Today I found myself pondering the value of sex and attraction in a relationship. In any relationship, the line between our relationships and our friendships is a boundry we cannot name and can only define for ourselves. Love is defined as a strong affection, relationship is defined as romantic or passionate attachment. Based on these definitions I can't help but wonder if anyone ever really gets both of these from the same person at the same time. There is a line in my favorite Chuck Palahniuk book, he writes "The one you love and the one who loves you are never, ever the same person." If this is true why then, are we not all fucking like bunnies. Population control aside what exactly is it that keeps us hoping Mr. or Mrs Right is gonna just walk into our lives and bam its happily ever after for atleast 50 years. Variety is the spice of life, except in romance. In relationships and romance our culture expects us to only love one person at a time, to only be with one person at a time and to only want one person at a time. So how do you get variety in monogamy? How do you enjoy the same person day in and day out. Even the most adventurous of couples loses something in monogamy. In some ways its to be admired, a challenge that few are able to rise to but for me it arises suspicion when people tell me how great their relationship is after a few years. I question how many times the subject of cheating came up in the course of that few years and how they decided what constitutes a good relationship. I am not a firm believer in monogamy, I believe it to be possible only for the truly star crossed or the truly committed. I've met people along the way that I would try for but as it is now I have yet to find someone to remain monogamous with.
The most beautiful relationship I have ever been fortunate enough to experience was based in openness and love. In no way by any means is this a monogamous relationship. They play with whomever they want to play with but at the end of the day they love eachother and care for eachother in a way, with a love I dont know that I've ever seen in a single sex partner situation. As the world progresses and comes into newer more radical ideas of how things should be, it can't help but be noticed that we become less tolerant of nature and more assimilation oriented as time goes on. Are we all really naive enough to believe that our partners will not stray simply because we don't want them to, because our sex is amazing, we're nice to talk to and are generally compatible. Monogamy is only natural to a handful of species, are we really one of them or have the politics of religion and government pushed us into an unnatural suppression of our most animalistic and natural urges to copulate. The more medical it sounds the less wrong it seems. We don't live our whole lives only loving one person, we love many. We also do not make love to everyone we have sex with and therefore would it really be cheating if we're still going home to someone we love or is it only my fear of commitment that makes me feel justified in my beliefs.Would these feelings be different if I was attempting to be in a monogamous relationship? If my partner came home and said they cheated would I respond with acceptance and understanding because, I am an enlightened woman, who believes we should all be free in that way, or would I just be a Bitter Betty about the whole thing? My moneys on Bitter Betty first, understanding second.
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ReplyDeleteThis is what I think...
To start, I feel like, not everyone, but most people who claim that monogamy is not reasonable and not in them use their reasons for saying so as a cop out for other, simpler reasons like being weak willed, lazy, having been done wrong and bitter or simply uncompassionate. Again, I'm not saying that there aren't people out there that could handle having multiple partners and learning the love them to the best of the ability, but I will say that probably 98% of those who say they can are wrong.
The first argument that's made is that monogamy isn't "natural". As mammals, it's animalistic for us to want and have many mates. First, mammals yes, but animals, no. If we're so much like animals with our instincts and natural urges, then why aren't raccoon's running grocery stores or deer running for city council? That's cause we're humans! We are a completely different race of creature. Although pigeons can fly letters across oceans and an octopuses can put together intermediate puzzles, we still out rank them by the ability to reason 50 to 1. Is there not irony that when someone carelessly sleeps around with many partners we call them a "dog"? Because they're acting below our level of evolution and reason.
As for having animal like urges? Absolutely. How does lots of sex with whoever you want NOT immediately sounds like a great idea. But as the intelligent species we are, reason tells us otherwise. Like in the same way we don't steal everyone elses money and over eat ourselves to death. Do these things still happen? Totally, but it's reason that keeps us for doing so or at least reminds us that it's not the best idea we've ever had.
As for natural...going back to reason. So naturally flowers grow, landscape changes and life creates. It is natural for food to grow. It's also natural for plants to die, diseases to form and for other animals to eat them. Seeing as we're this amazing species that has grown into these creatures of tremendous thought, we learn. We grow. We create. We figure out ways to sustain the life of this growing food. We figure out how to prevent disease and we figure out how to protect the things we need while hopefully taking into consideration that other creatures need to eat too. The things we have done with this growing food aren't per say "natural", but because we're so intelligent and want to progress as a species, our reason helps us better ourselves. And yes, we can get into all the "unnatural" things we have done to food to nearly destroy it as we know it, that's true. But that is no downfall of our reasoning and intelligence. What it is is a result of greed, laziness and a touch of stupidity...
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ReplyDeleteWe have all left “natural” hundreds of years ago and it’s never coming back. Now we have all the things that nature has to offer, but just as the “natural” blue of the sky, our brains and their capacity are natural too. We may have done things intentionally to help improve the quality of our brains like let’s say, going to school, but unless we plan to revert to our creations level of intelligence and decipher the difference between a hungry grunt and an angry snarl, we have to accept that we are operating above nature…or is it indeed natural for creatures with such our brain capacity build upon what nature started? Maybe if we were being observed outside our earth by another species that they would think watching us drive fuel burning machinery and consuming things that are the colors radioactive ooze are just natural things that humans do. Do we even know where natural begins and ends?
Ok, so back to monogamy. I also look at it this way. What do we know as the purest form of love? How many couples do we know that honestly put all the effort into that love into their relationships? All of it. Ever single ounce. Not a very good number, huh? So then what the hell makes us think that we can share this kind of love with multiple people? Few of us have ever even been able to master love with only one person! Forget even two!
The other big argument goes somewhere along the lines of how there’s more than one person for each of us in the sense that we can love more that one person. This is true. I don’t think there’s only one true mate for everyone. If we were to travel even just half the country, we could easily meet numerous and many people that we could learn to love and ultimately fall in love with. But we have a choice.
To get to where I want to next, I guess I’ll have to start at the beginning. To try and avoid the whole “nature vs. nurture”, let’s say when a baby is born, how the person ends up being who they are relies a bit on genetics, but more so on situations, how they learn, what’s happened to them and how they were taught to move forward. So, at the moment of birth, every baby has the same right to being loved as any other baby. Now during their life they are dealt different situations, they have been through different success and failures and it’s these causes and effects that create the person they become. Still, when it boils down to it everyone still has the same and equal right to love. No one is any better or worse. So what makes us pick the people we do that we choose to fall in love with? Is it selfish of us to want to fall in love with a person that caters most closely to the things WE want? That we pick someone who would be the easiest for US to love? How real is “chemistry” and what kind of role does it play if any? How much of our life to we dedicate to trying to find that person we choose? Do we waste a lot of our life doing so? How important to us as a species is it to find and choose that kind of person?
From here, I’d say that we do indeed spend so much time on personal, pairing love. The pursuit of it, the maintaining and the enjoying. Is it fair to say that a possibility to the actual meaning of life is to learn to love in the purest, broadest and most powerful way possible? What is the bottom line of everything we do and work for in our existence? I believe we are all here to learn these things. I can’t seem to find any other purpose. Sure, we get distracted like nobody’s business, but I can’t help be feel like everything we ever do is going to come back to love one way or another. I think it also goes without saying that if you’re not taken care, if you’re not well you can not take care of others and treat them well. It’s balance. I’m ok, you’re ok. So even some seemingly selfish things we do, we do it so we can get better because once we’re better we can now be better to those around us. Typically, half the time we have no idea what the hell we’re doing and don’t feel like we even know what we want or need or even realize that we’re doing it at all...
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ReplyDeleteSo again, why do we spend so much of our life on our personal, romantic relationships when there is an entire world of people that we could be showing love in a pure, lust free fashion? Is it a natural human condition we just don’t understand? I think to some degree, we do get that. We get that we have things to do, places to be…hopefully to try and display this broad love we will never truly understand to it’s capsity. When we hold a door open, donate a dollar, not cuss the neighbor out, say thank you, buy someone a beer, say hello, feed a cat, take a picture…typically we consider these all good things to do, but why? Because even when we don’t realize it, we are subconsciously loving someone in some way whether that was our initial intention or not. Because if you were indeed dealt a good enough hand in this life, it is natural for us as humans to love and we may never truly understand why.
So now that we know the meaning of life (for sake of conversation, we’ll pretend if we need to)…what’s with this romantic relationships we hear so much of?
I think that on a large scale, it’s difficult for us to see any kind of “big picture” love. We try, but it’s way bigger than us, just as it would be hard to try and spin 16 basketballs on our head. So I think we try and find some kind of root to it all. Break it down to a more comprehensible level…and then there was one.
Maybe the best way we can think of to try and understand the purest, strongest love that makes our clock tick is to just concentrate on one person, because one is the closest to fewest before there is nothing.
So yes Virginia, there is more than one mate for each of us. But we make a choice.
We can pick from thousands to which hundreds if not more can reach successful understandings of love, but monogamy is the tool that allows us to try and attain this understanding to the absolute best of our ability.
Monogamy is what encourages us to work through differences, to forgive, to learn and to grow. We could easily move on to the next and another, but what are we really getting out of it? Instead of moving on, what if we attempt this understanding with several people? How well and close are we going to get to this understanding when we have to spread our efforts out instead of concentrating them?
We live our days in and out of buildings, touch and go conversations, physical unrest, organizing mentally, the efforts, the in’s and out’s of the ant trails we’ve dug out in this world. We are tired. We are thoughtful. We work so hard. Monogamy is our gift in this haphazard rat race we’ve created for ourselves. We get a chance at knowing love and with the help of monogamy, we get the best possible chance. We should all be so lucky. And we are. Most of the time we’re just to stupid to realize it.
P.S. Eat my shorts.
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