I associate my failure to get married with my sense of being an outcast in societies I’m naturally attracted to. Even though when I was young my friends predicted I’d be the first down the aisle.
I’m more in my element in a lively multi-ethnic and multicultural community. I love cosmopolitan living (without necessary subscribing to the frenetic culture of drugs and sexual ambivalence and the rest of the mores that pass for enlightenment in our age). Yet I feel most differential around it.
My natural impulse to please, to provoke confidence, to make up for things I’ve done wrong, and my sense of gratitude should endear me to the fairer sex according to the book. I’ve also been told there’s a serious sweetness and honest willingness about me that inspires confidence among ladies. But all that has amounted to little more than a series of monogamous relationships so far.
I love in others their liberty. The sense of independence is the first thing I’m attracted to. Yet in my lover it is this liberty I wish to subjugate. I want to shatter and dissolve to my own likeness the form of what has attracted me. Yet I do not want it to be anything but itself.
Like an adolescent, I can’t master the contradictory tendencies within me: the desire to give, while conquering the need to possess without dominating, and to submit to what I haven’t surrendered to.
If, as they say, to allow self to be loved is to renounce self, I find no ability in myself to achieve it. I lack the means for perfect reciprocity to commit the supreme act of liberty, the voluntary self-enslavement (another name for love).
I lack that heroism. I find love an unbearable assault on my liberty when it demands such a sacrifice. Vague offerings of equivocal responses are what I usually manage. I call them love in my moments of ecstasy. At best they’re a generosity of the heart that seeks to please in adequate response to the needs of the other.
Obviously this is not authentic love since it’s not linked to the whole personality. Perhaps I should congratulate myself instead for being sensible enough to realise I can never sustain that sort of thing until death us do part.
I’ve been unlucky enough to be loved by people who loved me when I was not myself. The fault was not theirs. They spontaneously loved with sincere, unpretentious devotion what I displayed. Still they’ve never managed to dispel the pathetic restlessness of a perpetual exile within me when it comes to affairs of the heart.
I’ve been told, ad nauseam by my married friends, that man does not escape that kind of instinct except by the fertility of marriage, the base of society. As a result my attitude towards marriage is that of an agnostic. I see it as something fundamental to a stable life yet I can’t shake my need to subvert it.
Perhaps I’m too submerged in the mood of our times of valuing things by the resonance of solitude and the quality of despair.
The failure to impose order in my life disillusions me of traditional values. It makes me a contradiction to myself as I’m a dynamic traditionalist by sentiment. Still, I’m more disgusted by the informed nonsense of those who choose to philosophise their lapses. By those who are bold with their weaknesses and choose to fashion morals after their own desires and call it progress.
I’ve lived long enough to respect people’s differences, that is, to learn not to measure others by my not so excellent standards. Still such things rankle with me and the fact that our age is unable to create a spiritual fund for itself that can surpass our love for material things and for hedonism.
The dreaming depths called love, where the powers of mystery still manage to overwhelm us, is the last standpoint outside our egos. Truth is still able to invade our post-everything lives there despite all the spiritual erosion they’ve gone through. It’s providentially merciful that emotional suffering has an ability to shock us out of the staleness and flatness of our lives to higher consciousness.
I’ve looked at love from all sides now. I’m more certain than before that our hope lies with it. It is the only thing we have no ability to avoid indefinitely in our lives. In time, perhaps, we shall even lose the cant and outgrow the rarefied religious and romantic notions surrounding love to discovering that love is patient kindness. That is its essence.
I’ve never been the one at ease with shouted certainties. I stammer about love not because I’m in doubt, but because I’m too convinced. I’ve understood love to be an encounter with that which cannot be mastered.