August 28, 2006

• I think it was Leo Buscaglia who once speculated that if you put 1000 random strangers in a room together and left them for a while, when you returned, they would all have paired up according too their dysfunctionalities.

  
  

  Elsewhere– on several occasions– I have read and heard a piece of advice that goes something like this: If you meet someone and you share this huge instant magnetic attraction to each other, it’s a good bet that the smartest thing you can do is run in the opposite direction… because, most likely, they are your “worst poison.”

  
  

  Bits of information like these really make me wonder about the nature of attraction and love. Above all, the thought that keeps running through my mind is that if the above is true, is the underlying mechanism we (as human beings) use to select partners “broken?” As someone with a fairly idealistic mindset, I’d like to think that I am merely misinterpreting the meaning and intent behind the opening statements.

  
  

  One of my own truisms is well reflected by the statement “Those who have abandoned their dreams will discourage yours.” I don’t know who said that, but I have found it to often hold true.

  
  

  One of my dubious “talents” in life seems to be the ability to “overthink” a lot of things. I used “overthinking” as my main mechanism to overcome my doubts about wanting to get married, when I was in my early 20′s. It could even be argued that I took paragraph two by the horns and convinced myself to get married to someone I was not particularly attracted to, but with whom I “made sense” on a number of levels. 13 years later, I was very tired of living with a roommate/business partner– and although there were many other “miscues” at work in the marriage, the absence of basic attraction and love was certainly one of the largest obstacles that simply couldn’t be overcome.

  
  

  As some of you might remember, I have preciously speculated on the differences between the feeling of love, and the act of love. When I read the words of messrs. Buscaglia, Gray, Hendrix and other “experts” on human relationships, I always get the sense that they feel that “romantic love” is highly overrated; and that “practical love” is what anchors people in life; in their relationships.

  
  

  And the idealist in me looks at that with sadness, and feels set adrift on an ice floe, in very cold water, very very far from dry land. Is love really just a cold practical issue, like buying a house, or a new car? Is what constitutes a “successful” relationship the ability to look back 40 years later and say “it lasted?” Like older couples I have known who “tolerated” each otherm but “made it work.” Or is the definition of a ”good” relationship ultimately as different as the people who get into them? Meaning that a large part of the reason so many people struggle in relationships is actually because they are trying to force a general set of values on their very specific needs and wants?

  
  

  Ultimately, I end up with more questions. My parents certainly just had what amounted to “a business arrangement.” So did many of my older family members. And most of them ended up divorced. Some just lived together in “quiet bitterness” till one’s demise, because they were committed to the relationship, but certainly not devoted to each other. At the same time, I have known more than a few people whose “flames of love” burned extremely brightly, but then burned out very quickly.

  
  

  So who decides what “works?” Perhaps the ultimate truth is that the “mistake” we make is trying to measure our relationships in the context of some “societal opinion,” as opposed to “our own opinion.” And the proverbial shyghte hits the proverbial fan when a pair of “romantic idealists” compare and contrast what they have with a pair of extremely “earthbound rationalists” and start wondering where (or whether) they’ve gone wrong.

  
  

  That has always been the problem with the term “normal,” for me. Just who gets to decide what constitutes normal? The countertops in my kitchen are 4″ higher than the industry “standard.” That’s not normal, but it hurts the crap out of my back to work at a “normal” height kitchen counter, because I am 6’4″. Does it, by some measure, make me dysfunctional to not want to work at “normal” height counters? Or does it make me particularly functional to create an abnormal paradigm that works for me?

  
  

  My counters work, for me.

  
  

  And so, I see that I have walked around in what constitutes most of a circle. Or maybe it’s really more of a Mobius strip, than a circle– except I am now standing on the opposite side of the ribbon, as the ultimate observer.

  
  

  ===> Perhaps the underlying truth is that the “mistake” we make is in the form of trying to measure our relationships in the context of some “societal opinion,” as opposed to “our own opinion.” <===

  
  

  And ultimately, it all begins with ourselves. The “mistake” becomes that we look for answers “without,” rather than “within.” With all due respect to the ostensible “experts,” they assume a pervasive level of “brokenness” and a lack of self-awareness. They also assume that we all want to package relating into the same “box,” the same descriptive framework.

  
  

  What completes the circle (at least for me) is that trite cliché that we must “learn to love ourselves.” Beyond that, we must learn to recognize ourselves as love. I look around me, at friends and family, and I see so much pain and suffering because I also see individuals looking to others to somehow “fix” their brokenness. I see them rely on another to be “the answer.” I see two broken people dancing the dance in the pretense that two broken halves somehow make a “whole.” And I see so many “endings” happen, simply because one person finally wakes up to the reality that they need to fix themselves, and then they end up leaving their partner behind in the process. One “more or less whole” person together with a “broken” person still does not make a “whole.”

  
  

  One of my Teachers once pointed out that you can’t truly know what you really want in your life, until you have answered the question of who you really are, on the deepest possible level. Many people, alas, try to figure out who they are through a series of sometimes wild and often random guesses at what they want. I recognize this in my own work, friendship and relationship histories, but even moreso in the histories of people I know. In the beginning, I knew neither what I wanted, nor who I was. Eventually, I “graduated” to a misinformed stage of believing that I knew what I wanted, absent knowing myself. It is not until my 40′s– following more than a decade of self-inquiry– that I have felt close enough to knowing myself to such a degree that I could realistically approach the issue of what I really want.

  
  

  There’s an interesting “fringe benefit” that comes with that knowing: People actively try to persuade me that I am “nuts” and “wrong.” Perhaps it’s because my process threatens their sense of the status quo, and brings into question whether or not they are aware of their own (note: not my) truth.

  
  

  Do you know yourself well enough to know what you really want?

  
  

   

  • 5:58 pm
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