Café Philos: an internet café

I've heard models described as vacuous airheads, but that doesn't describe Suzanne unless someone can be both a vacuous airhead and an intelligent, creative, buoyant, and artistic woman.

I believe she was all of 14 years old when she first modeled lingerie for Victoria's Secrets, the catalog and store company. She couldn't have been much older because I met her when she was 16 and she was no longer modeling by then.

Over the years, Suzanne has revealed a persistent talent for getting fired from employments, so I strongly suspect she was no longer modeling by the time we met because Secrets had refused anything more to do with her. She's not a vacuous airhead, but she is dysfunctional.

The story I'm prepared to tell you today concerns Suzanne, Victoria's Secrets, and her abusive boyfriend. I've already introduced Suzanne and Victoria's Secrets, so I'll turn now to the boyfriend.

Meet Jeff.

He's one of those males who prey on women much younger than themselves. Jeff is 20 years older than Suzanne, and very few women his own age have ever sustained an interest in him. Jeff can be charming. He can be witty. He can be exciting. He can sweep a naive and inexperienced girl off her feet. Yet, most women see the looser in him. So Jeff has learned to specialize in the young, naive and inexperienced women he has some chance of getting.

Once he gets them, he doesn't know what to do with them. He turns the affair into a drama, the drama into a tragedy, the tragedy into a nightmare. When you take some fish out of the water, their colors at first fascinate, then fade. Latter, the fish begin to stink. Any girl who lands Jeff sooner or later learns that in a relationship, he's a fish out of water.

Young people almost invariably overestimate the odds in their favor of significantly changing someone, and especially they overestimate their odds of changing a lover. Maybe that's because they are always being told by their parents, preachers, and teachers to change themselves, and so they assume it actually works when you tell people to change themselves.

In truth, the only person likely to change someone is the person themselves. And even then, seldom, if ever, is a person capable of a fundamental change: It's not in the nature of water to become stone, nor of stone to become air.

In the few years Jeff and Suzanne were together, Suzanne wanted two things, both absurd. She wanted to change Jeff against his nature. And she wanted her own nature to bloom. The latter was absurd because Jeff had her under his thumb and was abusing her emotionally, psychologically, and physically. No one blooms under those conditions. At best, they merely endure.

If you yourself have seen a few abusive relationships, you know they are all alike, except for the details. The only detail of the relationship between Jeff and Suzanne that surprised me was that Jeff apparently never tried to keep Suzanne from seeing me.

I'm clueless why he didn't. It's a classic pattern of abuse that the abuser tries to prevent his victim from having any friends who are outside of his influence or control. But through out the time she was with Jeff, Suzanne saw me almost daily. It's true she seldom associated with me in Jeff's presence, but we spent hours together while he was at work or off somewhere else. That sort of thing normally doesn't happen in an abusive relationship.

Suzanne would look me up almost every day. We'd then go to a coffee shop, a movie, the mall, "The Well" -- which was her favorite nudist resort -- or we'd go hiking, or drive around Colorado for a few hours. Whatever amused us.

Once, we even went to Victoria's Secrets. That was three or so years into Suzanne's relationship with Jeff. That day, we'd gone to the mall.

When we were passing the Victoria's Secrets store, Suzanne wanted to go in. The racks, of course, were full of lingerie, and Suzanne excitedly asked me to choose three sets for her to try on. She then took me back to a dressing room where she stripped and modeled the sets for me.

Christmas was a month off, so I asked her a lot of questions about each of the three sets, including which one felt the most comfortable -- if I'm going to give lingerie to a woman, it damn well better be comfortable, especially at Victoria's prices.

Looking at a young nude woman is at least as fascinating to me as watching a beautiful sunrise. Yet, I'm not attracted to most young women's sexuality, and especially not to Suzanne's. Their sexuality is more likely to depress me than to stimulate me, although I'm not quite sure why. At any rate, I certainly do not make a point of telling young women they aren't sexy -- I have my life to protect! So that day I told Suzanne, "This is a lot of fun for me -- watching you model that sexy lingerie. If I'm having so much fun, think of how much fun it would be for Jeff! Why don't you bring him out here?"

Suzanne didn't answer immediately. When she did answer, her voice had gone strange. There was a tone in it I'd never heard before. In a way, it was a little girl's voice. But perhaps it only sounded like a little girl's voice because she was having difficulty controlling it. She said, "Jeff wouldn't like it. If I did this with him, he'd call me a slut."

We fell into silence. Then she began taking off the last set of lingerie in order to get back into her own clothes, but she was trembling.

When you abuse a woman, you prevent her from being true to herself. At it's core, that's what abuse really is -- it's preventing someone from being true to themselves.

Sometimes it comes out in ways that are large enough and important enough to easily describe. Like the woman whose husband prevents her from developing her musical genius so that the world looses a classical pianist. But much more often, abuse comes out in ways that are harder to see, such as when a woman trembles in a dressing room because her lover will not, or cannot, accept her sexuality whole and complete, just as it is, without condemning it.

Those harder to see ways are as criminal as the other. You don't need to beat a woman to abuse her. You can just as well kill a person's sense of themselves, their self-esteem, their self direction -- by a thousand tiny cuts.

By the time I met Suzanne I was too old and had seen too much wickedness to harbor any fantasy that I could reason with her into leaving Jeff. I knew she was confused beyond reason, frightened into uncertainty, blinded by her feelings, and emotionally dependent on him. So, I did the only things I thought I could do, which were never that great nor enough.

For the most part, that amounted to just accepting her for herself.

I remember
Laughing under summer skies --
Would have thought we could fly --
And the winds pass on by.

I remember
Holding hands while the river flowed --
Came a time to let you go --
And the waters pass on by.


Now for all that I know
You have a good life
Filled with the stars
And the trees.

But all that I do know --
It's the life you should have,
So beautiful
You were to me.

A young couple I know were arguing the other night about love. Specifically, one of them held the position that love ends at divorce, while the other was equally insistent that love didn't need to end at divorce.

The point hardly seems worth arguing for the truth is obvious: It's certain some couples who divorce are not in love, while other couples who divorce are in love yet somehow incompatible (the whole notion that you can be in love yet still not be compatible doesn't seem to occur to most young people -- I think you need a few more years and to have seen it a few times to realize it's quite common). So, why were they arguing it?

I might speculate it's because our society -- actually, our popular culture -- has such a narrow view of love and relationships. From Hollywood we learn that a couple who love each other never divorce unless they are going to remarry by the film's end. We also learn true love overcomes all difficulties, life is meant to be lived for love, and no one is better off single than in a relationship. Popular music and romance novels pretty much tell us the same things. If that's all you've been taught to expect of love and relationships, it is small wonder you might argue over whether love ends at divorce.

Real life is much richer than the cartoons of love and relationships presented to us by popular culture. So, I thought I would list a few scenarios that are not typically portrayed in popular culture:

• You can love someone you're incompatible with, and many people do.
• Most often, there's no reason or explanation for why you love someone: You just do.
• So very often lovers part because they cannot overcome some difficulty having little or nothing to do with love or even with psychological compatibility, such as a difference between them of race, age, lifestyle, or religion.
• People can and do love more than one person.
• There is no guarantee the greatest love of your life will marry you.
• People in love with each other can prefer to live apart.
• Divorced people can still love each other, and yet not wish to remarry.
• Not all love is constant -- many times love comes, goes, and returns like a breeze.
• The most significant thing about love is surely not how long it lasts, and merely how long a relationship lasts proves nothing in itself about the quality of love in that relationship: After all, mere co-dependencies tend to last forever.
• Most people, at one time or another, will confuse love with emotional dependency.
• Some people can be much happier single than married.
• Not everyone who loves, loves well, nor ever learns how to love well.
• The intensity of one's feelings does not necessarily indicate the quality of one's love. Just because you love intensely does not mean you love well.

So, what other scenarios that aren't typically found in popular culture have I forgotten here?

Two years ago, the Republican mayor of San Diego, Jerry Sanders, was elected on a platform that included opposition to gay marriage. Yet, on Wednesday, he suddenly dropped his opposition and signed a City Council resolution supporting a challenge to California's gay marriage ban. He had previously promised to veto it.

Why the change of heart? It seems the most important reason is Lisa Sanders, the mayor's daughter, who it turns out is a lesbian:

The Republican mayor said he could no longer back the position he took during his election campaign two years ago, when he said he favored civil unions but not full marriage rights for homosexual couples.

He fought back tears as he said he wanted his adult daughter, Lisa, and other gay people he knows to have their relationships protected equally under state laws.

"In the end, I could not look any of them in the face and tell them that their relationships — their very lives — were any less meaningful than the marriage that I share with my wife Rana," Sanders said.

The move most likely carries some political risk for Mayor Sanders since, "in 2000, 62% of San Diego voters endorsed a statewide measure to restrict marriage to a union between a man and woman."

It seems quite understandable to me that through the love one has for one's daughter, one would gain insight and empathy for the plight of homosexuals. Yet, that is not always the case. Dick Cheney's daughter is gay, and Dick Cheney continues to oppose gay marriage. I think in Cheney we have a man willing to put political considerations above what his heart must tell him is the right thing to do. But do you think I'm being too hard on Cheney?


Reference:

San Diego Mayor to Back Same-Sex Marriage

"Like everybody who is not in love, he thought one chose the person to be loved after endless deliberations and on the basis of particular qualities or advantages."


- Marcel Proust

Thirty years ago, I took a course called "Images of Man" in which we studied and discussed some seven different models of human nature. That was a very exciting time of life when I was discovering all sorts of grand ideas.

I was discovering ideas that I had until then only heard rumors about -- such as what time was to a physicist, what the subconscious was to a psychologist, or what culture was to an anthropologist. It had not occurred to me before taking the "Images of Man" course that our notions of human nature were human inventions. Indeed, when I look back on my growing up, I am astounded at how many very obvious things I had to learn.

Naturally, there was a woman involved.

No one at 19 should be forced to learn about time, the subconscious, culture, or any of a hundred other grand ideas without being in love. That would just be cruel. Worse, it could lead one to become a neoconservative.

Until I fell in love with a woman in my "Images of Man" class, I was very confused about love -- I really didn't know the difference between simply loving and possessively yearning. So, to me, love was heartbreak, a miserable state, something to be avoided, and when impossible to avoid, to be cursed. Then, of course, I met Alison and discovered the extraordinary affirmation of life that naturally comes from loving without expectation of any reward.

One of the models of human nature we studied that term introduced me to the concept of enlightenment. Have you ever considered how close enlightenment is to love? I don't think I really grasped much of the concept of enlightenment from that one class, but I would have grasped far less of it had I not been in love.

When compared to the torturous confusion of mere yearning, love is simple, clear, non-possessive, and straight-forward. When compared to the torturous confusion of non-enlightenment, enlightenment is simple, clear, non-possessive, and straight-forward. Perhaps the two are even inextricably entwined.

It even seems to me now, thirty years later, that I learned more about certain aspects of human nature from loving Alison than I did from studying the various models of human nature presented in the class.

Unless you are trying to pass a class in metaphysics, whether god ontologically exists or not is trivial at best and more likely irrelevant. It's true that discussing the issue can, if done well, exercise the brain and sharpen one's thinking, but so can many other issues exercise the brain and sharpen one's thinking. Overall, wondering whether god exists or not is nearly pointless -- except perhaps as a way of distracting ourselves from dealing with more authentic challenges of living.

Underlying the mistaken notion that god's existence or non-existence is vitally important are the assumptions that god, merely by god's ontological existence, saves us from meaninglessness, makes sense of our suffering, preserves us from eternal death, is with us in times of need, and so on and so forth. Yet, not one of those things can be demonstrated -- not to you, not to me, not to anyone.

The mere ontological existence of god implies almost nothing about the nature of god or god's relationship to us. For instance, suppose that tomorrow someone finally proves the universe must necessarily have a creator, and therefore god must ontologically exist. Fine. But would it necessarily mean anything to us? Would it mean there was salvation from eternal death? Would it mean god in any way cares for us? Would it tell us a thing about whether god has a purpose for us or not? On what grounds could anyone answer "yes" to those questions?

Yet, it is crucial to point out here that some people experience god. To be precise, they have an experience of something they choose to name "god". Other people, having similar experiences, choose to say they experienced the Tao, the Buddha-Nature, the Great Spirit, the Void, the Ultimate Weirdness, or some other placeholder. It doesn't much matter what people call their experiences experiences of. That seems to be more determined by what society, religious tradition, or culture they come from than by anything else. What matters is those experiences are so often transformative.

They are transformative in ways the mere ontological existence of god is not. For instance, someone who has had such experiences might find they no longer fear dying. Not because they now believe in a life after death, nor because they now have a reassuring theology, but simply because they have changed, been transformed, into someone who doesn't fear death. Likewise, someone who has had such experiences might find they are now capable of much greater love. Again, not because they believe god ontologically exists and has commanded them to love, but simply because they have been transformed into someone who is more loving. While the ontological existence of god (or the Tao, or whatever) is at best trivial, the experience of god is often profoundly transformative.

The question of whether god exists or not is insignificant compared to the transformation that can occur when one experiences god. Moreover, that transformative experience does not come about from believing in god. You can believe in god to your heart's content, but all your hours of belief will do nothing to bring about a transformative experience of god. Why is that?

"God" is just a symbol -- no more, no less. To say you believe in god is quite the same -- and just as trivial -- as saying you believe in the star that represents Paris on a map of France. It is just as insignificant -- and just as trivial -- as saying you believe in your wife's name. Nor does it matter in the least how elaborate, sophisticated and complex your notion of god is. For does it matter whether you say you believe in the star that represents Paris on one map, or you say that you believe in the more detailed street map that represents Paris on a different map? In both cases, your mere belief will not be the same thing as an actual experience of Paris -- regardless of how passionately or fervently you believe.

For those reasons, belief in god is quite often mere escapism. It is like reading a map of Paris rather than visiting Paris. It can be no more than a longed for daydream.

At Andersonville during the American civil war, the Union soldiers who were held prisoner there by the Confederates lacked salt. When you go without salt, you begin to crave it, and the craving of some of those soldiers became so intense that they would cut the world "salt" from their Bibles and chew the word. It did nothing to preserve their lives -- they starved for salt anyway. But it had a psychological effect on some of those who ate the word. It comforted them.

For many people belief in god is just such a comfort. It does nothing to really nourish them spiritually, it is by no means as transformative as experiencing god, but it does give them a morale boost -- just as eating the word "salt" comforted some of the soldiers who did it at Andersonville. Perhaps ironically, I think most of us would prefer the comfort of believing in god to the experience of god. That might be why we place so much emphasis on whether we believe or not.

Last night and this morning, I have been engaged in arguing about premarital sex with a friend on an internet forum. My friend is: (1) idealistic, (2) idealistic, and (3) idealistic. Apart from those three things, she's idealistic. But it's not entirely her doing, for she has been raised to be idealistic.

She's a bright, articulate, and humanely decent young person who has had the misfortune of having been sheltered from many of the realities of life by her parents.

Her parents even went so far as to home school her -- both in order to give her a superior education in some things and an indoctrination in other things. For instance: They did not think it was advantageous to her to know too much about the theory of evolution, other than why they considered it wrong. So now she's well educated about certain things and poorly educated about others.

I suspect her parents did a very good job indoctrinating her on the subject of sex and relationships. Added to that, she has never had a boyfriend. That is, she has had insufficient experience to contradict her ideals. She believes in Prince Charming. She really does! He is as real to her as the theory of evolution is wrong and she is holding out for him in more ways than one. Most obviously, she is holding out for him sexually. She wants to be a virgin on her wedding day. But more subtly, she is holding out for him emotionally. She does not want to date anyone who she thinks is not the Prince.

It has never really occurred to her that everything has a learning curve, and even love is no exception to that. In a vital way, we must learn how to love. And we can only learn so much about love from words, just as we can only learn so much about playing tennis from listening to words. At some point, if we are going to love well, then we must practice loving, just as we must practice tennis to play tennis well.

Ideally, in tennis, you hit the ball over the net, return each volley, and all goes well. But unless you have actually practiced doing that -- and practiced it and practiced it and practiced it -- you will be unable to do it well.

Of course, she would say she only wants to practice love with one special person, her Prince Charming. I think that's fine, if that's the way she wants to do it. I am not actually opposed to anyone holding out for their prince or princess. But I do object that she doesn't truly realize there will be a learning curve when she finally meets the Prince.

How do you keep your ideals when life smashes them down? In some cases, you simply don't. During the Korean War, the Americans attempted at first to conquer North Korea. Then the Chinese entered the war and the Americans had to change their goal or ideal from the conquest of North Korea to the defense of South Korea. They managed to accomplish this second goal or ideal, but had they not in time changed from the attack of the North to the defense of the South, they would have lost both goals, rather than just one. To accomplish anything in life you must sometimes be flexible about your ideals. And, somehow, I don't think my friend is flexible about her sexual and relationship ideals. She may very well end up loosing everything.

I wrestle with what to think about idealism. That's to say, I don't feel I understand it. And I don't feel I understand it because, for the most part, all I see are its follies and excesses. If you really understand something, then you tend to have a balanced view of it. But I do not have a balanced view of idealism: I see it's weaknesses, but not its strengths. So there is a large part of me that hopes she will find exactly what she wants in life. Even though I doubt that will be the likely outcome of her stubborn idealism.

When I think of dating, I think of courtship. Every few years, one or another of the big magazines is sure to run a cover story asking, "Is Courtship Dead?". The magazine will claim that's a serious question and to prove it's a serious question, they will point to some recent poll in which 67% of the respondents between the ages of 18 and 24 adamantly declare courtship means nothing to them. It's something their grandparents might have done in their day, but today's hip 18 - 24 year old has no use for it, etc. etc. etc.

You might recall from your studies of social history that "radical thinkers" in every generation within the last 150 years have declared courtship dead. Courtship is always being declared dead by people. Yet, every generation courts. Why is that?

"Why is that?" would have been a hard question to answer accurately back in the good old days. In this case, the good old days are the 1970's when everyone in academia seemed to believe that humans were born with a "blank slate". That is, the predominant paradigm in nearly every field back then was that humans were born with no innate behaviors -- nor even any predispositions to behaviors -- and that all significant human behavior could be explained as learned behavior.

On the other hand, today, it's very well known that humans are genetically predisposed to some behaviors. Contra the old 1970's paradigm, not everything humans do is entirely learned (although learning does play a role in most everything). Most likely, courtship has never died out -- despite all its obituaries -- primarily because we humans are genetically predisposed to court.

More specifically, it seems courtships follow a certain general pattern, and that pattern is what we're genetically predisposed to follow. For instance, a graduate student in anthropology discovered that women are more likely than men to initiate successful courtships -- at least in bars. One of his methods was to attend campus town bars where he could record the exchanges between mostly undergraduate men and women. He found that women initiate courtships nonverbally, with their eyes. In other words, they offer "come on looks" to men who interest them. The grad student noticed that courtships initiated by women were more successful than those initiated by men. Success in this case was measured by whether the people engaged in the courtship left the bar in each other's company. What the graduate student discovered was part of the general pattern of human courtship.

A while back, I read of two psychologists who had concluded that dysfunctional courtships -- courtships that do not follow, or that slight, the general pattern of human courting -- almost invariably result in dysfunctional relationships and marriages. If that's true, the importance of courtship in humans is clear.

I have a strong hunch, but based only on anecdotal evidence, that when dysfunctional courtships result in sex, one, the other, or both partners is very apt to feel exploited, abused and even humiliated by the sex. From what I've seen, it seems courtships prepare us emotionally and psychologically for sexual intimacy. Without a good courtship, we are not prepared for that level of intimacy, and our feelings afterwards often show it.

So far as I know, there is nothing in our genes that prescribe we must be married to have a healthy sex life. But if the anthropologists, biologists and psychologists are right, then our genes might indeed prescribe we must have a healthy courtship to have a healthy sex life.

Last, I think courses taught in the public schools on human sexuality should include a section on courtship. If dysfunctional courtships lead to dysfunctional relationships and marriages, it might be wise to teach kids what the value of courting is and something about how to go about it.

"Jealousy, that dragon which slays love under the pretense of keeping it alive."

- Havelock Ellis

"Love possesses not nor would it be possessed."

- Khalil Gibran


There are many kinds of love, but I think the rarest and purest kind is anything but possessive. It is that love which is most liberating, which is most life affirming, and in which we both transcend ourselves and are renewed.

That is the kind of love the Greeks called "agape" and that Jesus apparently believed caused us to be "born again".

Such love most often comes as an unexpected breeze -- and like a breeze it refreshes. Like a breeze, it seldom lasts for long. And like a breeze, it may return at any time.

Which do you believe is more important:

1) To love ourselves and others

or,

2) To follow a moral code

One night, when there was a comet in the sky over the San Luis, Jackie and I sat beneath a blanket on the porch of the Oak House at Valley View Hot Springs, which is a naturalist resort in Colorado.

It is sometimes easier to talk frankly and intimately with someone who is naked, if you yourself are naked too, than it is to talk frankly and intimately when either one of you is wearing clothing. Jackie and I were naked together under the blanket and I think that might have had something to do with why Jackie chose that night to tell me the story of her relationships.

She took two hours in the telling. Despite how earnest she was, my mind drifted off the meaning of her words, and I spent most of those two hours listening to her emotions and to the night, rather than to her words. Finally though, she summed up: "What do boys want? I don't care what it is, I just want to know what to give boys that they want. Tell me what they want so I can have a relationship that lasts."

She spoke with earnest intensity: Those weren't rhetorical questions to her. Yet, I hadn't been listening to more than a quarter of what she'd said that night. I asked for time to think through my answer. The two of us then watched the comet for a while.

Finally, I spoke to her about being true to herself. "Don't try to change yourself to suit the boys, Jackie. You'll only find yourself changing to suit the ones who don't really like you in the first place. Then when someone comes along who likes you for who you are, you will have changed so much to suit the ones who don't quite like you for who you are, that you won't know what to do. Instead, be yourself. The boys who like you for who you are will like that about you -- that you are yourself. And the rest be damned."

Jackie and I sat for sometime after that in silence. Then we decided to go for a soak and that ended the topic. Yet, I wondered that night what I should have told Jackie to help her. I considered the words I'd given her inadequate and even worried a bit about having let her down.

Then, about a year afterwards, Jackie spoke to me about that evening. Reminded me of it-- be yourself. "It didn't make sense at first", she said, "But I kept thinking about your words, and eventually it came to me what you were trying to tell me. Since then, I've kept what you said in mind, and it's helped a lot."

Sometimes we get lucky with our advice. We feel so inadequate in giving it, but then we get lucky -- someone comes along who works at understanding it.

A friend of mine is one of those liberals to whom the word "foolish" might be applied. She is so focused on the world of ideas, she trips over the world she lives in. That's to say, her principles get in the way of her feet.

So, for instance, she loves humanity, but doesn't love very many flesh and blood people. She hates the powerful people she's read about who oppress the Latin American poor, but adamantly defends a real life friend of her's who is a cruel bully.

Another friend of mine is one of those conservatives to whom the word "foolish" might be applied. He also is so focused on the world of ideas, he trips over the world he lives in.

So, for instance, he is so opposed to public charity in principle, he even opposed Federal assistance to Katrina victims. Because the Bible tells him the Jews are God's chosen people, he cannot see the injustice of Israel's settlements on the West Bank.

Ideas are more like maps than anything else. Just like maps, their truth value is in whether they are sure guides. But some people are more in love with the maps they make than they are with the terrain the maps are supposed to be guides to. They are like undisciplined cartographers who would sooner have an especially attractive map that's wrong than they would have a plain but useful map that's accurate.

Perhaps I should begin by stating that I'm not in favor of folks cheating on their partners.

I'm not a chauvinist for monogamy either. But I believe that if you were so incomprehensibly foolish as to freely, and while sober, promise someone that you will remain faithful to them, then you should remain faithful to them. No excuses. You made the promise. Keep it.

That's Plan A.

In life, Plan A doesn't always work, and so most people always try to have a Plan B. Here, then, is Plan B: If you do cheat on your partner, then do so in the most ethical and responsible manner still possible. For instance:

• Don't bring home any STDs, babies, or psychotic lovers.
• Don't tell your partner you've cheated unless it's absolutely necessary.
• Don't tell anyone else you've cheated unless it's absolutely necessary.
  
• Put your partner first, ahead of your lover, for attention, gifts, resources and time. Give your lover the left-overs -- not your partner.
• Don't discuss your partner with your lover.
  
• Don't lie to your lover about where they stand with you.
  

Having seen a number of people cheat on their partners over the years, I've come to the conclusion that most people -- but not all -- are lousy cheaters. Once they start, they go to pieces, behaving much worse than needs be. Then, they wind up confessing everything to their partner and spending 10 years in therapy. And that's just for a drunken one-night stand. It only gets worse if there's more than one infraction.

When we have sex, our bodies release certain neurochemicals that cause us to bond with the person we have sex with.

For instance, our bodies release oxytocin. Oxytocin is a neurochemical that does a number of things in humans, but it should be noted here that it is addictive. That is, oxytocin is as much of an addictive substance as is alcohol or nicotine.

Most people readily describe the emotional effects of oxytocin as having "a warm and fuzzy feeling towards someone". If you gave someone a shot of pure oxytocin, they would experience a rush of warm and fuzzy feelings, among other things.

So what does all this mean? It means that when you have sex with a person, your body releases an addictive chemical that you come to associate with that person. If you cease having sex with that person, you will be able to go a few days with no problem. Then the withdrawl symptoms will set in and you will yearn for him or her (you are really yearning for more oxytocin, but your mind doesn't know that).

This pattern is why so many couples break up, are happy with their break up for a few days, and then plummet into yearnings for each other. Not realizing that they are chemically addicted to each other, they think their yearnings mean they are in love with each other. So, they get back together again. Only to face the same problems that caused them to break up in the first place.

The moral of the story, if there is one, is this: Be careful who you sleep with. If you sleep with them often enough, whether inside marriage or outside of marriage, you will become addicted to them. That is especially true for women: Estrogen multiplies the bonding effect of oxytocin.

I am not making an argument here for restricting sex to marriage, but rather am merely saying that sex has consequences we don't always think about, but should. Sex, after all, is something that evolved in us not just for procreation, but (at least in humans) also for bonding us to each other.

"Each friend represents a world in us, a world possibly not born until they arrive, and it is only by this meeting that a new world is born."

- Anais Nin


Nin's words seem especially true to the extent we love our friends. When we love someone, we are open to them. That can allow us to see the world through their eyes. It can allow us to see how they see things. And in that respect, we can find a new world -- one we might not have become aware of otherwise.

As I write this, the sun has just touched the uppermost blossoms on the apple tree in my back yard. The sight is so beautiful that it demands I become lost in it.

Have you noticed there can be a certain emotional pain in seeing the most beautiful things? The most deeply beautiful things sometimes disconcert us. We might even turn away from them. We might even make an effort to dismiss them. For the deeply beautiful things of this world have the power to challenge us to move out beyond ourselves; to loose, if even for a moment, the concerns, the thoughts and feelings that give us such a sense of self, such a sense of who we are and why we are so important to ourselves.

Sometimes, we would prefer to look at something ugly than to look at something beautiful precisely because the ugly thing does not make us yearn to be free of ourself; precisely because it does not challenge us in quite the same way beauty can challenge us to loose ourselves in it.

That's a truth that seems lost on those overtly sentimental works of art designed to provoke in us warm and fuzzy feelings towards the merely cute or the merely pretty.

Yet, the deeply beautiful things of this world have the power -- if we let them -- of refreshing and renewing us in ways that sentimental prettiness cannot. The deeply beautiful things can offer us a perspective on our selves that is far more life affirming than the feelings one might have towards an all too cutely rendered painting of an English cottage at dusk.

That's why it is so important to let go of oneself at times: To allow ourselves to become lost, perhaps in the sight of something deeply beautiful. Letting go can, when one is lucky, be life affirming. But genuine letting go of ourselves is not ego affirming. And hence, it is something that we all too often are not prepared to do. Our egos, necessary as they are at times, can make us cowards even towards experiencing something as simple and life affirming as the beauty of an apple blossom against the dawning sky.

Nay, little one, it is not love as yet.
Dear as thou art, and lovely, thou canst not love,
Thy later loves shall show the truth of this.

- Laurence Hope


A 13 year old friend of mine professed to be deeply in love with a boy in her class. “People think I’m too young for it to be true love”, she complained to me, “but that’s not so: I know how I feel.”

In a way, she had a point, of course. Many a 13 year old is well enough emotionally developed to feel intense romantic love for a person, no matter how much parents, relatives, and older friends might wish they couldn’t. My young friend was simply reporting a fact when she told me she was in love.

Yet, how do you tell a 13 year old girl – a girl who knows full well how she feels when a special boy smiles at her, who knows full well how she feels when she doesn’t see him for a day or two – how do you tell her that what she feels is not mature love? Do you lie a bit and say it’s just infatuation? Do you try to explain the difference between the love she knows and the love she has yet to know? Or, is there something else you can do?

I’m personally terrible at explaining love to young people. The last thing I want to do is give them the impression I’m discounting their feelings. Yet, I know they are not capable of a mature love. Not only are they incapable of experiencing it – they are incapable at their age of really, deeply understanding what a mature love is. So, my usual strategy when a young friend brings up the subject of love is to simply listen, and listen well, to what she has to say. I refuse to judge her. I refuse to discourage her. But I sometimes try to gently point out there are unimagined depths to love that she can look forward to experiencing when she gets older.

The human brain is not fully formed until a person is in their early 20’s, so this matter of whether one can love well and truly at a younger age is very likely not just a question that applies to my 13 year old friend, but to all adolescents, and perhaps even to some very young adults. We shouldn’t confuse the question of whether a person can love well and truly with the related – but distinct – question of whether a person is ready for sex. Everything I know of that latter question suggests to me that most people are emotionally, physically, and mentally ready for sex sometime in their later teens. Yet, the capacity for love takes longer to fully blossom in our species than the sometimes related capacity for sex.

In general, the younger we are, the more likely we are to focus on our own feelings when in love. There could be a simple explanation for that. Perhaps we are more likely to focus on our own feelings because our feelings are so new and strange to us. But another explanation is we are more likely to focus on our own feelings because our brain isn’t yet developed enough to easily and accurately empathize with others. There is at least one study I know of that supports the second explanation. There might be other causes too, but whatever the cause(s), the fact is, when we are young, we tend to focus more on ourselves than on the people we love.

Compared to when I was, say, sixteen, at 50 I hardly notice when I’m in love. The people I love are more vivid to me than my feelings. That might be because I’ve been through those feelings so many times before that there is no longer anything surprising or novel about them. Hence, they are easy to simply acknowledge and then move beyond them. However, I can remember paying the utmost attention to my feelings when I was sixteen. In fact, I once paid so much attention to my feelings, and once paid comparatively so little attention to the people I loved, that today I could tell you much more how I felt about someone at sixteen than I could tell you what kind of person they were.

I don’t think that’s unusual. Far from it. When teenagers have told me about their love for someone, they have almost always focused on their feelings for that person, rather than on the person they loved. They scarcely notice that’s what they’re doing, focusing on themselves rather than on the one they love. I don’t fault them for that, but I recognize that it creates all sorts of problems for them. And maybe it’s because we older folk recognize the many problems with young love that we are almost always a bit alarmed when a young friend of ours tells us she’s in love.