Keeping Faith
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.
