Over the weekends, I get a lot less caught up in current events and the news as it makes the rounds of the blogosphere. Besides which, the news reported on TV seems to have quieted down a lot from the furor of the past few weeks. One might even think that the rest of the summer will be calmer than the bulk of July. That is, unless the apocalypse begins on August 22nd. Of course, that theory has seen so much promotion by now that each new article about it makes me think it is less possible. These things tend to be unexpected. (So say I from my vast experience with the beginnings of apocalypse.)
Since I’ve been spending time with friends, and talking on the phone with friends, and that sort of thing, the things we talk about are what I’ve been thinking about for the past couple days. And what is that, you may ask? Well, it is, rather predictably, relationships. It seems like everyone I know has had a relationship go south lately–from long-standing ones to more short-lived affairs. However, the consensus seems to be that everyone is going to have to start over. (Except for the lucky schmucks who have one that is still working, or got married and are more concerned with the for-real aspects of life.) I, myself, haven’t been exempt from this phenomenon. My own implosion happened in the winter and I had a heck of a time for the first half of the year getting over it.
As one friend of mine mentioned, breakups are horrible coming from the one side (that is, you’re the one breaking up with them), because you feel guilty. And coming from the other side (them breaking up with you), you feel worthless. This particular friend had had the privilege (?) of having to deal with both of these types of breakups within a fairly short framework, and mentions that it’s even more fun to feel guilty and worthless at the same time. Unfortunately, if the experience of all the people I know is something to go by, it would seem that breakups like these are inevitable, but after meeting a quota, most people seem to finally be able to settle on a marriage partner. But, oh, the heartache in the interim!
It just seems so wasteful to me. Here you expend all this time and all this energy on a certain person, and unless you manage to make a (meaningful) committment to them within the window of time that you’re both feeling “in love” with one another, it’s all destined to fall apart. All of these relationships seem to have fallen by the wayside because one person of the pair (or sometimes both) decided that their happiness was not being optimized by their relationship with the other person, and that it was better to cut loose and move on once more.
Well, this is my gripe. Why on earth did we start to try, culturally, to optimize our happiness? I mean, selfishly it makes sense, but happiness is so ephemeral by nature that any attempt to hold on to it almost guarantees one to greater heartbreak later on. The more you try to be happy, the less likely you are to actually be happy. Happiness happens in the unplanned moments. I guess I’m saying that emotions are unreliable and that by attempting to direct our lives based on our emotions, we’re bound to make poor decisions.
It seems like everyone is shooting for this idea of “True Love”, the grand, Platonic Ideal of Love. (No, not platonic love, but Love in its purest, truest form.) The thing that strikes me as interesting about this is that the idea of that kind of love is a fairly new invention in the history of human ideas. French troubadors started, in the 13th century, to sing ballads of courtly love, which was actually pretty far from what we shoot for these days, and the idea took off from there. It wasn’t until the Victorian age that the idea of marriage for love–that sentimental love should be a basis for marriage–really took hold.
Marriages tended to be very practical affairs, done for economic reasons or alliances.
Somewhere in there, though, this idea of Great Love really got a hold on the Western imagination. And now every last person you meet is trying to find “The One,” as we call it. Or they’re holding out for when they’re “truly in love” with someone–and breaking hearts in the interim–because the flawed aspects of interpersonal relationships intrude rudely upon their idyll.
My theory is that the only way that a relationship now can work is for two people to just rush into a meaningful committment (marriage when you’re intending not to divorce them if you stop “having feelings” for them), and then deal with the fallout later on. Of course, before you make the committment, you need to ensure that they meet some standards, such as having similar values and an approach to life that you can agree with. But if someone does match up with you in enough ways, why dilly-dally around until someone decides they don’t feel it anymore? Because that’s what always happens. Feelings don’t last–emotions are ephemeral. It’s the nature of the beast.
It irritates me to see so many people that I know hurting over relationships that really had no need to end. Yes, both parties were human, and thus flawed (as all humans are). But most of these? I can see no real reason for them to have ended, except that one or both parties were holding on for that Ideal. And as many utopian-minded governments have shown us over the ages, when humans shoot for the Ideal, the result is usually less than ideal (and more often than not, closer to hellish).
I think that we need to sit down and take stock, and figure out what we really can expect from another person. But far more important has to be the work that we do on ourselves to allow us to live with–to deal with–to love–this other person. But then, maybe that’s the heart of the issue. In focusing on our own subjective experience of “love” and “being in love”, maybe we forget that this other person is also a person of value. Maybe we lose sight of the other person as a person rather than an appendage to ourselves, and a rather inconvenient one, at that (particularly when they’re showing their less than appealing traits).
However, I’m far from an expert in these matters, and there are plenty of problems with making matches by any other means than the ones we practice in the Western world. I’m just really sick and tired of watching one relationship after another implode for spurious reasons.
Posted by Kjirstin 
