Tom's Love Quest

These girls wooed me the most over all.  Not that they   all   produced the greatest sexual or romantic desire and gratification, though some of them did.  But at times while either pining for or dating each of these, I felt I could be with no one more suited to my tastes, morals, values, education level, religious beliefs, social status, and so on.   While grazing in these ladies’ pastures, the grass immediately surrounding me was always the greenest.  Indeed, there was no such thing as greener grass on the other side of the fence.  There may have been   equally   green grass; but none greener.  I sensed that I was dating among the best I could, and that there was none better.  Now I’ve dated many others besides these.  But only relationships forged with the ladies in this list appeared to be the best that a relationship could be; at least for a few months to a few years anyhow. 

And now, the list:

1. [First Love]   in 1972 through 1990.
2. [Molly]   in 1974.
3. [Ann]  in 1974, and briefly in 2004.
4. [Maniac]   in 1975.
5. [BT]   in 1976.
6. [Shaina]   in 1977.
7. [Dawn]   in 1979.
8. [Cher]   in 1981 through 1983.
9. [Andrea]    in 1982.
10. [Shelly]   in 1983.
11. [Shanee]   in 1983.
12. Paula Eide    in 1984.
13. [Fannie]   in 1984 through 1987.
14. [Kate]  in 1986 through 1987.
15. [Lenee]   in 1988.
16. [Elstan]  in 1988 through 2002.
17. [Cassee]  in 1989, 1994, and 2000.
18. [Renee]   in 1990 through 1991.
19. [Juanita]   in 1991, 1994, and 2001.
20. [Roberta]   in 1991.
21. [Chrissy]   in 1993.
22. [Emeebee]   in 1993-1998, 2000-2001.
23. [Carlene J]  in 1993 and then again in 2000.
24. [Melinda]  in 1995, and briefly in 2007.
25. [Alandra]   in 1996-1997.
26. [Judith]   in 1997-1998, 2010.
27. [Vee] in 1997 -2002, 2006.
28. [Kar]   in 1998-2002.
29. [J]   in 1999-2000.
30. [Lynn]  in 1999-2000.
31. [Beejay]   in 2000 through 2001.
32. [LizDee]   in 2002 and 2004, briefly.
33. [Emmy]   in 2003, and 2005.
34. [Kandi]  in 2003 through 2005.
35. [Ballerina]   in 2004.
36. [Linda]   in 2009.
37. [Miss Independent]  in 2009.
38. [Prism]   in 2009.
39. [Elsee]   in 2009.

 

Click on each name link to see the posts that pertain to that lady.

Take care.

Tom Hesley

Dear [Mentat],

Yes you can [achieve self-actualization without focusing exclusively on that effort], but usually, only if you’re generally gratified up through level four. If so, then you can afford the luxury of (as Maslowmight call it) unmotivated, non-coping, purely self-actualizing, expressive needs pursuing. At level five, motivations   are   in fact, markedly less driven by external forces with the purest ones being   strictly internal. Also, these needs require less from the external world for their gratification. The most advanced ones require no external input to achieve, and no external measures of success to know whether we in fact gratified them. This seems to jive well with your sentiments.

One would also expect people to show less obsession (or   monomania   as you call it) in level five pursuits, since these   Being   needs are less urgent and hurt less when left unfulfilled. People don’t usually get sick from thwarted level five needs, though pathology does appear when lower-level needs are thwarted. The lower the level of thwarting, the greater the likelihood of and the more severe the resulting pathology. There is less risk when gratifying at level five because we don’t get sick should we fail. And, it’s easier to imagine a happy life devoid of piano playing for example, than one without a lover, safe living quarters, and abundant air and food supplies.

Finally, the size of the set of all pursuits that gratify level five needs dwarfs those at the lower levels, thus another reason why we’d expect people to be less devastated when they can’t fulfill a specific level five need (like playing the piano creatively). With so many more choices at level five, it’d be much easier to find another means to produce the same gratifying effect.

I agree that strictly internal measures of success are the ideal, and are ultimately what we seek – happiness independent of others’ whims and judgments. This is probably why so many attempt to start their own businesses — to break the tyrannical grip of the corporate power structure. They want to gain more control over the measures that establish their success, and in so doing make their success more determined by their own rules (internal).

But if we accept [Abraham Maslow's] needs hierarchy [triangle] as gospel, this state might only be reached once the basic needs we have that   do   depend on the whims of others, 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

[Mentat],

Actually, I didn’t realize immediately that this was tongue-and-cheek. But that’s okay. Your invitation gave me an opportunity to reflect on my own history with women, and work, and my interests both internal and external to relationships. As a result, I discovered the following: Craving may indeed be a chief source of misery as you put it. But it’s also instrumental to furnishing the world’s most intense pleasures, especially where woman lust is concerned. I have difficulty therefore, with aligning against craving because of the goodness it makes possible for us.

Forgive my dogmatism. But I have much history of indulging my craving for women. Many women. I’ve chased ‘em with just sex on my mind, where getting what I wanted from the relationship without regard for the ladies was paramount ([Peggy Sue], [Shanee]). Others I’ve loved when I couldn’t care less about sex and instead, was intensely attentive to my careers at [work place 1 and work place 2] ([Hane]). Still others, I’ve selflessly loved (like [Lenee]), when I wanted nothing from them except their happiness. I’ve noticed that as a youngling, I was more lustful, and less anxious about the practical sides of an involvement. The woman’s happiness meant less then. But with age came a heightened appreciation of the pragmatic issues. Today, I recognize that though my ultimate goal is still   my   happiness, I must first ensure that the woman is happy if I ever expect to achieve my own bliss. But more on that some other time.

In short, I’ve chased women while harboring varying degrees of obsession. I’ve loved ‘em when my only strong interest was them and the relationship ([First Love], [Cher], Paula, [Emeebee]), and I’ve loved ‘em when the relationship actually took a back seat to hobbies like ham radio, home maintenance, and personal growth concerns ([Hane], [Hanna] [Chrissy]). I’ve attempted many times during the 90s to dull the ache of low love by seeking unrelated accomplishments (ham radio licenses, promotions at work, Microsoft certifications, new music to listen to, et al). But through all that, I’ve found that for me, it’s best to obsessively focus on satiating the craving for intimacy,   until   it’s satiated.

Genuine longing for true love cannot be diminished by enthralling one’s self in a hobby, a career, a religion, a drug, alcohol, lots of friends, a humanitarian cause, or anything else. The only way to truly quench the thirst of the lovelorn, is to find   true love.  Nothing else will do. It makes no sense that one can increase his chances of finding true love by not pursuing it devotedly, and then devoting himself primarily to its maintenance.

Now what you say above, along with our many lengthy conversations on the subject, suggests that you feel that it’s better for a person going into a relationship, to have many interests outside the relationship – quests that are totally independent of it, and efforts that he keeps up even after the relationship intensifies. I admit that   some   external interests seem necessary to prevent growing tired of girlfriends. I don’t want to see them all the time or be consumed with why the relationship is working or not. In fact, as I age, I find that I need more time alone each week for reflection, reading, writing, and such, and any woman I date in the future must accommodate this. However, I’m not convinced that as a rule, love works better when the lovers have pursued (are pursuing) unrelated accomplishments.

Every degree of obsession (or devotion) to relationships to the exclusion of external pursuits, offers advantage as well as folly. Since I’ve opted to satisfy my cravings for women by focusing mainly on how to discover and attract beauties, as opposed to suppressing these cravings by acquiring many non related pursuits, it does seem that you and I have different philosophies on how to achieve happiness and minimize suffering.

Let me say for the record that I respect your view, and believe that given your unique experiences, your position is best. However, don’t be offended because I’ve devoted the rest of this writing to poking holes in your position. I only wish to communicate that your view does not work for me given   my   unique experiences, and to show you how I came to my view, and why.

It may be that one who nurtures many outside interests is more attractive. At least to some anyhow. Indeed, some women are drawn more to the well-rounded man than he with few other interests than to love somebody, and to be loved back. Our well-rounded fellow here, who we’ll call Worldly, might attract more women because he’s less available. After all, with lots of other interests, Worldly has less time for love. At least, he doesn’t want to make the time.

The notion that absence makes the heart grow fonder, indeed rings true in many human interactions. Some Worldlys know this well, and use this to manipulate women into longing for them. They deny their ladies the attention they want. They know that women desire Worldlys because they can’t have them as much or as completely as they would like. Here, Worldly’s claim to fame is his ability, intentional or not, to leave women wanting for more because he chooses not to completely fulfill them. He’s never fully theirs, and they know it. Though they hate this, their yearning for him intensifies because of it too. Whether or not he deliberately makes himself scarce, his lack of presence charms women. The uncertainty about what he’s doing when he’s not with them fans the fires of their passions to roaring, white-hot crescendos. This is one explanation of why worldly men might seem more attractive to women.

But this type of attraction, born from shortage and doubt, and possible button-pushing, is not what I consider valid. It is subject to manipulation and abuse by Worldly, and causes stress in the hearts of Worldly’s women. One could argue that it’s partly this self-absorption which seems to be more common today than in the past, that heightens the risks of disappointment in relationships. Relationships however, aren’t supposed to be stressful. Many are not. In fact the healthy affiliation should lower stress, rather than raise it. I suspect that the women in those many surveys, who say they like best the man who has numerous exterior interests, are themselves neglected to a degree by him. They don’t mention the lonely nights, with him away somewhere off chasing another dream, or the troubled finances because he overspends on his non-romantic pursuits. If I read your words correctly, you say that having other interests may make us more able to be attentive to a lady’s needs. But the opposite is also true, and often appears as a destructive theme in otherwise healthy unions. These studies that advocate moderate to low levels of exclusive focus on the relationship, often don’t consider this side of the story, and can mislead readers as to a woman’s true desires in mates.

Worldly’s breadth of knowledge, acquired through years of pursuing many diverse goals, can augment his desirability. Women say they like a man who can teach them new things, and in fact, much time is spent, particularly early in a new union, of lovers doing just that — teaching the other what they want to learn.

A man of breadth will probably make more money and be better able to recover from setbacks like job loss and illness. And he may be better equipped to rear children.

Worldly will likely be better at empathizing and relating to her plights, if those plights fall within the realms of his experience. In this way, you are right. Worldly could indeed be a more effective listener and supporter. Clearly, moderate focus on other pursuits does enhance the health of any romance by improving one’s ability to understand his mate’s difficulties.

But the question is: How much diverse pursuing is the right amount? And when is it too much? There is a balance between internal and external pursuing. I position that fulcrum as follows: This of course varies from person to person, and there’s no right position for everyone. But for me, top priority is to discover and hold on to a fulfilling love relationship. That’s first. First, above computers, books, self-improvement, writing, the Lions Club, the WPSBC Alumni Association, all of it. While I enjoy reading, writing, Djing, music, and so on, I would gladly trade most of these time-passers for equivalent time with my dream girl. I would swap several hours of reflection per week for time in her arms. I’d pawn all my ham radios to buy her a jewel. I’d sell most of my books to make space for her belongings in our home. Now I wouldn’t give up everything for her. Just most of it. Some of it I’d save as a diversion, for those times when we need to get away from each other. But I have no burning desire to be a Worldly. What I burn for, is to have my dream girl on my arm.

Indeed, the big reason I’ve acquired my many pursuits is because so far, I’ve been a dismal failure at the one goal I most want to achieve. You talked in another post about the value in recognizing that while we may not be good enough at meeting certain goals, that meeting other goals can still make for a happy, fulfilled life even though we can’t accomplish the original goals. I agree that, as Burns might say, it’s possible to be reasonably happy and comfortable without getting everything out of life we want.

But neither Burns nor Ellis, nor anyone else I’ve read has said that it’s possible to be   maximally   happy and   supremely fulfilled   when you’re forced to turn your back on your dream because you’re not good enough to make it come true. That goal of finding my dream girl is the most important yet difficult unfortunately. Its victories have been few and short-lived, and as we’ve discussed, numerous formidable social forces oppose me in it. On the other hand, my non relationship goals tend to offer greater success potential. There seems to be fewer opposing forces in these. Thus, it’s easier for example, to pass the next exam in ham radio, or the next level of Microsoft certification, than it is to mate with a perfect 10. My BS degree, and the four promotions at [work], though they took some time and much effort, were easier than finding true love. Easier, but not as fulfilling.

It was wonderful to get the diploma and the raises. Yet it was empty too. While I’ve achieved success in numerous self-oriented pursuits, and used their victories to manage my depressions, they never completely erased the loneliness. Oh, they took my mind off of it for periods and contributed greatly to my overall “reasonable comfort” with life. So they had overall good effects.

For a number of years, I became the classic workaholic. The job, and doing it well I made my center of existence in the early nineties. While I figured that attaining notoriety would make me more attractive and later, enable me to achieve a healthy balance between career, relationships, and personal interests, I loved the work itself too, with its many thrills of getting programs to run correctly. However, with each promotion, after the celebration was finished, and everyone went back to work, I found myself still in the same, unrelenting rat race. While I had moved a few steps further down the road toward success, and got to taste significant thrills along the way, I was still on the same road, still thirsting. Except for the bigger paycheck, I wasn’t any better off. Girls didn’t want to date me any more as a senior software engineer than as an associate when I first joined [that company]. Besides, the jobs got harder the higher I went. Greater demands, increased coworker conflicts, more blame for things over which I had no control, more harsh judgments from bosses, and with that, less job security and more stress. No fun. More money and higher status didn’t make me any happier with life.

Yet I persisted, hoping I’d find happiness in a nice home. So I bought the classic big house in the suburbs – a hallmark of a successful career. Yet a cold draft whistled down the stairs each night when climbing them to bed. No, there were no open or leaking windows up there. There wasn’t any   real   draft at all. No, this draft was a manifestation of a recurring thought: a reminder that though I “had it all,” something was still missing. And that something, as you’ve probably guessed, was my dream girl. The draft reminded me that though I’d worked so hard to build a good career, I was not getting the rewards promised by parents, teachers, and friends. Indeed, I was just as lonely in that big house in the suburbs as I was during the McKee Place years. What had the intervening years of hard work really gotten me? I had money, but that wasn’t enough. I had colleagues, but outside work, they weren’t around. I had lots of hobbies and spent thousands on them. The house itself kept me pretty busy for the first two years. But I still felt alone and unfulfilled. I did everything I could to make the American Dream come true. But still, there was no one upstairs waiting for me in the bedroom. No one to comfort me and make my work woes disappear for the night. No one to warm that cold air that repeatedly whisked by my face, bringing tears to my eyes frequently. So while it could be said that my career and house made me more like Worldly because they gave me numerous pursuits to focus on besides relationships, in my experience, they didn’t make me more attractive to women. At least, not more attractive enough to date the ones I desired. Nor did they eliminate that thirst for love.

No promotion ever felt as good as when   [First Love]   finally said yes after seven years, or when [Judy] let me give her a foot massage in the [camp] swimming pool and asked me to help her learn more English. Given my experiences, loving interaction with a dream girl is the only completely fulfilling activity there is. And I’ve tried many activities besides this, to know this. Yes. We need periodic victories, even small ones, to keep the blues away. And as mentioned, these little successes seem easier to come by when pursuing non-relationship goals. But no wins, either singularly or together, have ever filled the void of that missing romantic victory for me – lasting love. A win’s meaning is lessened when it doesn’t bring one closer to fulfilling his life purpose. At this point, my own Worldly pursuits, though by many accounts successful, have yet to bring me the relationship I so want, or to give me the degree of fulfillment that loving the right person has and would.

I would, without hesitation, trade ten promotions for ten years with my dream girl. I would swap the entire 15 years of aloneness at [work as a software engineer] for 15 years as a janitor in a dead-end job, so long as I had my dream girl by my side. These days, career and money concerns seem so trivial next to the love quest. While the Ohio years will always be an integral part of any success I achieve in the future, occasionally I look back on them as colossal wastes of time. Stopping that waste was, among other concerns, what drove my decision to finally leave, which marked the beginning of my mid life crisis. For the first 25 years of adulthood, I did what you’re supposed to do, and maintained plenty of personal pursuits – ones that had nothing to do with relationships. I went to school, got a degree, forged social connections, got a job, bought a house, did some traveling around the country, achieved excellence at that job, and went to church. I danced at night clubs, wrote articles for the local singles group, and maintained numerous platonic friendships.

But with mid life came the realization that none of this was getting me where I most wanted to be. Nor did any of it ever alter or obscure my true purpose, to love and be loved. With mid life, it became clear that time’s a wastin’ and that I’d best make radical changes in my approach if I hoped to ever love my dream girl. The change I opted for was to concentrate my focus and effort on what really matters, and give up those pursuits that don’t. In short, I tried, as you suggest, to make “other accomplishments.” It didn’t work for me.

Now, let’s explore another dimension of this. Worldly would argue that having many outside interests makes us more well-rounded, and as such, provides more interesting experiences to share with mates. The contention is that Worldly types bring more of value to the relationship than men of less breadth.  But as mentioned above, selecting breadth over depth has costs. Women enjoy a man’s wealth of diverse knowledge, but won’t like him spending so much time away from them to keep it up. While they’ll appreciate his zeal toward pursuing numerous and diverse goals before they met him, they’ll probably not want him to spend as much time with that once they make him their boyfriend.

Also, while lots of initial common interests are a plus, they are by no means necessary for long-term happiness. Frequently, couples bond with very little in common. Yet they live long, happy, united lives. What they don’t share at the start, they come to share once the relationship is underway. They join clubs, bowl, and ski, read books aloud to each other, dine, and listen to the radio and watch movies together, creating some common experiences that were lacking at the start. As the union progresses, the list of shared memories grows, and that initial void of wanting commonality shrinks and eventually becomes insignificant. The longer they stay together, the more in common they have, and thus, the more they have to build upon. As I see it, the only truly necessary commonalities at the start, are dreams of dedicating their lives to a love partner, and a mutual and profound attraction to each other. If both lovers share these goals and passions, differences become less detrimental. Love indeed conquers all. M. Scott Peck touches on this point in “The Road Less Traveled.”

Now to another point: Relationships are pursuits, no more or less inherently worthy than any other. They offer boundless opportunities for personal growth, spiritual enlightenment, and the thrills of accomplishment. True, they have potential gotchas – hurt feelings, heartbreak, uncertainty, agony, danger, and bitter failure. No different than any other pursuit really. Play actors cry when they don’t get the long-sought part, just as lovers sob when their beloveds hurt them. The agony of waiting for the adored to call, is duplicated in the life of the CFO, awaiting last quarter’s financial reports. Athletes hate when their bodies don’t do as they want, sort of like beloveds hate it when lovers refuse to perform a certain way. The absence of harmful disappointments cannot be found in any pursuit, romantic or not.

Few pursuits offer immediate success to anyone, and all of them necessitate that we make ourselves highly vulnerable to failure. Liability is a cost of renown, and the better you want to be at something, the more of yourself you must dedicate to it, and thus, the greater will be the psychological bruises should you hit a setback. But people supporting a tempered approach to love believe that they’re safe from heartache, if they put just a small portion of their eggs in the relationship basket. They spread their remaining eggs among many baskets. They think that failure in one area won’t be as devastating because fewer of their eggs will suffer damage since fewer of them are invested in this one pursuit. However, in so doing, they trade the excellence of depth for the safety of breadth. They either don’t realize or don’t care that for truly exceptional performers, heartache is plentiful whether you’re courting a beautiful woman, or wooing your boss for that promotion, or attempting to climb Mount Everest. The more you desire anything and the more of yourself you invest in it, the more pain you’ll experience when things don’t go your way. This phenomenon is no truer of the search for love, than say, the search for the cure for particular cancers. All pursuits, carried to the extremes that world class superiority demands, require almost complete focus and tolerate little distraction.

Like any other quest, to do a relationship well demands lots of dedication and constant work, along with a high degree of dogmatic obsession. Most happily married couples agree. If you’re going to play the piano well, you can’t also expect yourself to be a professional golfer (unless you’re extremely gifted!). Likewise, if you’re going to be a career man, then you must trade away some ability at being a good husband and father, and vice versa. You just can’t do it all, nor can you do anything well without performing poorly at something else. Olympic athletes also exemplify the fruits of complete dedication to single disciplines. Few would make Olympic teams if they didn’t practice sixteen hours a day. They must do that in order to achieve true excellence as well as a competitive edge. But how do you avoid putting your psychical wellbeing on the line if you’re going to maintain this routine for long? Indeed, much motivation to achieve derives from an implicit knowledge that our worthiness will suffer if we don’t accomplish the goal. We fear this eventuality, and those who fear it the most often tend to be the highest achievers. They’re the wealthy executives, the world-class athletes, and among the best lovers.

The idea is that most any discipline (loving another included) demands much investment of self to achieve and preserve greatness at it. Any more than just a trifle of diversion to non related pursuits impedes one’s progress in the primary objective. So why must a man dedicated to satiating of his love lust (as I am), be any less psychologically healthy than one who spends decades training to set foot on the moon or to write the great American novel, or to become a Buddhist monk? Pop psychology often illustrates the down side of obsession and how bad it is to be overly dedicated to a single goal, relationship or other. But without obsession, great works of art such as the ceilings of the Sistine Chapel, the statue David, and the symphonies of Beethoven would never have come to be. Why do we seem to regard the role of obsession in relationships with more skepticism than in other pursuits? When channeled such that no other’s rights are trodden on, obsession and compulsion are crucial ingredients in those long-lasting relationships. They are good things in this context, and so necessary to becoming an excellent mate, just as they are in virtually all other pursuits. Lessen your focus by pursuing more than just a small number of pursuits, and you sacrifice your chances of being good at any of them.

In short, I believe that neither breadth nor depth is the patently better mode of living. Sometimes, breadth is good. At others, depth works best. Now relationships don’t always require constant full dedication (depth). In fact, the best unions achieve a high degree of trust between the participants. The more mutual trust, the less necessary it is for lovers to focus on the relationship. Once this trust is achieved, then yes, it would seem healthy for the lovers to spend less time focusing on their bond, and more pursuing outside interests. But again, the appropriateness of such efforts varies as the relationship progresses.

Also, Worldly himself probably got to be Worldly as the result of a series of intensely focused pursuits. Though he has a rich history of diverse experiences, they did not come to him at the same time. They accumulated over his entire life. At any point in time, the number of concurrent pursuits is likely to be very small (say one to three). Worldly himself is more a sum of his single-minded obsessions than a master of managing large numbers of simultaneous pursuits.    At this point in my life, I’d say that I’m a Worldly engaged in fulfilling his biggest dream so far. That may be good. It may be bad. I don’t know. But what I do know is that I can’t give up on my dream. I’ll either make this dream come true, or die trying. While The Quest has dragged my heart through many a painful trench, turning my back on It, has (and would) just replace one kind of pain for another. I’d be trading the disappointment of rejection for the laments of those resigned to the impossibilities of their dreams. You know the old saying: It’s better to have loved and lost than to never have loved at all. More on this in other posts.

Tom Hesley