Tom's Love Quest

Dear [Tess],

Things are great. It turned out to be a gorgeous sunny day, once the fog and gray clouds disappeared. I’m going out for a walk this afternoon. Will be thinking of you.

Tom Hesley

Dear [Tess],

Good morning. I just woke up. It’s a gray, cold day outside. But it’s nice and warm in here.

I think about you too. You might be my dream girl.

I have some writing to do today and a little cleaning. All in all, it will be a typical day.

More later,
Tom Hesley

Dear [Mentat],

Yes, the reading has been most enjoyable, informative, and enlightening. I really do want to be knowledgeable about this stuff, and so lately I’ve been spending six to eight hours a day reading. I have a little ways to go in order to catch up to your knowledge. But these dialogues give me good reasons to read – so that I might understand your arguments and how to counter them.

Well, even if the actual numbers of abusive priests is small, the damage they can cause is quite a bit bigger, since each one has access to perhaps hundreds or even thousands of children in a parish.

Yes, as long as the nymphos are gratified most of the time when they feel the urge, I contend that they do get more pleasure from sex than those who barely desire it. This must be so if, as I believe, pleasure is indeed the result of gratifying desire. The more desire you have to gratify, the more potential pleasure you can reap. The less you have, then the less you’ll reap. Thus, as in your water scenario above, the person who gets thirsty every two days and then enjoys the quenching each time indeed gets more pleasure (or at least, more incidents of pleasure) in a two-week period than the person who thirsts only once during that same two-week period.

Now on a per-thirst-quenching incident basis, I agree with you. He may enjoy water as much as someone who must drink it more often. But he won’t enjoy it   as often. Per a given amount of time (say a month or a year), he’ll enjoy it fewer times. So I’d say that the person who must quench his thirst a hundred times a month, gets more enjoyment than the one who only does so ten times.

In light of the above, I’d also contend that reduced sex drive would indeed constitute reduced over all pleasure that could be gained from having sex. The less you want it, the less you’re going to seek it. Again, you may enjoy it immensely when you   do   seek it. But since a reduced drive would mean that you’d be compelled to seek it less often, you wouldn’t enjoy getting it as much, because you   wouldn’t   get it as much. This all boils down to the following question: Who enjoys sex more? The nymphomaniac who has 20 orgasms per month, or the frigid person who has just one orgasm per month? I believe that you know now, how I’d answer it.

I might also add that the person who wants it very little may feel that way because he or she   does not   get much pleasure from it. If he did get lots of enjoyment, it seems to me that he’d want it more. I knew a girl in the late 1990s who openly boasted that she was asexual. She never went with either man or woman, and didn’t want to, finding the whole sexual ritual disgusting. Granted, she’s at the far end of the continuum of frigidity. But she does illustrate that someone who desires sex very little would also get very little pleasure from it, and in fact, actively seeks to avoid such pleasures. Again, with less desire, there is less pleasure in gratifying it. And it’s also true that when little pleasure is felt when gratifying a particular desire, the desire itself lessens. After all, how long would you continue wanting ice cream if all you could find were sour curds?

However, many passions fuel rape, besides sex. In fact, often, sexual desire has nothing to do with a man’s desire to dominate a woman. Some guys like hurting women or disfiguring them so that no one wants them. We can’t blame sexual craving for much of the concealed violence against women that you mention. Much of this “wholesale rape and murder” grows out of a culture-wide bias against women, which still exists to some degree today even in this country. It’s rare that a man’s sheer love lust for a woman drives him to harm her. If it does, then it’s consistently easy to show that he has other mental problems besides simply thwarted sexual gratification. Blaming sexual craving for violent crimes against women, is like blaming guns for the high rates of murder. It makes [little] sense to do so.

Understood. But again, I must say that you may be attributing too much evil to the sex drive, whether we’re talking about you, me, or even someone who has been jailed for rape.

[...] Keep in mind that you had lots of excess alcohol and pot byproducts in your system in those days. Plus you probably weren’t eating well, not to mention the fact that you were severely depressed. You said often how irregular your sleeping patterns were. Well, given all that, your mind probably wasn’t functioning in a healthy manner.

Such a mix of conditions can produce confused responses to stimuli, false causalities, and exaggerated addictions. You might not have acted [so] problematically if you hadn’t been drinking, been eating a well-balanced diet, getting enough sleep on a regular basis, and not smoking pot. Who’s to say whether sexual craving [in and of itself] caused you to behave too irresponsibly? I bet it probably was not.

Tom Hesley

Dear [Tess],

All is well here. What have you been thinking about where you and I are concerned? I think lots about us walking together and holding hands. Do you like kissing?

Tom Hesley

Dear [Tess],

[She said that as she slept last night, she awoke to find herself searching for my hand.]

Oh! You’re so sweet! I too have been searching for someone like you for a very long time. I have a blue robe with gray trim – just to help you fill in some of the blanks.

Two spoons? [She referred to the two of us fitting together in bed, just like two spoons would.] Yes. I hope with all my heart that it’s that way.

Sleep well. I’ll be thinking about you.

Tom Hesley

Hey sweetie.

I’m great. Just working on this speech I’m delivering in November, and did a little house cleaning this afternoon.

Yes, it would be wonderful to spend some time with you. I feel a very warm, sensitive and beautiful person when I read your letters.

Do you like holding hands?

Sleep well, and I’ll talk to you later.

Tom Hesley

Dear [Tess],

I like taking long walks and hikes, listening to music, reading, watching good movies, and doing repairs on the house.

My day’s been nice. I’ve written around 2000 words and am finishing up some laundry now.

*smile*

Take care, and talk to you later.

Thinking of you,
Tom Hesley

Dear [Mentat],

As detailed   here, and then with more elaboration   here,  I reject the notion of ridding one’s self of his   love lust   by using   mindfulness meditation therapy   techniques.  Nothing seems more satiating for the thirst for love, than true love itself.  Meditation is no substitute for true love.  Given my own difficulties in finding true love, I suppose one would think that by now, I’d be ready to fully embrace medication as a workable alternative to the real thing.  But I haven’t.  As stated many times, my life philosophy is to find true love or to die trying.  It’s what I’m geared to do.  So no meditation for me; just true love please. 

Tom Hesley

Related Posts

• Tom’s Views –> Can Mindfulness Meditation Therapy Cure Love Lust?
• Tom’s Views –> Only True Love Cures True Love Desire

Dear [Mentat],

Yes, I still believe that the more we approach, the greater our chances of finding a true love become. However, when I adopted this overly simple strategy in 1990, I was surprised to encounter such a high percentage of   romantic rejections. I mean, many dating books advise men to expect just one out of every one-hundred women to respond favorably. But with me, that hits-to-misses ratio was more like one out of every fifteen hundred. No joke!

Plus, I’d underestimated the cumulative negative impacts of too frequent rejection on my psyche.  Through all that, I came to understand that I was taking the romantic rejections too personally. Back then, rejection affected me as would a punch in the face, sending me reeling for weeks sometimes. I came to detest it as well as the women who issued it. The more   love rejections   I received, the more hurt I got and the more afraid of rejection I grew. 

So I had to bow out of the game for a year or so in the mid 1990s to learn to desensitize myself. To that end, I entered therapy, read several books on coping with love rejection, and tried to savor life without women for a while. The therapy proved a success, though of course, I still don’t like rejection. But today, the female utterance of the word No, doesn’t produce the searing anxiety it used to. I don’t feel as slighted anymore, because I understand that ladies are as powerless to control who turns them on as I, and so could not be rightly blamed for finding me wanting.  See    here    for more details on some of the potentially harmful effects of romantic rejection that I’ve encountered through the years. 

It’s bad to seek rejection just for rejection’s sake because one needs to have an eye toward any wisdom the experience might contain; wisdom that’s easy to miss if all you’re worried out is bumping up the numbers. At times, I lost sight of the real goal (a beautiful lady saying yes), and actually felt a sense of accomplishment when I got a no. I reasoned that the love rejections were evidence that at least I was getting out and trying, rather than sitting on my butt at home doing nothing at all. This was certainly true enough. After all, I wouldn’t have accrued the rejections by sitting around at home. In a sense, the rejections were indeed strong evidence that I was at least playing the game. No, I wasn’t   winning   the game. But since one must first   play   the game in order to win, I found comfort in knowing that I was one step closer to winning, by playing, and accruing the romantic rejections.

This worked for a year or two. My pride in my monumental efforts to defy my fear helped offset the humiliations I encountered. It didn’t matter whether she said no or yes. Success at that point I measured by how often I could bring myself to ask, irrespective of how she responded. But soon, that sweet part of the bitter-sweet taste of rejection disappeared. No longer was it good enough just to get out there. No longer was I proud of being able to work up the courage to ask a woman to dance. And finally, no longer did I feel any sense of accomplishment by having gotten far enough to be told No. Getting rejections thus became child’s play. And then, once the thrill of victory over successfully making the attempt faded, only the humiliation remained. Thus, sustaining the motivation to keep trying grew difficult, particularly once I moved here to Altoona in late 2001. Even today, it’s not [so much] the fear of being rejected that keeps me from approaching more women. Rather, it’s the resignation that they’ll just say no anyway, so why bother?

Romantic rejection is all the more embarrassing when one realizes that he could have gotten the same information without risking so much. Why jump head first into a pond to see how warm it is, when you could have just stuck your toe in and learned the same? Throughout the 1990s, I dismissed the validity of non verbal communication. For me, the toe test was insufficient and potentially inaccurate. It wasn’t good enough thus, for a woman to just give me a dirty look as I walked toward her. Simply looking at her and observing her reaction did not absolve my responsibility to genuinely move past my fear, and actually talk with her. Just reading her body language didn’t count. No. I expected myself to actually   ask   her if she’d care to get acquainted. Of course, by this time in the typical scenario, she had already answered that several times with dirty looks, by moving away, and such, and was clearly frustrated that I paid no mind. So, not only did I get rejected, I also got many judgmental stares along with disparaging comments and unfavorable epithets. In this way, the bite of romantic rejection felt much more painful than it might have, had I acted smarter and with more sensitivity.

To wrap this up then, the   costs   of focusing only on increasing the numbers of women approached and rejections received, and not enough on improving the approach techniques, would be:

1. Too much wasted time and excessively hurt feelings.  Why ask a lady out when you’re virtually certain that she’ll say no anyhow? 
2. Needlessly frequent and severe rejections.   It’s one thing to simply be told no. That’s humiliating enough.  But it’s quite another (and more painful thing) to be told no with the added message that she thinks you’re a fool, particularly when you have indeed acted like one.
3. Loss of one’s good reputation. Asking the same woman out too often can make you into a stalker in her eyes as well as her friends’.  When numbers are the only game, we often forget who we’ve already approached, particularly when approaching hundreds of women in a night Women talk crassly about insensitive men, who appear to be on the make.
4. Missed opportunities to learn from rejection. If you don’t consider what happened and learn from it, you’ll be no more likely to get a Yes the next time. And who wants to keep repeating the same mistake? Take gamblers for example. They’re never content to just sit back and play the game. They’re constantly looking for ways to improve their odds of winning. The man seeking a mate should also be forever on the look-out for new angles.
5. Wasted resources   such as needless money spending. Often, guys buy ladies drinks and other gifts, even when they strongly suspect that she doesn’t like them. Yet they do so hoping to   melt her heart.   What a waste however. While such strategies might work on the so-called gold-digging lady, they will not on any woman whose only agenda item is to exchange love with a desirable man.
6. Less time for other pursuits. If one’s constantly out in the bars working the numbers, he’ll miss out on other, perhaps more enjoyable pastimes. To me in the 1990s, bars were a necessary evil one had to endure in order to meet women. I didn’t like them, but couldn’t think of any other places where so many available and desirable women congregated, and thus where my chances of finding a lover would be higher. I would have much rather spent that time attending ham radio club meetings, shopping for CDs and books, and tinkering with computers. However, these activities weren’t often frequented by sought-after women. Yet now that I’m aware of the futility of meeting someone in a bar, not to mention the fact that I don’t drink anymore, I find these days that I make very much more time for hobbies than ten years ago.
7. Too many dead-end relationships. When all we care about are the numbers, it’s easy to become entangled in a relationship with a lady who isn’t   the best.   That is to say, that without careful prior consideration of the woman’s desirability, we can end up approaching ladies who look great from afar but cease looking so good as we move closer. I’ve on occasion glanced women across the room that seemed perfect. Then I rushed over (before someone else would snag them) for a dance. Sometimes they’d say yes and next thing I knew, I’d be on the dance floor looking at her before me and wondering where her charm had gone that had been so plain but a few moments ago.

From the preceding list, it’s easy to glean the many practical advantages of working smarter while targeting more than just raising the sheer numbers of approaches:

1. Better Overall Mood. Less shame, less depression, less wasted time chasing relationships doomed to failure from the start, more liked in one’s social group, and more time to pursue fun hobbies.
2. Less Need for Therapy. This grows from item 1.
3. Improved Self Confidence and Self Esteem   due to less squandering of the self on needless rejections.
4. Improved chances of finding Miss Right. If one is not consumed in the wasteful efforts of needless repeated rejections and dead-end relationships, he can aim his resources where they’ll count more, and only subject himself to rejection from truly eligible women.
5. Fewer Wasted Resources. Follows from item 4 above.
6. Better Reputation. With a better ability to   read the situation,   a man is less likely to make unwelcome advances in which he goes needlessly too far. Women like knowing a guy is sensitive to their wishes, and will talk well of he who heeds them to others, even if they don’t consider him attractive.
7. More Time and Energy For Other Pursuits.   Questing for the right relationship can be exhausting because not only does it take considerable time and effort to troll for girls, but the chronic rejections make the search doubly taxing. If a man is working smarter, and is thus presumably getting fewer rejections, this would seem to bias his overall experience in the quest to the positive and thus make it less draining on his psyche.
8. Better Effectiveness in Work and Career.  With fewer rejections, and a resulting better overall mood as mentioned in item 1, the man would concentrate better, be less irritable, and thus, do a better job at work. As a result, his coworkers would like and respect him more and likely push for promotions for him where applicable. This in turn would give him more resources (buying power), and as you know, women prefer richer men, even the ones who can’t accurately be typed as gold diggers.
9. Longer Lasting, Happier Relationships. If a man selects more eligible mates to begin with, he’ll be happier with his choices for longer periods. While it’s true that he won’t have as many dates since he’s choosier, those that do present themselves will be more completely fulfilling. As a result, he’ll
   A. Treat them better,
   B. Respect them more,
   C. Be less given to abusing them, and
   D. Be better able to accommodate any unusual proclivities in them.
   In short, he’ll be better equipped to accept them as they are and thus, won’t as likely seek to change them. Potential friction shrinks therefore, and the lady will feel more genuinely loved (because she would in fact be).
10. Enhanced Desirability. Given items 1, 3, 6, and 8 above, the man would be deemed more attractive, and so his chances of attracting the lady of his dreams would go up.

There, does that answer your question?

Tom Hesley

Related Posts

• Combating The Shame Of Rejection
• Tom’s Views –> Romantic Rejection Causes Long-Term Harm

Dear   [Mentat],

Well, you’ve beat at least two major addictions in your life: alcohol and snuff. Now that you’ve got years of sobriety, and know deeply the necessity not to waver, hopefully no woman or career will ever make consider drinking again.

But yes, listening to your better judgment, as I found out firsthand, must trump all other voices. My better judgment always told me to not date heavy women. But as you can well imagine, my mother, sisters, and female friends disagree with this vehemently. They say I’m shallow and short-sighted, offering that the type of beauty I seek is temporary and that a love based on it can never last. They argued that the ravages of aging affect less a person’s mind (their soul), than the body, and so they say that the energy of the spirit rather than the matter of the flesh is the more righteous quantity upon which a male should fixate. Of course I know this to be untrue today. But from the late 80s through 1997, their arguments, so cogently sounded by so many, had me doubting my better judgment, and from 1990 through 1992, overtly defying it.

But though the inner voice of better judgment rates quieter than those of the surrounding crowd raised in unison against it, it’s the one to which we must listen, for it punishes us most severely if we don’t. Yours did perhaps, by driving you to drink more. Mine did the minute I stripped off the clothing of those [curvy] women in the 90s, who I refer in that Lady-In-The-Park story as   dark ladies.   Their [obesity] turned my stomach. Poor [Hane]. I almost threw up the first time I saw her naked. I couldn’t contain my revulsion, which must have shown on my face, for she knew of my displeasure immediately and started to cry. She wondered aloud why I’d permitted our relationship to go so far if I thought her so detestable. I told her that I’d ignored my better judgment in order to do the “right” thing by her. I wanted to love her, and hoped that I’d find a compelling reason to, if I allowed myself to know her well.

She was a decent girl, and most helpful in taking me shopping, to doctors appointments and such. She never regarded me as too needy, and always respected me. Her attitude never betrayed any disappointment in me. She loved me. Hands down. Once she took me to a dinner with her coworkers and made frequent references as they conversed, to what she considered my greatest qualities. She was showing me off, bragging about dating me, and that felt most nice because to that point, I hadn’t experienced a woman so deeply proud to be with me; especially a fully-sighted one. Though my inner voice screamed to get away, I didn’t listen because [Hane] was so good in every other way. She only lacked   sexual desirability. Notice that I’m favoring the phrase   sexual attraction   now over   physical attraction   because the word   sexual   more accurately encompasses both the physical and mental aspects of this lust. To say that someone is   physically attractive   incorrectly implies that this attraction is   only   physical, when in fact it is so much more. As we’ve discussed, the attraction involves highly cognitive, evaluative mental processes that consider far more than [just] a woman’s shape or bodily attributes.

Nonetheless, in those times of blind ignorance in my life, I suspected that those women whose judgments drowned mine might be right. Perhaps sexual attraction really does mean but a trifle in the grand scheme of things. Perhaps it should mean nothing. All the good things that [Hane] was, they said I should revere, and were adamant and thus “right” in this. Why? Because had I rejected [Hane] upon realizing that she attracted me not, I’d have never seen her good. I’d have never allowed her to show me what a deeply abiding love from a lady other than a family member was like. Up until [Hane], I suspected such unbridled affection from an able-bodied female impossible, as no sighted woman had ever taken a serious interest in helping me except my mother, grandmothers, and sisters to a lesser degree. So [Hane's] love threw me into a rather large ego trip for some months, filling voids I hadn’t realized were even there.

She   wanted   to help, and used to get angry when I’d take busses or cabs instead of calling her for rides. She reacted oppositely to my handicap than most every other woman. Rather than shrugging me off, she embraced and respected me for having made it so far career wise, while contending with such an oppressive force.

I told her once about my eyes being extra sensitive from the cataract surgeries, and how unattractive I felt that the resultant squinting made me. But she disagreed, saying that the squints were cute. She enjoyed leading me around, which women since have said they did not like doing. They felt that I should have been ‘the leader’ as we went into restaurants, skating rinks, and golf courses. The fact that I often couldn’t see where I was going did not lessen their desires for a man who takes charge. They took no pity on me.

[Hane] didn’t care though. I think she relished being needed, as exemplified in our public outings where I’d walk sighted guide slightly behind her. In all my years of dating, I amassed a big list of laments of the treatments I received from sighted women. Yet none of those, not a single one [did Hane ever exhibit]. She never treated me badly, and seemed to know, without being told, what I needed from her to feel happy. Her spirit was pure even though her body was fat.

[Hane] made it easy to believe those women arguing for the mind instead of the body. But I would soon learn what to me then was unthinkable: Neither a woman’s good deeds nor her hardships make her romantically desirable. However, I’ll get into that another time.

At any rate, better judgment can seem brutal and cruel because it often instructs us to stay clear of people who seem on intellectual and emotional levels, to be so wonderful. We may think they’re wonderful. But if we don’t feel it in the heart and loins, they’re just not good enough. So avoid ‘em.

Tom Hesley

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