Dear [Linda],
This post is in response to the comments you made here.
It has been written across time that the desire to love and be loved by someone desirable is a lot of things; it’s a thirst, it’s an itch, it’s a pain, it’s what we as humans were designed to seek, presumably, in order to create future generations of our species. It’s what most of us live for; at least, until we get it. Once we do get it, and it’s continued supply is assured, then we can go on to truly excel at other, more worldly pursuits, like writing. But until we get it, maintaining consistent focus on those other pursuits is much more difficult. Have you ever tried writing while thirsty? How about doing a term paper when you’ve got an itch that just won’t quit? Or, what about understanding a hard book while nursing a toothache? Like these other distractions in my opinion, you can’t stop the yearning for love just by ignoring it, or by insisting that it should not exist. No, you’ve actually got to quench the thirst with a beverage, scratch the itch, and eliminate the pain at its source. True. You can num it for a while by becoming a workaholic, and for a time, you may indeed do well at the job in spite of the thirst, the itch, and the pain. But when you go home each night and feel that cold draft upon your face as you climb the stairs to your bedroom, where there’s no one up there waiting for you, you’ll realize sooner or later that the job does not, and in fact, cannot fill your need to be loved. The job neither quenches the thirst, nor scratches the itch, nor gets rid of the pain of being alone. No matter how deeply you plunge into your work or how often you visit the bars afterwards, that draft will always be there to remind you that your bedroom is cold and that your life is not, as of yet, as fulfilled as you’d like it to be.
People deny this need because it makes them emotionally dependent on and thus, vulnerable to being hurt by others, and they hate being vulnerable; they hate needing others in order to be truly happy. Nonetheless no matter how much they’d like to erase it, the need for love cannot be vanquished; it can only be met. Work is no substitute for true love.
Oh sure, we can stay busy with other pursuits, though thirsty. We might even enjoy them at times, though the ache of loneliness will still remind us of our unsatisfied needs. We can use diversions like work, friends, games, and drugs to temporarily lessen that ache or reduce the itching. But the Beatles had it so right in the 1960s, when they sang that all one really needs is love. Love is an essential stop on the journey to our destiny because it appears that in order to achieve our maximum potential, we must first be fulfilled in love. Otherwise, the love need will eventually and virtually always hold us back. Perhaps you’re right that this should not be the case – that neither love nor a woman should keep me from writing. But the fact is that I write so much better when there’s someone to dream about and enjoy. I didn’t choose this. It just is, and while I might try and fight it if I was thirty years younger, my mission today is to fully accept this inalienable truth; that my writing will indeed ebb and flow in lockstep with the romance in my life.
Take care.