s unhappiness due to malnutrition.

On the question of how long it would be until the chronically unhappy, made apparently happy by a relationship, would start finding imperfections in their dream mates: I’d answer it by saying that if their dissatisfaction [...] is   really   and   exclusively   due to a problem with the dream girl, and not their own predisposition to discontentment, then I’d expect that the person who finds what he’s always wanted in a dream girl wouldn’t be any more likely to find flaws than anyone else. But, if some other unfulfilled need makes him sad like lacking security or proper nourishment, then he may find lasting happiness with no one, whether she’s a dream girl or a troll. Thus, a relationship only suffices for people who are otherwise fulfilled.

Many people seeking single cures for relentless melancholy will probably never find it, yes. I agree. Happiness may come however, as a result of a combination of all these. No guarantees of course. But in examining the lives of people appearing to be supremely happy, it’s difficult to find one discrete cause of that happiness. Sometimes, it can happen as discussed above. But usually, when someone’s happy, it’s a long string of events and circumstances that facilitated their bliss. No single magic pill. No single book. No single motivational seminar. Etc. Right thinking also contributes as well. If someone thinks irrationally about how the world should operate, then yes, even if God granted them the riches of Job, they’d still be dissatisfied.

Tom Hesley

Related Posts

• Last Time In Bed With Emeebee 

Dear [Mentat],

[...] As you imply, enjoying the   little things   won’t fulfill a basic need, like security, love, or esteem [referencing here terms defined in Maslow's hierarchy of needs triangle]. Besides, you’ve heard it said that people wear masks in public. They often make greater light of things than the reality warrants, and act like they enjoy them more than they actually do, just to be nice or to avoid appearing too negative or offending anyone. I’d suggest that those who [...] take thrill in the little things are either:

1. gratified in their basic needs, and so can derive more pleasure from the little things because their psyches aren’t overshadowed by deprivation,
2. are not gratified in all basic needs but do a good job at covering that up, or
3. are not gratified in all basic needs, and believe that taking pleasure in the little things might better prepare them for the bigger task of finding gratifiers for their basic needs later on.

Again, it really depends on the individual involved. I’m skeptical of anyone who seems too happy and overly thrilled by the little things. Finding pleasure in the little things does not necessarily position one better for relationships I don’t think. But having a healthy relationship on hand will indeed position one better for enjoying the little things.

Tom Hesley

Dear [Mentat],

Perhaps my happiness is more dependent on having a mate than yours, yes. In my mind, a level three need [referring to Maslow's hierarchy of needs triangle] would seem to be such a strong one that if left unfilled, it would cover up the higher level needs. In my own experience, all the achievements at [work] came to matter little in the end, since I was forced to enjoy them alone [without a girlfriend]. The joy resulting from the group respecting me as a foremost authority on certain system components, only went so far. Eventually, the promise of such joy if I continued the fast work pace, became an insufficient motivator to retain and advance that expertise. Studying new code and designs became laborious and boring, and as I referred to it and the whole [work] effort in general, a colossal waste of time. Once I realized that I’d hit my maximal potential for happiness that I could without a woman, and then grew disenchanted with that level, I just stopped caring about work. So yes, my happiness became squarely contingent on being loved by someone desirable. Whether that’s good or bad, I don’t know. It’s just the way it is for me.

No, marriage won’t necessarily enrich a person’s life. In fact, as I was saying to Mom the other day, a bad relationship is clearly worse than no relationship. However, when you have one in which the partners are mutually respectful, helpful, and thoughtful, it’s hard to imagine being the worse for it. In fact, it’s much easier to envision such a situation raising one to higher degrees of excellence in all other pursuits than he could have achieved without a supportive, loving partner. So when we’re analyzing the overall effects of a relationship on the psyche, it’s important that we disallow the admittedly frequent bad stories to overly skew our views about the potential good that comes from quality romance. You hear me talk often of how much I want a relationship. In these statements, I’m referring to these good ones, not the bad.

I’d disagree with your assessment of finding a mate [providing only] a   temporary lift,   particularly when there are no other mental illnesses indicated than chronic loneliness, and the secondary effects of such loneliness – mild to moderate depression, faltering concentration, withdrawal, addiction, and such. A relationship is by no means a fix-all. It will not cure psychosis or many forms of neurosis. Depending on the particular malady [...], a relationship is no more effective a cure than a sugar pill would be to a drug addict. But it does cure many ills nonetheless.

You speak of melancholy [...], and how a person who is chronically melancholy would continue to be so even if he found a relationship. Well, it depends on why he’s down. If he’s sad because he can’t achieve a career goal for example, then you are correct. A relationship would probably not bring him [out of] the dumps for very long, especially if he has other ungratified needs. If, on the other hand, the source of his blues is primarily lacking love, then should a desirable lady appear, her love could be quite therapeutic over the long haul [and indeed, give him a more permanent lift].

Finding a mate is by no means the same class of need as, say, playing a piano or doing missionary work in Africa, or impressing a boss at work, or eating to one’s heart content. It’s more basic and thus has fewer alternatives for gratification, and it’s gratification is more imperative as well. It’s hard to argue that the love need is a symptom of a mental shortcoming therefore. Indeed, it appears to be an integral part of our biological make-up, by virtue of the fact that people who have this desire have more children, and those who don’t have it have fewer. Since parents have a ready conduit (the children themselves) for transmitting their values to subsequent generations, we’d expect the tendency to base happiness on the presence of love to be a more prolific view among people, simply because their parents probably had [...] that view, and taught it to them. Now everyone I know of has parents.      And most parents want a relationship. So the odds are that most people want relationships as well; not because they’re weak in character, but because it’s their nature to want it, as fostered by natural selection.

Finally, as mentioned, a relationship won’t cure, say the absence of food, security, or in many cases, esteem, and self-actualization. I think that satisfaction of   any one   of the basic needs probably won’t result in true happiness. The only way to get that would be to achieve simultaneous gratification of all the needs together.

A relationship however, though a big slice in the happiness pie, is still just a slice. It’s by no means the whole pie. So in this way, you are right that a relationship won’t cure depression, particularly if that depression comes from a thwarting of a need that a relationship does not gratify. But we might also infer that a relationship can be the final piece in the happiness pie, when all the other basic needs are met in large degree. In this scenario, where the only thing needed for complete happiness is love, you might be wrong. A relationship could indeed bring total happiness; at least as total as happiness can get in humans.

Tom Hesley

Dear [Mentat],

Yes, that’s certainly understandable – that excess craving would prevent you from reaching your other goals. Your belief that finding the right mate would drastically transform your life for the better may indeed have been irrational. But maybe not. It’s hard to know for certain, since you haven’t found such a person yet, and don’t really know how that would make you feel. You could meet someone tomorrow who would indeed make   the earth move under [your] feet   as Carole King sang, or give you love that would   turn you around   as sang Kenny Rogers. If popular music and literature are any indication, such transformations happen quite often.

In fact, Maslow suggests [in his book,  Motivation and Personality]  that psychotherapy works as well as it does because it satisfies some of the thwarted level three needs of its patients. He argues that the most effective therapies are those that most completely satisfy the basic needs and teach the patient how to ensure continued gratification once the therapy ends. He says that if society at large became a more gratifying (as opposed to a more restrictive) one, then the need for most therapies would vanish. You know yourself how positively transforming a string of therapy sessions can be. I suspect that the right girl would be at least as transforming for you, although I am sympathetic to your position that it’s foolish to hold out hope for such a lady, given the odds against her ever appearing.

Still though, enough people write about the magically uplifting effects of a good lover, that I don’t think the belief that such would happen for us if we found love, is irrational. It has a strong basis in fact. My own experiences (though admittedly brief and few) with perfect tens, suggest that it can indeed happen this way. The belief itself is sound in my opinion therefore, though the long odds against it ever happening might make it appear irrational.  [This can encourage] us to seek level four and five gratification [in reference to Maslow's hierarchy of needs triangle] with the hope that successes up there would for the most part offset the thwarting at level three. Yours is a good strategy [to rid yourself of your love needs through meditation] if, as you suggest, the odds of finding true love are prohibitive for you.

Yes, given our histories, it does seem that I had fewer issues to overcome to achieve success than did you. And, as I’ve discussed elsewhere, finding a partner may or may not change anything fundamental about a person. It just depends on what the individual needs happen to be as to how uplifting a relationship will be for a particular person. If, as you said, much of your depression came from loneliness, then is it so unreasonable to think that had you found your dream girl, and ridded yourself of that loneliness, that your depression would have left you also? I don’t think so. By the law of transitivity, a good woman might have been all the therapy you needed. But, if your depression came from other sources that had nothing to do with a missing mate, then you’re correct that any happiness you would have reaped from finding a love would have either not occurred at all, or at best, have been short-lived. Only you can know these things about yourself however.

Tom Hesley

Dear [Mentat],

Well, that’s true that it wouldn’t be a catastrophe should we remain loveless. We’ve both had many a happy time while standing alone. And though I don’t want to just be reasonably happy without a mate, I acknowledge that it’s possible and in fact, I’ve been so for some years now. It’s actually a good thing because otherwise, I’d have been a suicidal, sad man, for sure. It’s worthwhile to be able to get on with life even when we don’t have what we ultimately want.

As far as the part about putting one’s life on hold until he finds a mate goes, one could argue that I’ve done just that. Sometimes, when a dream is important enough, we   must   do that. I gave up my computer career for, among other reasons, to devote full time to mastering and writing about the forces that keep pleasing women away.

Many suggest that doing this was supremely irrational. But I don’t see it that way. After fifteen years of living the professional life without companionship, I knew that putting the rest of life on hold until I solved this problem would be wise (and even necessary), especially since I could afford to do it financially.

For others not quite so lucky, Ellis’s teachings, though not ideal, could indeed have a positively functional significance, by showing how to be content with situations which cannot, without incurring prohibitive financial hardships, be changed. Most people generally don’t stop working to pursue their life’s dream full-time, because they have families and financial obligations locking [them] into their current path. Indeed, if they have families, in this country, chances are that their basic needs have been met up through level three [in Maslow's hierarchy of needs triangle]. So they wouldn’t feel as compelled to make such a radical life change, because the only needs they have left to fulfill are the less urgent level four and five ones. For these reasons, we’d expect people to stay put.

But in my case, I just got so fed up with that ache of loneliness from thwarted level three needs. I couldn’t combat it with several therapeutic series not to mention tens of self-help books. After over a decade of trying these make-shift measures, I lost all hope of any remedial approach other than actually getting desirable ladies, to make me feel chronically better. After close to three years of weekly analysis in total, I understood that cognitive therapy just wasn’t going to solve this for me. Oh, I’d feel relief while in therapy. Sometimes I’d even get to thinking that life was really good the way it was and that it could indeed be no better. But within a few months of the doctor and I parting ways, the props of therapy would invariably collapse, and the loneliness returned as strong as it was before. A therapist’s couch just can’t replace a bed with a warm, beautiful woman in it.

However, I’ve never become suicidal or destructive due to this deprivation. So I guess I don’t fit into those   extreme   cases that you say Ellis’s techniques help well. I admit though that even the worst diet for example, has great value if following it makes the grossly overweight thinner. Like the Atkins diet of high fat and protein has helped people shed millions of pounds though it may be murder to the cardiovascular system, Ellis’s ideas have saved countless thousands from the destructive effects of deep depression, even though they don’t seem to provide the first, best answer to lovelorn sadness. We can teach people how to minimize the pains of deprivation. But we can’t show them how to actually eliminate the deprivation without teaching how to get precisely what they seek.

In other posts since this one, we’ve talked much of the higher-level needs being easier to satisfy due to the greater plethora of choices of gratifiers. So I won’t discuss it further here.

Also, as we’ve expounded upon much in recent posts, people can live happily without relationships. I agree. I just choose not to go at happiness from that angle because it doesn’t work for me.

Tom Hesley

Hi [Emmy].

Yes, went to the eye doctor. He signed the NLS form and I sent it to Carnegie Library in Pittsburgh today.

Yes, I napped a few hours this afternoon. I was really starved on sleep. If we were to ever live together, we’d definitely have to come up with a more sleep-friendly arrangement. But then, if we slept together every night, maybe I’d get used to having someone in the bed with me. So I’m not knocking it.

Mom likes you a lot as well.

Good luck on the resume updating.

It turned out to be a wonderful day here as well weather-wise.

We made some nice connections this weekend, I agree. It is my sincerest wish that I might learn to love you. In the meantime, we can have a great time as friends, I think.

Where you said “disgust” below, I think you meant to say, “discuss”.

Talk more to you tonight.

Tom Hesley

Dear [Mentat],

See my   Tom’s Views –> Self Actualization – A Strictly Internal Affair   piece for more details about Maslow’s   self-actualization   concept.

But if we accept [Abraham Maslow's] needs hierarchy [triangle] as gospel, the state of self-actualization, that does not rely much at all on others,  might only be reached once the basic needs we have that   do   depend on the whims of other people, are gratified.   The ruler, to be a good one, must first be ruled himself.   Though once a ruler, he might despisehis earlier life and look down on others still living that life, the fact remains that he had to live as a peasant himself to pavethe way to regal status. Likewise, the person wanting his own business must first, typically, work for others. He might not like that, and would probably consider such work degrading. But that lower work, much as he hated it, must be done in order for him to successfully run his business.

It seems crazy that such a successful person would spurn the path he took through the lower level needs to get where he is. Yet Maslow says that it’s common for people once gratified at a particular level, to   start underestimating   the importance of the gratifier at that level. In my view, we must not make this mistake, lest we become hypocrites. How can we legitimately diminish someone for living as we ourselves once lived? More on this next.

Are level five doers truly more worthy of our esteem? Do they represent the gold standard of humanity, and are the lower doers lacking who don’t measure up? Shall we blame the love-seekers for exhibiting needs not visible in the self-actualizers? And as a result, should we say, “You should be more like them”? Are the lower-level needs more shameful than level five ones? Are self-actualizers inherently   better   people?

Do they in fact, make the best lovers? After all, self-actualizers seem more deeply happy and have a greater zest for life, physical and mental health, longevity, generosity, compassion, patience, and such. Can we rightly attribute these achievements to an entirely self-made prowess? In short, how much credit for their advanced standing do they actually deserve, and do people not so advanced deserve any less? Shall the man who completes the race jeer at those still running it, even though he ran it himself? Shall he whose belly is full look disdainfully upon the hungry in New Orleans as they scurry about and ravage like animals to survive?

We’ve known politicians who, once in office, cancel programs that years earlier made possible their political careers [to take off]. Then on the stump, they deride folks who would take advantage of such programs like college grants, public works, and after-school activities. It’s common for humans to achieve success and then negatively judge those who have not. The higher-ups fault the lower-downs for having needs and inadequacies which they claim they’ve vanquished in themselves, and these attitudes are the basis of most inequality. Sociologists say that inequality is the biggest root of evil among humans and is basic to just about every social problem plaguing us today. Well, what better example of inequality than the stratification resulting from these wrongful claims of higher righteousness by the well-to-do? The hero without humility is no hero. The person [...] thinking that he doesn’t need his origins, is deluded.

Once I had many heroes. I looked up to people   more advanced   than myself and admired them. But I also blamed myself and got depressed because I wasn’t more like them. Then I learned that they were fallible and generally no less susceptible to life’s temptations and hardships than was I. People seeming proper today were likely improper at one time. We must be careful not to conclude that heroes somehow circumvented the customary paths to excellence. They didn’t figure out any other ways of eliminating their basic needs than through sheer gratification. Their way of living is not   better   per se than needier folks, but more precisely, is a logical progression along the same continuum. At best, we might say of their creativespirit and purely expressive abilities that are so universally revered, that they were lucky or privileged, and fortunate to have been able gratify their lower level needs so that they could play at level five. They might not show symptoms of lower level needs today. But I’m certain that practically all of them would, if deprived of gratifiers at those lower levels.

Attributing too much awe to these fully self-actualizing people without a clear understanding of how they came to be that way, has undesirable consequences. Let me explain. As I consider today how my Mom’s parents treated me and others when I knew them, I think that they were among the most self-actualized people I’ve known. They were kind, unconditionally loving, overwhelmingly compassionate, and selfless. Gram only ever complained about her arthritis, when she complained at all. And Pap? He wanted to hold and protect me just like the women in the family. Gram and Pap rarely yelled, and lead very simple, stress-free lives. I believe you met them in the early 70s during a visit here after we brought you home from the bus one Friday night. They lived in this house before Mom and Dad took it over in 1986, and things look much different around here today than in my grandparents’ time. They had far fewer material goods. In fact, the cellar in the 70s was empty except for a washer, dryer, furnace, water heater, pantry cabinet, and a couple empty tables. But now, you can barely walk down there because there’s so much stuff, much of which hasn’t been used in several years. Mom probably has ten loads of laundry thrown about the floors, Christmas decorations from fifteen years ago that haven’t been displayed since, and lots of papers and other memorabilia. Me, I have an empty upright freezer down there, a brand new air compressor which I’ve not hooked up though I bought it in 2002, and boxes and boxes of every sort of tool. As a boy, I could roller-skate in the basement without fear of running into anything. But not today. Back then, the floors had no clutter; no dirty laundry, no tools lying around, and very few infrequently used items at all sat propped against the white-washed walls. Upstairs, every room, dresser, closet, and cabinet was the same — sparse. The grandparents had very little, and apparently, wanted for very little. How could they be happy?

I never thought about this much until after they both died. It so happened that Pap died in 1977 and Gram followed in 1980 while   [First Love]   and I lived together in Highland Park. In fact the morning of July 21st, as Gram exhaled for the last time,   [First Love]   and I had just finished our biggest fight.  [First Love]   spent the entire previous day at [a local amusement park] with a male friend [...], without inviting me — her boyfriend — along. And when she got back, she was notably evasive about all they’d done together. Even today, [his] name still strikes tension in my stomach, for those two had a colorful dating history in high school, and as such, she had this unshakable affection for him. He was rich, drove nice cars, ran his own business — you know, the all-American male success object. Calls to his number [...] appeared on our long distance phone bills throughout the summer. So there was clearly something going on between them, and I hated that, and resented her for going with him despite my pleas that she not. But you know   [First Love].  Never one to acquiesce. He spelled the beginning of the end for us.

The [amusement park] incident reversed the momentum of our relationship. Up to then, we’d been growing closer, but after that collision of wills we started to drift apart. She stepped up her talk of moving into the [...] dorms in the fall, and during August, spent no time in [our apartment] with me, all though officially we lived together through August 31st. She’d begun pulling away and I couldn’t stop it, though I tried often. I fought her at every turn, arguing constantly about how she was allowing [this interloper] to ruin things for us. I accused her of deserting me and blamed her for our demiseas a couple since she after all, she was the one who chose to move out. And then, as if to drive the knife further, she began a new association with [another formidible nemesis].

After she’d gone, I was crushed. What a waste the past seven years of chasing her had become. How could she abandon me after just a few months when I had patiently waited so long for her to love me? It wasn’t fair, and I hated her for it.

[First Love],   so much more well-read than I then, could consistently confute me any time we discussed the situation, leaving me stammering and ashamed of my feelings. I never won an argument with her, and she never admitted to wrongdoing. I just couldn’t understand why, if she loved me as she said, she could so casually move away and why she had so much need of [her park buddy] and [the nemesis]. Yet she felt completely right with them and in moving to [the dorms]. All the blame for “ruining our relationship” as she put it was mine. She painted me as a selfish, needy child who would probably never acquire empathic abilities, and so, would never be able to truly love any woman. She said that her life circumstances demanded much more compassion and understanding than I apparently could provide. Then, she said something that brought Gram and Pap to mind once more, and set me on a thinking path that would prove confusing and mentally debilitating for the next two decades. The day she broke up with me she said, “Tom, I have so many problems right now, that you’ll likely never comprehend. Maybe when you’re sixty you will understand. But it’s obvious that as a nineteen year old, you simply cannot.”

Over the next couple months, I called her often, trying to get her to change her mind, and when I wasn’t campaigning to win her again, I spent much of the rest of the time in my bedroom, staring out the window, crying. It was hard to eat or get excited about going to [the trad school I was attending] which up till then, I loved so much. I’d even called [a therapy place] for help, but when they asked a few uncomfortable questions on the phone, I hung up and didn’t try again. I was an emotional wreck though, and I might well have ended it all if it weren’t for Mom, [Cher], and [Dem] supporting me.

Then, in October, whether by some design or random chance, an image came to mind of my grandparents standing before me. This was a peaceful, familiar vision at first, for they’d always been so consoling during childhood. Why not then, now? So I’d imagine them patting me on the shoulders and saying, “There, there now. You’re going to be all right.” And for a few weeks, that helped calm my chronically upset stomach.

Then, one day in early November as I viewed them in a daydream, I remembered   [First Love's]   words, “…Maybe when you’re sixty, you’ll understand… …Maybe when you’re sixty, you’ll understand… …Maybe when you’re sixty, you’ll understand…” The thought rang and reverberated relentlessly like a favorite song you just can’t stop hearing in your head, mixed with Pap’s voice saying, “There, there now. You’ll be all right.” I felt I was on the verge of some profound insight though at the time, this was just a feeling and I hadn’t the words to express what that insight might be. For some days, the two quotations played again and again on top of each other in my head. They meant something important and I was bound and determined to figure it out.

I came to believe that   [First Love's]   seemingly optimistic prediction that I might understand her when I was much older, was actually a lament that I didn’t understand her already. Clearly, she felt that I   should have   been more sympathetic and often chided me because I wasn’t. So this was just her way, through now-obvious sarcasm, of chiding some more, of expressing her beliefs of my ignorance as being   so   deficient, and my mental growth potential   so   small, that it would indeed take me till I was sixty to correct what she termed as my blind, selfish, unloving, and spoiled ways.

Ironically, the qualities she found so lacking in me, I found so abundant in my grandparents. They never were selfish, always understood (or at least, they acted like they did), loved without reservation, rarely forced me to do anything I wished not to do, and they were older than sixty. Could it be that if I acquired their strengths, that   [First Love]   would come back? After all, they had everything she seemed to want. The problem was that I did not, and eliminating this deficit became a life goal of mine for several years.

My grandparents then changed from my consulars to my heroes. I started appreciating the usefulness of being like them, thinking that if I had been more like them while with   [First Love],   that we never would have broken up. So, all through the eighties until I moved to Ohio, I tried to understand how they behaved, what made people admire them, and then, to emulate them. I believe I considered them more in the first decade after their deaths than during the last two decades that they lived. For some years after our split, all that really mattered to me was getting   [First Love]   back. So I poured and poured over every memory of Mom’s parents and how well they’d treated me, looking for ways to discover [and]incorporate their good qualities into my being. I scrutinized photographs, asked Mom and her sister and family friends to tell me everything about them they knew, and spent hours listening to the few surviving cassette recordings of them. What emerged at first was further affirmation that   [First Love]   had assessed me well. I really was wanting in several areas crucial to the health of any relationship, not just with   [First Love].

I came to believe that I had indeed been selfish, relentless, immature, and spoiled. And with that, my grandparents assumed a judgmental role in my visions, scolding me for how cruelly I had treated   [First Love],  and voicing shame and disappointment because I had not learned better how to truly love someone from them. They were the best examples of good lovers around, had spent so much time raising and teaching me, and yet, I had absorbed so little. I felt ashamed and disappointed too, and resolved once more, to reshape myself in their image.

Now, here’s where I made the mistake mentioned just before starting this story, of attributing too much awe to self-actualizing people. I tried emulating my grandparents’ kindness, but most of the time felt pretentious and insecure doing it. They did it so well, but I just couldn’t manage it with the same grace and sincerity. Compassion came so naturally to them as I remember, because they never had to think about it. They were just automatically kindly folk. This was their talent. It was their nature. But for me, to exude compassion for   [First Love]   was quite a willful and dissonant undertaking. Nothing natural or right-feeling about it. Try as I did, I just couldn’t see her behaviors as veiled cries for compassion. Not when she was doing the following:

· Insisting on frequent time with [her two closest male friends] without me

· Spending only eighteen days at our home throughout the entire three months we lived together with most of those being in June,

· Moving away from our home,

· Distancing herself from me once at [school]

I felt that she was milking me, that she was willfully excluding me from the intimate details of her life that she had so willingly shared before, and that she’d decided well before this that we weren’t really suited for each other. All the compassion and kindness in the world would probably not have affected the outcome. Not really. Delayed it perhaps but not prevented it. She would have left sooner or later, no matter how like my grandparents I was. Of this I was fairly sure.

But on the flip side, maybe it was the depths of my own ignorance, rather than the overwhelming evidence against her, that made me feel so sure that   [First Love]   was doing me wrong by pointing out my perhaps true, but inconsequential flaws. That is, the things she said were wrong with me may indeed have been wrong, but did   not   actually cause her to leave. Yet since I still loved her, I for some time ignored the evidence, and aspired to become more of the person she claimed to want. Becoming more like my grandparents [therefore] became an imperative.

Now I had no idea what I was getting into, and soon found that there was much more to being like [Gram and Pap] than simply emulating their behaviors. When we highly esteem a person, it’s all too easy to dismiss the significance of the journey they took to reach the worthiness of our admiration. I did this. I had no idea what they were like before I was born, but learned that they weren’t always the kindly and gentle people I remembered. In the forties, Pap yelled a lot according to Mom, ranting and raving and cursing and drinking daily. He used to play cards and shoot pool just to make ends meet. He had mob connections, though Mom wasn’t very clear on the details. She may not have known any, or she may have been trying to protect his memory. But she did say that in the early fifties, Gram threatened to leave if he didn’t change. That must have scared him, because mend his ways he did. By the time of my earliest memories of him in 1964, he was completely different and he and Gram were still happily married. He had not been for all of his life, the man I knew him to be.

Gram herself, while perhaps more benevolent than Pap, went through her own growth periods as well, though again, Mom didn’t have much detail of her as an adolescent in the roaring twenties. We do have pictures from when she was fifteen in 1925, and she was quite a beautiful teenage girl. Her beauty and the secure way she carried herself hinted that she’d been around the block a few times, though again, I don’t have specifics. But like Pap, she’d become quite the well-liked lady in her fifties and through to her death at 69 years of age. She believed in God without question and went to church when her arthritis allowed it. Often speaking of the Bible, she strove to be a devout Christian, and in fact, was so for her last twenty years. So all I ever saw was Gram and Pap in their silver years. They had already worked out the kinks in their lives before I ever knew them. They had done all the trial and error, made all the humiliating mistakes, committed all the embarrassing acts, all before us kids were even conceived. Thus we have no first-hand knowledge of any impropriety on their part.

Now as a young adult, I still had heroes like Captain Marvel, Isis, Wonder Woman, the Incredible Hulk, and too, my grandparents. Because I had no knowledge of their wilder times, I thought that Gram and Pap had been their good way all their lives, and so I fallaciously expected that they, when they were my age, had the same wisdom, and that they [had] therefore, never been more selfish, less understanding, and less loving than I knew them to be as grandparents.

But I was wrong. I did not account for the inevitable growth that occurs throughout the life of any healthy person. According to my thinking [as a nineteen year old boy], they must have been at my age as they were in their sixties. It never occurred to me that they’d   evolved   into their current characters and that perhaps in their late teens, they too were likely as wild as me in mine. So in my early twenties, I tried emulating them, but couldn’t, and so, surmised that I was inferior because I just couldn’t find their qualities in myself.

Obviously now, this was clearly ignorant if not irrational thinking on my part. Unlike Captain Marvel, Isis, and Wonder Woman, Pap and Gram were real human beings with real pasts. They’d come a long way to get where I saw them standing in the 70s, a journey most of which I was not privy. So even though they’d seemed perfect, they’d not always been so, and so should not have been revered for always having being so.

The problem with my sort of hero worship is that it puts the hero person on a pedestal by inviting us to believe that they never had or never contended with the shortcomings that we have ourselves, that they somehow avoided the more distasteful aspects of growing up. Of course we know intellectually that no human ever walks on water. But on an emotional level, we often act like our heroes are perfect and can do no wrong, and in fact, never did any wrong. Then our esteems of them become artificially elevated as we affirm such illusions, again and again.

Part of the illusion is that these people were always stronger, wiser, and more self-sacrificing than are we, and that they could never have been as imperfect as ourselves. This makes emulating them most difficult, unless of course you’re a good actor. It’s next to impossible to emulate perfection unless you are yourself, perfect. If we’re going to truly duplicate the depths of any good quality you’d care to mention, then we must walk paths similar to the heroes’. We needn’t walk precisely the   same   path. But we must walk   some   path that imparts to and shapes the same values within us as profoundly as the path the hero walked imparted and shaped his values to him. No shortcuts. And that path would necessarily be longer and more challenging than simply imitating the heroic actions.

In light of this, among some other obvious complications that I’ll not get into here, it’s no wonder I had such trouble mimicking my grandparents in my treatment of   [First Love].   Gram and Pap’s actions spawned from fifty years of life experience, which I of course, did not have. I could not therefore, rightly expect myself to be like my grandparents the least pretentiously until I had acquired the same level of life experience, which by the way, I still have not, and all this was over twenty years ago.

Back then, [this] deficiency [of wisdom] was even more pronounced. My illusion of their always-advanced nature pushed me into countless futile exercises to be like them without knowing what it really took to emulate them, and much self-deprecation when I failed. I might have avoided this if I had only seen their esteemed standing in their sixties as the product of years of less esteem, and not an innate quality that only the better, more worthy humans had. But I suppose this is a big part of what growing up is all about.

I must confess that I’m struggling here with how to express this idea precisely. So let me approach it from another angle. You remember that Star Trek episode, “Tapestry,” where Picard has that near-death experience with Q? Picard laments his behaviors as a youth (which he described later as ‘loosethreads in the tapestry of [his] life’) that lead to his reliance on a now-defective artificial heart. Looking back, Picard didn’t like his younger self, and so jumped at the chance to relive it when Q gave him the opportunity. For Picard, setting things “right” meant avoiding getting stabbed by the naussican. But as you probably remember, that regretted stabbing while seen by Captain Picardas the result of his immature, barbaric behavior, was also instrumental in his current-day success as captain of the Enterprise. With that part of his life history changed, the captain was no longer a captain, but a lowly lieutenant instead in a dead-end, low-skilled, no-excitement, mundane job. His less well-tempered history though bad, was just as necessary for his becoming captain as the more pleasant doings.

The point: Few heroes have a pristine history. Some of it is good, and some bad, but   all   of it so necessary for the hero to be a hero. Virtually always, if we’re talking about true-to-life human heroes, they do have a bad side if not in their present, then definitely in their past. Though the apparent absence of a bad side intensifies our awe of such people, we must remember that it is most certainly there, so we don’t come to see the heroes as holier than thou, and as higher than human.

Now, getting back to the question of higher opinions for level five doers as opposed to level three doers: It could be that the chronic mate-seekers lack no more esteem-able health than the love-satisfied self-actualizers. Picard was actually a better man for having indulged his aggressiveimpulses as a cadet, though he devalued his earlier self because of them. My grandparents were upstanding people but only after they had gone through a period of non-upstanding ness. Perhaps like these, love-seekers are simply at an earlier stage in their social development.

Given all this, as well as reading the first hundred pages of  [Abraham Maslow's book]  Motivation and Personality, I think now that we’ve wrongly pitted level five needs gratification against the lower levels in these dialogues. I’ve done it. You’ve done it. The general tone here has been me justifying my level three needs and disregarding the higher level ones. You on the other hand, appear to favor level five pursuits, as you’ve cited the numerous pitfalls of the more animalistic level three needs and the trouble to which ungoverned level three passions can lead, and indeed, have lead you yourself. You work on level five gratifications, while I work more at level three. Given the debating nature of these talks, we’vecome dangerously close to errantly dichotomizing these needs as though one is more right than the other. Fortunately, your email on Sunday clarified this. Again, I think we both understand that it’s really not an either-or situation after all. Ideally, level three comes first. But when we can’t easily gratify level three, then the next best thing is to focus on levels four and five. While this will never completely mitigate our level three needs, you’re right, it’s better than doing nothing.

If you think about it, this makes no more sense than say esteeming adulthood over childhood, for these are just different stages of humanity, neither one inherently more respectable than the other. Healthy adults don’t fault a child for being a child, though his youngling status means that he can’t do everything the adult does. No, the healthy adult empathizes with the child because after all, he was a child himself once, and recognizes his own childhood as a necessary step along the path that lead him to his adulthood. So he doesn’t fault the child for being where he was once. It’s like righteously proclaiming our peaceful nature by slighting the warriors, forgetting that we too warred in earlier generations, to gain peace within our borders. The warriors today, though they might seem repugnant, are simply doing now what we had to do then to erect the tranquility upon which we now stand while looking down on them. Can we avoid double standards by faulting them for following our same path? Likewise, those happily functioning at level five should not disparage thoseworking on lower needs, lest they become hypocrites. It’s too easy and unjust to blame a bum for his plight, while we live in warm shelters with fully-stocked refrigerators.

This is a typical response however. Maslow describes a tendency in humans, once they meet a lower-level need, to take its gratifier for granted, to begin thinking that we no longer have that need, to start believing that need to represent an underdeveloped, untamed, uncivilized side of humanity which we have evolved beyond, and then in the extreme, come to despise its gratifier. Many discard the gratifiers only to find that the need they thought had gone forever comes back with no less intensity than when they gratified it the last time. But again, especially in light of your Sunday email, I see that you’re not doing this.

Tom Hesley

Related Posts

•  Tom’s Views –> Self Actualization – A Strictly Internal Affair