Give Your Life Away, It May Not Be Worth Much

Few are those who see with their own eyes and feel with their own hearts.
- Albert Einstein

Do you wonder sometimes if Einstein didn't get sucked into a black hole somewhere and spewed out covered in some of the strange stuff he talks about other than physics?

Who can't see with their own eyes and feel with their own heart?

As it turns out, most of us.

Most of what we value in life--including what we do with the precious hours allotted to us in our own lives--we adopt from what we have hard from others. We eat more or less the same things as our neighbours and family eat. We subscribe to spiritual beliefs somewhat similar to those of others we know. We wear similar clothing to work, on the golf course, playing a sport or shopping.

Would you not think a down-and-outer bum from the street would be clearly out of place in the same pew as you at church? Yet for all you know, the "bum" may lead a more spiritually pure life than you, may help others more often than you, may even have a personal net worth far in excess of yours.

So why would the bum not belong beside you in church? Likely because you think he may embarrass you by embarrassing himself, meaning that you care what others think about you when you sit in the same church pew as a bum in ragged, dirty and smelly clothing.

Surely when we fall in love we feel with our own heart more clearly than we do with emotions at other times in our lives. That's a one-to-one thing that only involves two people (only one if the love is unrequited, but let's consider two the norm). Two people who love each other deeply care only about themselves. It's not selfish so much as self centred, or a universe of only two people.

Yet how do we find and choose such a person? Most often we use standards or guidelines passed on to us from others. Most times we won't get involved with someone our friends or family can't stand. Because their opinion matters. We use other standards to measure potential mates, but we usually acquire them from others.

The "deeply in love" stage is limited in most long term relationships. It's known as the romantic phase. It usually lasts from six weeks to eight months, depending on the people involved and circumstances. By the time a year has passed in any relationship, the romantic phase is over and a couple has moved on to a deeply bonded relationship. Romantic gestures may continue, but the hormonal rush of romance will have tapered off to something more manageable. If the relationship continues, both members will be sizing up where they want it to go and where the other may be prepared to have it go.

The act of sizing up where we want a relationship to go is largely determined by what others tell us. Nothing in nature tells us it's time to evaluate. Lots of effects in our lives do just that. I'm reminded of how often that happened in the popular television series Friends, where relationships ended because one couldn't meet the evaluation tests of the other.

When do we act on our own, using our own eyes to provide independent evidence to our brain so that it can make up its mind (pun noted) without influence from outside? When do we act only according to the dictates of our heart, without letting anyone else express their opinions, however well intentioned? In fact, not that often.

We are not just social animals who require the attention and approval of others in our social circle, we are also individuals who need others in our lives to provide validation, approval, love and other aspects of social intercourse. We are not rock or islands in the stream. Nor can we be for long. We each function within a particular social milieu. Stepping outside of it by making totally independent choices may jeopardize our membership in the group.

Einstein was right. We rarely make independent decisions, with our eyes or out hearts. Usually it's because we can't afford to be so independent.

So are well all slaves to each other? Or to someone who is effectively our master? No. Slavery today, in the free world, is a matter of choice.

What we must do sometimes is balance off what others want us to do and think with what we believe is best for us. When we decide to act independent of the wishes and advice of others who care about us, we need good communication skills to express our feelings in ways that will not offend or alienate them.

Sure it's hard. So was relativity for Einstein. But what else have you got to do with your life than to get better at it?

Bill Allin
Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems, a guidebook for teachers and parents who want children to be able to make wise decisions as they grow up, to be able to balance the intricacies of life so that they can be happy and get along well with those they want to hold dear.
Learn more at http://billallin.com

Why You Lost At Love

In real love you want the other person's good. In romantic love, you want the other person.
- Margaret Anderson

In one line we have a summary of the difference between two very important kinds of love in our life.

With romantic love, we want something from the other person, something incoming from the other person (whom we desire) for ourselves. With real love, we want the best of ourselves outgoing to the one we love. By "the other person's good" Anderson means the welfare of the other person.

Can the two exist within one person, between two people? It's possible and many claim to have succeeded, but the feat is so difficult as to be highly unlikely.

Romantic love is a hormonal attraction, a primal instinct we have to spread our genetic material (DNA) to future generations, though this gets sidetracked by birth control methods and with same-sex relationships. The feelings are there even if the objective is something other than having babies.

Romantic love usually lasts from two months to eight months, though exceptions see it lasting two years or longer in rare cases. Romantic love is very energy demanding. As with mating rituals of other species, romantic love with humans requires great production of hormones and huge demands on the metabolism, which over a long term could negatively impact the immune system. In other words, romance is hard work on the body.

Real love, as Anderson calls it, requires commitment, which involves a very different set of requirements on the body, specifically on the brain. Interestingly, Margaret Anderson's real loves were of others of the same gender as her. Her romantic loves, if she had any even with other women, would have been brief and relatively insignificant to her compared with her real loves, two women with whom she shared her life (monogamously) for many years (one was the widow of the great tenor Enrico Caruso).

It would be very hard to have your own best interests at heart (romantic love) and the best interests of the love of your life at heart (real love) simultaneously. The push-pull would tear a person apart emotionally.

Why do so many relationships end in heartbreak and divorce? When the romantic period ended, the two people were not prepared to give more of themselves when they had got used to receiving from the other. Heartbreak occurs when the romantic period ends for one party while it still continues in the other.

In a relationship such as marriage, breakup and divorce brings a slightly different kind of heartbreak. Both kinds of heartbreak, however, involve grieving for the loss of the other. That is, the person with the heartache regrets the loss of what he or she was receiving from the other, not the fact that he or she will not be able to give of themselves to the other any longer.

Heartache, like any other kind of grieving, is both personal and selfish. Few people believe, deep down, in the saying "If you love someone, let them go. If they return, it's love, if they don't, it never was."

Both romantic phases of relationships (or the potential to have one) and real love fail mainly because one or both parties don't know the skills, the requirements and the commitment involved with keeping a relationship going. More romantic relationships never happen because one of the parties is socially ignorant of critically important social skills than because of inadequacies in the looks department. It's hard to fall in love with someone who doesn't know how to be romantic. Men may like to look at dumb blondes, for example, but few want to marry one.

On the other hand, two beautiful people may fall deeply in love, with hormones rushing like the Kentucky Derby, but the relationship may fall apart if one or both lack the skills necessary to keep the non-sexual part of the relationship going.

That often happens with real love too. Couples who "drift apart" don't just develop different interests. One or both lose track of the giving part of the relationship, the part where they both have to constantly have the best interests of the other at heart at all times.

Love, the most powerful emotion we have and the greatest of bonds we can have with another person, is not a simple business. Few people are prepared to love another person who has little idea about what is needed to sustain real love. It would be like allowing someone who has just passed a first aid course to do brain surgery on you. It ain't gonna happen.

In good relationships, people want another person with the same levels of skills and knowledge as themselves. Someone with more knowledge and skills is a bit intimidating. Someone with fewer skills is dull and inept.

In a relationship where the person with the greater knowledge and skills wants it to work, that person must bring the other up to speed or the whole thing will fizzle.

Someone who knows he or she lacks social knowledge and skills about dating, marriage and the whole issue should go to the trouble to read up on the subject. Most of it can be learned from books borrowed from a library. Or by taking a course at a college or private school that may offer it, if one is available (they are scarce). Or by befriending someone who has the skills and pumping that person to give what they know.

There's nothing pretty about ignorance. In any relationship, almost no one wants to have a lover who doesn't know what they are doing. And the odd one who does, I wouldn't trust.

There's no shame in being ignorant about love. The shame is in knowing you are ignorant and doing nothing about it, then blaming others for being so "cold."

In something as important as love, whether it be of the romantic variety or the "real" kind, it pays to find out what you should know before setting out. Otherwise you may as well wear your ignorance on your forehead. Loser!

Bill Allin
Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems, a guidebook for parents and teaches who want to grow children who know how to have good, sound relationships because they know what they need to know.
Learn more at http://billallin.com

If Sex Is So Great, Why Does It Screw Up So Many Lives?

Where we have strong emotions, we're liable to fool ourselves.
- Carl Sagan, American author and scientist (1934-1996)

Let's deal with the most obvious example of the truth of this quote, marriage.

In most western countries, the rate of failed marriages (as determined by the rate of divorce) hovers around or above fifty percent. That means that at least half of the people who entered the ceremony believing that they were deliriously happy because they had found their soulmate for life were wrong. What they found was beautiful romance which lasted about as long as most romantic relationships, from two to eight months.

Why the huge failure rate? We humans are built for two fundamental kinds of relationships.

Romance worked well for our prehistoric ancestors because it allowed them to find the mates that would produce their children. The other kind was more akin to friendship, a healthy and lasting kind whereby a man and a woman would raise a collection of children, most of which were the direct descendants of one or both of them.

This worked well in tribal conditions where mating happened frequently between various combinations of couples. It wasn't important to the tribe who birthed the children once they were there, it was important that the whole village or band contributed to the raising of them. Having everyone take an interest in raising the children meant that the kids would have built into them the values of the community.

Prisons were non-existent. If punishment was necessary, it was administered often by means of social ostracization from the offended party or from the tribe for a period of time. As everyone knew what everyone else in the tribe was doing most of the time, crime within the tribe was rare. While there might have been fights between men over who would mate with a woman at a given time, there were usually enough females so that each male had one or more of them available. This is true today in bands of our nearest genetic relatives, the great apes.

Even when couples had paired off to live together and to take responsibility for raising the children for which they adopted obligations, mating took place with others. Maybe with others who didn't have mates, maybe with some who did. Of course they didn't copulate around the community campfire. What mattered was that the male and the female came "home" when they were supposed to be home to fulfill their other responsibilities.

Today we continue that pattern, though our religions and our media have tried to pretend that we humans were built for monogamy. We aren't. No species of primate or even of mammal is totally monogamous, according to recent scientific studies. What the animals are is committed to a monogamous home relationship, not a monogamous sexual relationship.

Romance was natural, especially for those in their teens years, because each person looked for the mate who would father or mother their offspring, the strongest and healthiest possible children. As mating and pairing off for living purposes were often two different matters, no one was surprised when the natural mother of a child did not live with the natural father. Living together as a cohesive group was, after all, what the family was all about. Sexual intercourse existed within the family, but was not necessarily restricted to the family.

Judging by what we see on television, the most common reason why marriages break up is sexual infidelity. Yet sex with various different partners was in our genetic and hormonal makeup for tens of thousands of years before religions and the media made us believe in monogamy and sexual fidelity within a marriage.

Do we even today, in what we believe is an advanced condition of humanity, have the tools, the skills and the knowledge to maintain sexual fidelity within a marriage? I submit the unequivocal answer to that is an emphatic No.

Women, especially in the early years of raising children, often do not have enough energy left by the end of the day for their bodies to produce enough hormones to have a strong interest in sex. Every few days, maybe, but not every day for most. The male, however, is built for daily or even more frequent sexual experiences during his years of maximum sexual strength.

As the male gets older and adopts more responsibilities, it's apt to be him who loses the energy battle, resulting in insufficient body strength to produce hormones to have regular interest in sex. While the male reaches his sexual peak around age 27, when his body tells him to have sex with every female he can get his penis into in order to spread his genes around, the female doesn't reach her sexual peak until at least age 33, sometimes several years later. When the male's interest in frequent sex is slowing, the female is more rarin' to go than ever before in her life. By then her kids may be past the high maintenance stage so she has more energy.

We don't have the social structures to match our rising and falling sexual interests (pun noted, I almost said mate our interests) with our basic physical needs. This is the environment into which we place "Till death do us part." And the public social commandment of sexual monogamy (which has never, ever, been widely accepted in private).

Where does emotion come into this? In this case, the response to a rush of hormones is what we call romance, which is a strong emotion. We can be madly in love with someone we want to mate with because that's how our hormones cause us to react.

As you can easily see, our social structures are not equipped to deal with public social demands which do not jibe with private hormonal/emotional needs. This gap will not soon be resolved or closed. We are in the midst of trying to cope with a chasm that has opened up now, but not ready to put the broken social fabric back together into a new form of arrangement that is as widely accepted as the old arrangement was in our tribal times of the past. The old one won't work and we don't have a new arrangement ready to take its place.

We are in the midst of a transition period in human history, in many ways, but one of the most important regards our interpersonal relationships. No one knows how it will shake out. Right now it seems chaotic.

The best we can do as parents is to make our children aware of the realities of this human condition and to give them the social, emotional and family tools and skills to manage their personal affairs with their heads up, knowing what to expect. And being prepared for what to do when they reach each stage of a relationship with another person.

We may one day end up with three phases to our adult lives, first romance and mating, second the raising of children (families) and the third a pairing for living together through old age. There is evidence for the beginnings of that possible structure for the future even now.

It's exciting if you see the transition happening before your eyes around the world. Scary as hell if you don't realize that our species is in the midst of a transition which will likely firm up long after we who read this are all dead. We need to see the big picture.

Bill Allin
Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems, a guidebook for parents and teachers who want their growing children to be ready to face head-on and to cope with the changes that will happen in their lives as they pass through adolescence into adulthood and beyond that into old age.
Learn more at http://billallin.com