Saturday, November 05, 2005
The Music Of The Icosahedrons: Love In The Time Of Combat, Continued
I expected the previous essay on this topic to generate some commentary, but I seriously underestimated the volume, both in number and in stridency. All the same, I'm confident that the nerve I touched is one that needs a good firm massage. People don't write either to praise or condemn you unless you've penetrated to the pinnacle of their priorities -- or their private pain.
Part of the confirmation is present in this ludicrous Maureen Dowd essay from a week ago's New York Times Magazine. I shan't trouble to recap it for you; it's still on-line, so capture it while you still can. (I have a feeling Dowd will soon be wanting to live it down, if she doesn't already.) A substantial number of women near Dowd's age (50) are in her position: mateless, unable to find attractive male prospects, and without the slightest clue why.
It is possible to possess a huge number of great gifts -- good looks, high intelligence, affluence, social grace, the ability to put 9 out of 10 rounds through the X-ring at 100 yards -- and still be unable to mate happily and securely. There are factors in the mix that no individual, male or female, can control. Moreover, they dwarf the things one can control, utterly and irrevocably. Therefore, it's-just-not-fair plaints about one's romantic difficulties or defeats are pointless; indeed, they indicate an inability to grasp the essential nature of reality.
What are these uncontrollable factors before which even the most gifted of us are powerless? Other individuals.
If you want to guarantee yourself a life of helpless frustration in everything you do, here's the shortest route:
If we omit the special case of hatred -- the desire that harm come to an innocent person -- there's no such thing as a "wrong" desire. In the nature of things, there cannot be. There are wrong actions, of course, but simply to want is above all judgments but God's -- and lately He's been silent on the subject.
Inasmuch as courtship is a two-person pursuit, which can be ended by either party with no need for the other's consent, it should be obvious that to keep the thing going requires each participant to accommodate the other's desires. Partnerships of any sort require some of this, of course, but on the field of romance it's the sole, indispensable glue that holds two people together.
I've written about this before, in other ways and venues:
To love is to risk. To love is to drop one's general defenses to let another inside, and to extend the borders of self to enfold that other person, despite any flaws or maladies he might carry. To love is to incorporate the well-being of another into one's own highest priorities, even though one can never protect another half as well as oneself.To love is to grow.
The emotional crescendo of love involves the dissolution of "I" and "thou" into "we." Your priorities gradually merge into hers, and hers into yours. At its completion, on essential matters at least, neither of you could fail to want what the other wants, nor could either of you fail to detest what the other detests. Each ego is not submerged but enlarged by the incorporation of the other.
This approach to love has some important corollaries. First, when love fails, it's because that merger has come undone. The egos begin to see themselves as distinct from one another once more. When clashes of desire arise, the partners can't quite remember how they melded them long before. Drivers that propelled the original coalescence appear no longer to function. Which is why one should practice well the habits of love -- the "doing," apart from the "feeling" -- to sustain him through his rough patches. We all have them, even the strongest, wisest, and most passionate of us.
But second, and more important to the unmated, there are persons with whom we are irremediably incompatible. It doesn't matter how strong the sexual attraction is, if one or more of her essential desires strikes you as loathsome. And of course the converse is true as well.
Many persons will split hairs over this, will claim that "you can get used to almost anything," and that a sufficiently strong willed commitment will trump even the deepest revulsions. To which, if I may borrow a page from the oeuvre of my colleague the Curmudgeon, I must reply:
An essential desire is one that is "of the essence;" that is, it's a value integral to the nature and identity of the person who holds it. If you're to merge with her, it must become one of your essential desires as well -- and if it really, truly repels you, how on Earth will you manage that?
There might be exceptions. For example, you might harbor strong but irrational prejudices against the sorts of persons she prefers as friends. Perhaps you could unlearn them. Alternatively, if they really are lowlife scum, perhaps, in the light of your company, she'll come to see them for what they are. But if she's a militant atheist and you're a devout Catholic, or she's unalterably averse to having children and they're your fondest wish, or she's a passionate socialist and you're a passionate libertarian, forget it! You have no practical chance of making it work.
Compatibility of essential desires is not sufficient, but it is necessary. I speak from experience.
Over the millennia, men have remained more or less constant in what we require from a generic mate:
- Sex,
- A calm and stable home,
- A modicum of emotional support in our times of trial,
- Space and time for our autonomous pursuits.
Because our essential desires are few, and because some of them don't demand that others share them or participate in them, as a rule we're fairly easy to please. We have a few "thou shalt nots" -- keep your cotton-pickin' hands off the remote control, babe -- but apart from the desires enumerated above, we have virtually no "thou shalts." You want your own friends, ladies? Your own involvements? A career outside the home? Fine, just as long as none of it compromises the home itself.
Because we're so easy to please, and because ours is the sex upon which the romantic / sexual initiative has been bestowed by Nature, most of the human race eventually marries. Granted, a lot of modern marriages don't last, but at least men still set forth to get mated, and we almost all succeed at that much.
At this point, I'd like to digress a bit to cover a contentious topic that badly needs elucidation: sexual allure.
Do men prefer certain female somatotypes? Yes, we do. So do women. Moreover, they're the same ones. They're not the ones sported by supermodels. Women that fragile, that dependent on clothing and makeup to attain desirability, and whose bodies are that likely to be ravaged by the passage of years into something stooped and desiccated are not appealing as long-term partners. The mind boggles at the image of one of those praying-mantis figures sporting the bulge of a full-term pregnancy. How could such a woman survive, unless she did what Victoria's Secret icon Tyra Banks did: cast off the emaciated look demanded by the fashion photographers and allow her body to develop?
With regard to glamor and its appurtenances, these have their place. A woman who knows how to use them, and uses them when appropriate, can add sparkle to her life, and to her husband's eyes as well. But a sensible man knows better than to expect the missus to make dinner in movie-star makeup, a Givenchy gown, and five-inch heels. At least, not every night.
As for women's desires, a key component of this fascinating but terrifying subject is how little some women know about them -- their own desires, that is.
The aforementioned Maureen Dowd essay is a perfect demonstration. Dowd appears to have invested more of herself in what the dominant feminist voices told her to want than in anything natural and heartfelt. So at fifty, she's still alone and wanting to be otherwise, still muddled about what she really wants in and from a man -- and berating men for her ambivalence. Worse, she castigates women who conform to the traditional model of the feminine partner for assorted betrayals of their sex, and hints darkly of emotional, social, and political tragedies to befall them and their female progeny.
So we have here a single woman well into her middle years, who isn't quite clear in head or heart, who holds a number of nebulous grudges against men and their norms, and who can't get a date. Given that she's laid the responsibility for her condition on everyone and everything but her identity, values, and preferences, what could her prognosis be, other than spinsterhood all the way to the grave?
Imagine the sort of man who, knowing Dowd for what she really is, what she believes and how she feels, would still be willing to bed her. What could one call it other than "combat sex?" And what could one expect from it but stained sheets and morning-after angst?
The bottom line is simple:
- One must have a basic, if unarticulated, understanding of love to love successfully.
- One must somehow find a mate whose essential desires are compatible with one's own.
- One must learn to do love as well as feel love.
Everything else is peripheral, marginal, or superficial. Great loves and enduring families do not form around couples united mainly by their fanaticism for Toad the Wet Sprocket, the New York Rangers, or pepperoni pizza. They don't form between persons who badly want to get laid and find one another sufficiently un-repulsive to do it with. They don't form between persons obsessed with themselves and their extrinsic goals in business or commerce. They form when a man and a woman with compatible values allow each other's desires to become equal in importance to their own, and commit themselves to the sort of life and the sort of self-discipline that implies.
There's a word I've been hesitating to use, in part because it's so seldom mentioned in connection with love and romance, and in part because I use it so often. But I can resist it no longer; it's too critical to this whole matter of allowing one's beloved's desires to enter the space where he keeps his own, and to blend with them inseparably.
The word is humility.
The humble man accepts that certain things are beyond his control. Among other things, it requires that he accept what he is by virtue of being a man -- or a woman. Among the many things over which we have no control, our natures as men and women must surely be numbered. Were we to accept ourselves as what God made us, and our opposites in their turn, a tremendous fraction of the romantic / sexual malaise that stifles and hampers relations between the sexes would be dissipated at once.
Apparently this is easier said than done.
(P.S.: Anyone who writes to upbraid me for my use of pronouns above will receive a large wad of personalized, guaranteed non-sexist abuse by return mail. I've been known to bite off the heads of feminist language enforcers for the sheer fun of it, so don't tempt me.)
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