Tom's Love Quest

Dear [Mentat],

Yes, many questions float around in my head about how useful seeking pity will be. As noted, I don’t think a woman asking it of me would persuade me to give her a chance in love, particularly if I felt no carnal attraction. So, do I even have a right to expect such special dispensation from women? Am I crazy for hoping that someone else would be so moved if I’m not moved myself? I value those in-love feelings above all else in my relationships. Without those, as I see it, what’s the point of being in a relationship at all? It seems that most others feel likewise. They want to be in love, and they leave when they fall out. But if my imperfections keep women from loving me with passion as my experiences suggest, then am I wrong for wanting to be in love without being able to inspire similar feelings in women? No. I don’t think so.

Many have never experienced LAFS and so insist that it’s a myth. But this resembles the congenitally blind man, insisting that colors aren’t real because he’s never observed them. How meaningful is that? His prove-it-to-me attitude hinders his ability to assimilate new concepts and grow, because he rejects that which doesn’t get through the filter of his own experiences. Colors do exist, no matter how fervently he denies them. And like colors, LAFS too exists because studies show that between sixty-five and seventy-five percent of the population say that they’ve experienced it. Fortunately though, I need not take it on faith because I’ve seen it for myself long ago, as puppy love for   [First Love]   in 1972 as well as in several subsequent relationships. That passion along with its derivatives, survives to this day, and I must admit that if   [First Love]   were to request a new association tomorrow, I’d have trouble saying no, though I probably would say no. I still love her, though I’ve not seen her since 1990. The point is that people often dismiss LAFS as short-lived and superficial. But it does last in my experience, and in fact, the more quickly it comes on, the longer it will probably last, as discussed above. I’ve loved   [First Love]   now for thirty-three years, nonstop.

Though I have a better appreciation now of why women take a long time to warm up, I think, that at least for men and for many women as well, the slower attraction comes on the other hand, the more fragile it is, and thus, the less likely will it endure. Indeed this bucks conventional wisdom. But again, allow me to expound a bit more on my story with   [First Love]   to illustrate. As I said above, she took seven years, count ‘em,   seven years   to finally say that she loved me; no LAFS on her part. Even though her love germinated slowly, once bloomed it lasted but five short months. Then she left, without a backward look. Her love came slowly, and left abruptly. All those cans of pop I bought her at school meant nothing. The rose bush, the cards, the repeated requests for her hand at proms, all of it never really made her love me, not in the pleasantly enslaving ways of LAFS. If I’d realized then that her absent LAFS damned us as a couple, I’d probably have stayed clear. But what’s done is done, and I’m actually glad for those bitter-sweet times because of how they underscored the importance of the LAFS ingredient. [First Love] showed that a beloved without LAFS probably means long, cold times of uncertainty, pain, and eventual dream-doom for the lover.

I’ve loved women for whom the initial attraction (LAFS) was intense as well as those who inspired no such feelings, not even after years of knowing them. Comparing the two, the LAFS relationships by far fulfilled the most, because these rarely bored me. But when they did bore, on those occasions when that initial attraction faded, the resolve to stay in them nonetheless,   never   faltered. In the height of our happiness, [First Love's] body ceased to amaze me the way it had in school, just like the glass of water grows less interesting once a thirst is quenched. In high school, one look at her gorgeous legs and my heart would start beating fast, the penis would stand erect, and concentration on anything else but the fantasy of passionately caressing her became impossible. Of course prior to 1980, I never got to do that for real, and so, my unresolved passion for her only grew, intensifying the thrills of the fantasies. But once I had lived the dream a few times, the thought of it grew much less intriguing and foremost.

Also, those same fantasies stopped tasting as sweet because partly, the curiosity that fired them before 1980 was gone. Once we moved in together, [First Love]   was readily available in reality. So any time a fantasy occurred, I could immediately fulfill it before it could mature into the knee-weakening lust of deprivation which had so characterized the core of my existence in the 70s. In fact, at times that summer on Jackson Street,   [First Love]   would lay on the couch in bare feet, short shorts, and bikini tops. Yet I’d experience no longing as I beheld her, though this vision often appeared in highly charged fantasies in high school. She looked as plain as plain-Jane can look once my sexual cup (if you will) was full. Some might say that now was the time to move on to greener pastures.

Yet I never considered leaving her, because those initial sparks of LAFS, though gone, had ignited much hotter emotional flames in their wake. While in the beginning, the LAFS passions of physical attraction and curiosity were really all I cared to indulge, later they subsided, and while still important, contributed much less the reasons I wished to stay.   [First Love]   was smart (never airy), attentive, and thoughtful. Though less powerful, a pleasant non physical sensation of overall satisfaction emerged. The loneliness was gone, and the sense surfaced that I’d finally gotten what I wanted after all those years of campaigning and begging. Gone was my tendency to gawk at other babes in the street.   [First Love]   was undeniably among the most attractive women in the world, and she completely quenched the thirst for involvement with all [other] such ladies. No one could produce more pleasure and sense of fullness for me. Even at age nineteen, I knew there were no more loveable women out there, and though admittedly I hadn’t experienced many women to that point, with   [First Love]   loving me, I didn’t want to.

When we find someone good enough, the need to look for anyone better vanishes, and so we become unresponsive to the wooing charms of others. Returning to my water metaphor, completely quench a thirst at home for example, and you’ll stop desiring water anywhere else as well, so long as you return home periodically to drink. Why drink elsewhere when you’ve already got the best water at home?

Of course, along with the quenching of the thirst comes decreased desire for the water. This is normal and expected. But some folks mistake their faltering passion for it as a sign that the water itself has become less desirable. I point out that

1. the water being less desirable, and
2. desiring the water less

are two very different concepts although people typically respond to both phenomena identically – by seeking different water. They look elsewhere hoping to find “better” water – water for which they again thirst and subsequently enjoy drinking once more. But the water at home is still as good as it always was, though it might not seem so to the man without thirst. Chemically, it hasn’t changed, and thus would still quench even the direst of thirsts, if such a thirst still existed. So often people want to have their cake before them, yet eat it too. That is, they want to experience the highly pleasant feelings of desire being gratified, yet they also expect that desire to persist beyond its gratification so that they might repeat the pleasures of that gratifying experience indefinitely. This however is irrational because we’ll stop desiring even the most desirable water once we quench our thirsts. The same can be said of women.

As   [First Love]   quenched my thirst to bed with beautiful women, my excitement in the bedroom declined surprisingly fast. Briefly, I was saddened that those explosive passions didn’t appear more often, and never to the degree that they did during our first time or two together. But I figured that the same would happen with   any   woman, and this de-emphasis of the physical was just a normal part of any happy relationship. Indeed anecdotes abound about how over time, lovers spend less time absorbed in each others’ bodies. Mom spoke often of this, as have my sisters, and [our electronics teacher] as well. In fact, so does Maslow, more generally, in the preface to the second edition of [his book]   Motivation and Personality.   He suggests that when a basic need is satisfied, humans virtually always start taking for granted the object that satiated their thirst. They lose interest in it and often discard its gratifier, only to find later that their lust for it returns. Then, they have to acquire the object all over again to re-gratify themselves.

Had I stayed with   [First Love]   long enough, this might have happened. I might have fallen out of love and strayed eventually. But as I said, in our brief time together, never once did I behold another woman with any lustful longing, even though the excited passion for   [First Love]   had shrunken. [Our electronics teacher] described that initial magnetism as temporary, and being a man with a rich dating history who later became a good provider, he seemed qualified to offer useful insights into these issues of the heart. Further, in my case, how he described it was precisely how it was. The first couple times with   [First Love]   were wondrous, and after that, became unexciting and perhaps a little boring. But I knew all the while that   [First Love]   was a keeper, because as the fantastic interest in her abated, so too did my lust for other women. When completely gratified,   all   sources of carnal enjoyment become uninteresting, just like the one that is gratifying us. My passions for   [First Love]   indeed declined, but I knew better than to allow myself to believe that I no longer needed her. Though I didn’t   feel   the need, I was certain that it was still there just as certainly as the need for good water to survive is omnipresent, even during times when we don’t thirst for it.

However, it’s also true that we might stop desiring our water at home for reasons other than the mere fact that through sheer gratification, we want it less. We may learn for example when we next visit the water cooler, that someone has put sulfur in it. In this case, we would go looking elsewhere for better water, and rightly so. Though we desire the water at home less due to the sulfur, our thirst for it in general remains. Here, the water   has   lost its desirability. So while it follows that we’d stop desiring water when it ceases to be desirable, it’s not true that water stops being desirable merely because we stop desiring it.

When it comes to women, it’s important to know the causes of reduced passion so we can rightly decide whether to stay with our current lover or seek another. After all, we’ll never escape reduced passion. That is to say, whether she’s truly our lifelong dream girl or just someone we   thought   to be such (but learned later was not), in either scenario [reduction or loss] of lust will almost certainly result.

I don’t mean to brag. But I never had too much trouble telling the difference between real and apparent dream girls.

Involvement with a real one quells all passion for other women, while dating a near miss does not.

I’m proud to introduce real ones to my family and friends, but not so excited to have apparent ones come here.

Even after the love lust is completely gratified, I still wish to stay with the real dream girl, but [am] eager to leave apparent dream girls.
I know I’ve got a real keeper when there’s an implicit, highly intuitive sense that I can do no better, and wouldn’t want to, even if I could. With an apparent dream girl however, this certainty never comes, or if it does, only lasts for days after meeting her for the first time.
I only dream erotic scenes with real dream girls, and never about apparent dream girls. Thus I will not commit to a lady until she’s appeared in my dreams in the pleasing ways of love. Until she does, we cannot rightly conclude that she’s a real dream girl. After all how could a real one not appear in dreams as the ideal lover?

Real dream girls never stop feeling like dream girls, no matter what they say or do. Irrespective of how poorly   [First Love]   treated me for example, I still never questioned my love for her. I’ve always loved her, even today, in light of everything both good and bad I know about her. As stated above, I’d be hard pressed to turn down a new opportunity to date her (though my intellectual side would prevent me from becoming a doormat again). Apparent dream girls on the other hand, can easily make me doubt my resolve. All it takes is a foul word or tone, or too many incidents of them squeezing the tube of toothpaste in the middle, or leaving too many dirty dishes unwashed, and I’m ready to pack it in.  

If forced, I’d give up my family for a real dream girl if they inserted themselves between us. But as happened with [Mim], I was grateful for their intervention because [Mim] was but an apparent dream girl.

A real dream girl instantaneously transmutes the historically selfish person into one of understanding and compassion. An apparent dream girl is much more subject to abuse because her welfare isn’t paramount in her boyfriend’s eyes. So all these cases of abuse you hear about? I bet most every one of them occur because the guy settled for an apparent dream girl and didn’t wish to hold out for the real thing.

Real dream girls really turn me around at levels that go much deeper than reason. Their internals become mine. What they value, I come to value too. And this is not simply a case of me hiding my real preferences to please them, because at the most internal levels, my preferences themselves actually change. Example: Though as a loveless man I’m convinced that I’ll never want children, I’ve observed this idealism to melt during times of involvement with ladies I truly loved ([First Love], [Emeebee], [Alandra], and [Judith]). Suddenly, the thought of a crying baby and all the hard work necessary to keep it safe and healthy seemed so natural, so right, and so fantastic. Yet when those relationships ended, I soon returned again to the prior dogma of being childless forever.

Real dream girls it seems, are the catalysts to this empathic merging. Apparent dream girls however, do not change us in this way. On the contrary, they may even strengthen our dogmas of single-hood. I never wanted children less, for example, than I did while dating [Mim]. Nor did I wish to “play the field” more. The fact that she wanted commitment and kids made no difference because her desires to me seemed like little gusts of wind along the path I’d already chosen for myself prior to ever knowing her. They did not alter that path, nor was I compelled to willfully resist it. Real dream girls however, rewrite our life desires and plans. Jim Croce seemed to miss this point in that song   I Got A Name   from 1973. He sings, “If you’re going my way, I’ll go with you.” One gets the idea that whoever it was to whom he was singing, was clearly not a real dream girl to him. It might have been an apparent dream girl, a family member, or his mother. Heck, it might have been some man like his father or boss, or anyone else whatsoever. But it was certainly not an apple of his eye, for he spends the whole song affirming his individuality and stand-alone strength. He says he has a name like pine trees lining a winding road, singing birds, and croaking toads, and like a north wind whistling down the sky, the whippoorwill, and the baby’s cry, he has a song. He makes sure we know that he sings that song loud. And he seems to disparage (just a little) the folks who aren’t so outwardly assertive, like his father, by saying, “And I carry it with me like my daddy did, but I’m living the dream that he kept hid.” Perhaps he’s never been touched by true love. To his real dream girl, he might have sang instead, “Well I know I could share it [his dream] if you want me to. And if you still want me, I’ll go with you.” Too bad he died struggling to affirm his aloneness.  I could go on and on, but I believe you get the idea.

I don’t know if I’ll ever find a real dream girl who thinks of me as a real dream guy. However, whatever it is that creates such a wonderful empathic disposition of oneness among true lovers is bigger than a person’s need for compassion or how they talk or how they look. Though surveys say that women by in large are turned off by neediness, I believe that the woman who eventually falls for me won’t mind, just as [Parkar's wife] doesn’t mind [his]. I’m only interested in ladies who’s attraction to men centers around his holistic essence, and not so much around his specific traits (like neediness, wallet size, Etc.). Thus, I feel more confident about seeking compassion. Who knows after all, where it could lead?  [I might end up,  dating up,  afer all.]

Okay, I’m done with this.

Tom Hesley

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This entry was posted on Sunday, October 16th, 2005 at 1:09 pm and is filed under Alandra, Aloneness, Attraction, Beauty, Concepts, Emeebee, First Love, Giving Rejection, Judith, Letters, Loneliness, Love At First Sight, Lust, Myths, Physical Attraction, Pity, Rejection, Shallowness, Special Ladies. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.