THE
NATURE OF LOVE AND ITS MANY COUNTERFEITS
From
“Watermelon Dreams”
.jpg)
One
day in July of 2008, I went to the Coffee Gallery in Altadena and started
talking with my friend Michael, who was reading a book about love. Love, one of
the few topics you can study your entire life and never really “get it.”
“The
problem,” I told Michael, as if I knew what I was talking about, “is that we
think about this way too much, whereas the animals – at least some animals –
don’t think about it. They just act. The
basic fundamentals of what most of us mean by love – protection, providing food
for the young, some training – are simply done without all the considering and
evaluating and vacillation that humans are so famous for.”
Michael
nodded. He didn’t talk a lot but he
listened, and when he spoke, he asked a deep question or he had a pithy
comment.
We
agreed upon certain things that every human should know about “love” and its
many facets and tangents. A man cannot
have more than one woman at a time, whether wife or girlfriend. OK, some try and seem to get away with it, and
some are even involved in consentual polygamy.
But that seems to be the
exception, not the rule. One woman at a
time, period. That works and other
arrangements do not. Even when people
try to have “open” arrangements, they all seem to fail in the long run, usually
due to arguments and disagreements about what “open relationship” means, as
well as jealousies that inevitably arise.
We agreed that the Masai men in
Africa might have four wives there and “get away with it,” because that is the
social norm. It is done in plain view
with everyone knowing that’s what’s happening.
But it won’t work here.
Don’t have sex if you’re not
prepared for children. “Hoping that she
doesn’t get pregnant” is not a good protective measure. Don’t have children until you’re ready to
devote the next 15 or so years to them, as a child without involved parents is
part of the formula called “How to make a criminal.”
Michael and I agreed on some of
these basics, and we barely brought up the principles in the “Art of Loving”
book by Eric Fromme.
I realized that much of what my
parents “taught” me about this subject was due to the fact that I knew I should
not follow the path that they took.
Though there was rarely a show of affection between my mother and father,
at least I had a roof over my head, we didn’t move around all the time, and we
were all given a good education. My
father always worked, and my mother sometimes worked as a nurse. There seemed to be little of what we would
call “romantic love” there, but at least we had the essentials handled, in a
more or less stable relationship. In
other words, my brothers and I received at least as good a home life as is
given to their children by the most protective of animals. Which is more than I could say for many of
our friends and their parents.
Michael and I continued to discuss why he was reading a book about “love” in the first place, and it continued to invoke memories from my childhood. Where, for example, did I get my idea of what “love” is, or should be? What did I learn from my own home? More precisely, what didn’t I learn from home that I should have learned?
Read the book for the FULL CHAPTER...
