Where is Love?

Wanted: Youngish, attractive, lovely person would like to meet similar or younger for outings, quiet times, permanent sincere relationship.

The idea of Romantic love is supposed to have started with the medieval troubadours wandering around Romance-speaking Europe. These layabouts didn't want to fight (too rough), didn't want to hoe turnips (too dreary), and didn't want to become monks (all that reading and scratching on parchment with a quill pen). So with the inventiveness of the lazy they cooked up this new occupation: singing love songs to sexually deprived ladies whose hubbies were out doing macho things like fighting the Saracens.

Marriage--the "permanent sincere relationship"--was a business arrangement, as it still is in most of the world to this day. One party agrees to keep the other party in return for housekeeping, companionship, offspring, and maybe some fairly available if not very interesting sex. The party with the money, land, or dowry gets to be the boss.

The history of marriage in our society, however, has been more like an effort to mix the hot sweet oil of Romance with the cold clear water of marriage. But don't give up: oil and water might mix.

We all know couples who have been together for years and are contented with each other. Not resigned. Not waiting until the kids grow up. Contented. What is their secret? How do they do it?

These genuine couples--man and woman, man and man, woman and woman--do seem to have a common denominator: One or both have placid, relaxed natures. They are both aware of and still irritated by each other's faults, but they have accepted them. The following test may strike a chord. Fill in the blank in this sentence: "I would still be with him if only he didn't _________________ so much." The missing words might be anything from "murder people" to "leave the top off the toothpaste." Now, if Bonnie could put up with Clyde doing the former, why can't you put up with your lover doing the latter?

How do you get around to the contented stage? Is it through having fabulous sex with each other? It's not the only part of love, but most of us, convinced that it is by all those movies and cigarette ads, fiddle around with combinations as with the lock on a bank vault, trying to open some door to permanent bliss. The variety of arrangements is amazing. No matter what bizarre combination of sexes or number of participants you can imagine, someone somewhere has been doing it for years and has even given it a smart name--like polyandry, necrophilia, or masochism.

If the parts fit together somehow, then someone is trying it somewhere. Nostrils and earholes, tongues, grannies, goats, fists, sandshoes, dirty knickers, egg-eating snakes ... it's exhausting just to think about it. Perhaps someday soon we will have educated and purged ourselves of our two thousand year old fascination with forbidden fruit and then will be as relaxed as Buddhists, who seem to the western eye to attach equal importance to dining room and bedroom. It is almost impossible, for example, to imagine a Buddhist being any more interested in a pornographic book than in a picture of a nicely roasted leg of lamb.

So maybe love is not in some orifice. Where else can it be? Is it in the brain? Or some cute gland? Or some apt definition? How about "Passionate Friendship?" Or "growing old together?" Or "dare not speak its name" or "that passeth all understanding?" It looks like there are as many types of love as there are variations of sex. Everybody has a personal picture, the most popular going being something like this: We meet. Glances are exchanged. I think Mmm! You think Hmm! Unless one of us makes a really repulsive impression when we finally speak, it's on!

What has happened? This is the mystery of the ages. Plato thought you had met your other half, previously severed. Darwin would have said Natural Selection was at work. Whatever the explanation, some ancient magic has drawn us together. We are on our best behavior with each other, like children at a party. Eventually we go to bed, the length of the wait depending on our social group. Mutual sexual attraction makes nice bed, no matter how inept. We make allowances. We compliment each other. "It's quite big," you say. "They are a lovely shape," I say. Sexual attraction has become the nursery for a tiny, weak fellow just beginning to establish himself. This is the little rascal we have been searching for. Love, sustained by sexual attraction, nourished by compatibility, begins to grow between us. But he needs a lot of care. Otherwise we just coast along on our sexual attraction for each other until, inevitably, one of us gets a little bored with the bedroom.

This is the crisis point. Mutual love, mutual interests and mutual habits have tied us together with a net of silken cords. And now sexual attraction is just one of the cords, not the only tie as it was at first.

The alternative? If we are selfish and self-centered, we may attract some guilty soul who needs a tyrant. Or, fueled by insecurity and possessiveness, we may scorch out the tender beginnings of love altogether. Given a bad example by our parents' marriage, for example, we may become terrified as those silken cords multiply until they start to look like ropes and chains.

Every time you promise yourself that "Next time I'll fall for somebody intelligent, somebody my own age, somebody who will be a friend," feeling confident that you will never again commit yourself until you're sure he's right for you in every way. But you won't, will you? The first hunky boy that comes along, no matter how spoiled and selfish, will convince you that this is it--just because he is good in bed. So it is with me. If only we were just sexy animals or just disembodied intelligences. It is the mixture that is so impossible to handle.

But perhaps that exciting mixture is exactly what romantic love is all about.

From a recent Usenet post.