I need to beat someone up. Specifically, I need to beat up whose ever fucked up idea it was, lo these many epochs ago, that we're only ever supposed to fall in love once in our puny miserable life, and if that one doesn't work out, we're fucked forever, with no hope of happiness, contentment, or joy. Really, who the hell came up with this one!?!?!? When you think about it, it's absolutely upsurd. It's like saying there's only one food in the whole world you'll ever love, and you've got to taste a lot of different dishes to find it. If you do find it, yay for you and you can eat that one perfect food 3 times a day for the rest of your life and you'll never get fat or bored of it. But if you eat it and you have an allergic reaction, well, that's just too bad and you'll never have a tasty meal ever again ever, and you'll have to spend the rest of your cuisinatically sorry life eating gruel with candied earthworms. Seriously, think about that.
Why do we do it to ourselves? Is it really that much easier to go on whining and obsessing over what we've lost (i have done this myself once or twice) than to accept that there might be something just as good or even better just over the horizon. It does require effort, both physical and emotional. You have to get up from your sofa of self-pity (where you've been sitting eating Hagen-daas and watching reruns of your love life, hoping in vain that they'll make a new episode), walk out your front door, and...
Well, i don't know exactly. But i know you need to get out your front door at the very least. After that, i suppose you just keep your feet about you and follow the road. It's a dangerous business, but it's better than burrying yourself alive in a cave of sorrow and self-loathing, waiting for somone to take the initiative for you and resucue you. It might happen, but more likely you'll sit there, rotting, until you finally wise up and realize that the only person who can save you is you. Hopefully when that happens you won't be too old and weak to push aside the bouder and step out to meet the Marys.
The idea of The One is a self-imposed toruture device, created by some long-dead tosser (probably the same idiot who decided that people who masturbate burn in hell for all enternity, which i also refuse to accept on the grounds that even if hell exists, which i don't think it does, i'm sure as shit not going there for enjoying the body nature gave me) who spent all his life alone and wanted to make sure everyone else was equally miserable. (something about misery and company...) the idea has been perpetuated for centuries by literature. even in literature, though, The One usually falls into the realm of the ideal and unattainable. I'm thinking here of things the writings of such greats as Homer et al and all the adaptations of the Arthurian myth. It's a notion reserved for those priveledged few of society who live a life of all manner of social ideals (see "chivalry"), and even for those few, The One rarely succeeds. Even in the greatest love stories, it seems to bring failure far more often than success, and leave behind it a slime trail of depression and despair, like some giant putrid satanic snail crawling over the earth.
It seems that more recently, though, The One is thought of less as an unattainable ideal and more of a standard. We seem to think we're all entitled to find The One, and all else has become undesirable, unworthy, worthless. Suddenly The One has come to the masses, and we all want our One, our Only; nothing else (and here else equals less) will do. I blame hollywood. As a society we've all been sent on an emotional wild goose chase, told to expect in the course of ordinary life that which doesn't exist, and even if it did, the chances of coming across it are so infintessimally small it might as well not exist.
I'm no expert on love, but at this point i think i'm pretty close to being an expert on recovering from love. Once I tasted a strawberry milshake, and it was the loveliest, lushest thing i ever put in my mouth. I thought to myself, I could eat nothing but strawberry milkshakes for the rest of my life, and i would never miss a thing. I lived on strawberry milkshakes for several years. I didn't eat them often, and occassionally came near to starvation when I couldn't get my milkshakes and i refused to touch any other food, but they were so rich and filling that the smallest taste sustained me for weeks on end. But it turned out I'm lactose intolerant, and the strawberry milkshakes disagreed with me. I had to stop eating them, and it broke my heart. I never wanted to eat again. Eventually I accepted I had to eat or i would die, just shrivell up and die. There were times when that didn't sound too bad. But in the end i ate, and god was it awful. I thought, food holds no joy for me. I'll never taste anything sweet or nice again. I scrounged and scavenged everywhere I went, but all I found was slimy, wilted lettuce, used coffee grounds, dog chow, and curdled milk. I crossed the ocean and kept looking, tasting. One day I moved in next to and eclair, and i thought i'd found salvation.
I've tasted a lot of food, and many of the things I've eating i've loved dearly. They're all different, and there's no way i can say which i love more, strawberry milkshakes or hungarian goulash; hawaiin pizza or chocolate eclairs -- they're all wonderful and nourishing in their own unique ways. To compare or rank them would be to belittle and patronize their individual qualities. And even though it saddens me to think that i'll never eat another strawberry milkshake, i know there are other marvelous confections out there, lurking in sugar-coated glory beneath mounds of rancid bangers and stale bread, and i know that if i keep at it, there will always be other entrees to enjoy.
So stop whinging about what's gone, and accept that there's such an infinate variety of tastes in this world that you can't possibly sample them all, nor can you say you don't like something until you've tasted it. Like my mother used to tell me about food and kinky sex, "hey, don't knock it 'til you've tried it." No matter how much you may long for what you've had in the past, there will always, Always, ALWAYS be other experiences out there equally wonderful. Go find one.
4 comments:
I don't know, CB. I do and always have believed in the existence of "the one" ever since I was a child. I never had any great notions of the whole wedding caboodle but the concept of the grande passion was a cherished ideal. And it never faltered. I knew as soon as F walked into the room that this was it for me. It was like an electric shock. Nothing that I felt before was like it (it felt completely differnt from an obsessive infatuation - believe me, I've experienced both) and it happened when I least expected it (in my flat - where I was living with my boyfriend of 2 years) Other people that I've spoken to about this have said the same thing - my Nan used the word "click" to describe her first meeting with my Grandpa for example. She knew that this was "the one" for her.
But, (after my first couple of teenage and fairly innocent relationships which broke my just pubsecent heart) I coupled this notion of a grand passion with a much more fatalistic approach. If something didn't work out then it was obviously because they weren't "the one" after all. No blame attached (at least no self blame) they just weren't right. Which meant that "the one" would show up at some point.
I think though that I approached the whole relationship/ searching for "the one" thing in more of a masculine way than other girls. I had no hang ups about having flings while I was waiting for Mr Right to turn up. I never searched for a permanent relationship. Once I stopped confusing obsession with love I had a whale of a time. Why waste the moment if you have nothing better to do? and if someone has a nice body or you share a mutual love of kung fu films then why not spend time with them while you're waiting for your grand passion to turn up?...
So while I don't agree that "the one" doesn;t exist. I do agree that there are a million wonderful people out there that you can have fun with (and you don't have to take off your clothes if you don't want to, but neither should you be castigated if you do. I think I once put it as being sure that you both lay your cards on the table before you put your knickers on the floor) You're dead right. If you sit at home then you'll never find the one. But I do still firmly believe that there is "the one" for everybody. They just tend to turn up when you don't look for them.
as always, you hit the nail on the head, hc. it's the fatalism which is exactly the reason i don't believe in The One. It's unfathomable to me that two people are "meant" to be together. Meant by whom? It implies a consciousness at work, and as a life-long atheist (yes i was raised a good catholic and did all the sacramental stuff, but i never believed it, even when i was a small child. i had to go to church to make my granparents happy.) it strikes me as rediculous that even assuming such a consciousness exists that it would give a rodent's rump who ended up with whom. I've never been able to get my brain around the whole fate/destiny thang. Saying two people are "meant" to be together is like a puddle saying to a pothole "we fit perfectly together, so we're 'meant' to be." yes, i stole that analogy from douglas adams (where credit is due and all that), but it's a darn good one.
that said, i absolutely believe in the existance of grande passion. it is a cherished ideal with me as well. i just think it's perfectly possible to have that passion with more than one person in your lifetime. how else to explain widows and widowers, or even divorcees for that matter, who love their second mate with all the passion and fervor they had the first time around. doesn't it belittle the romance of second marraiges to suggest that either they fucked up the first time and didn't marry the right One, or that they're settling for something less the second time?
anyone else want to jump in the fray here?
Ah, well, you see, here's the dicotomy in my argument and the bit where all logic fails and my theory shows itself to have more holes than a net curtain.
I believe that some people can spend their lives in complete happiness and contentment with someone who is not necessarily "the one". Whether they've decided to do so because they've been terribly hurt in the past and have given up on the idea, or for financial reasons or a need for security or the fact that you just get on fine with that person or whatever... some people do it and lead incredibly happy lives.
But...
I do believe in the one that supercedes all others. I do believe that certain people are meant to be together and I do believe that there's an unfathomable consciousness at work which puts us together. (or course the comeback to my argument above is that if you believe in fate/destiny then spending your life with someone because you rub along together great can also be classed as fate/destiny so that screws my theory up!)
I'm not calling this consciousness God (who I sort of believe in - sometimes)but its pretty damn close to it. And, I do believe that if you find the one (who I'm defining as the person who you have the unmistakeable click with -(White puts it brilliantly when he describes the meeting of Lancelot and Guenevere as the click of magnets) and it doesn't work out then you won't ever find the one again. It doesn't stop you from having a happy life with someone else but I don't think that it is the same blinding light that surrounds you being with "the one" (and we really need a better word for it than "the one".)
I can't say for certain that if (God forbid - blooody catholic education gets you every time!) F and I split up that I'd be on my own for the rest of my life (you can't do some things on your own!) but I don't know if there would be the same electric shock certainty on meeting someone else that they were the person I was meant to be with from before the universe was made. From people I know who've either lost their partner or had their partner leave them the unequivocal answer I get is no the feelings are not the same. There isn't that "click" And, from people who have left their partners for various other reasons, I've also heard that though they have strong feelings for the people they're with, the feelings arent as strong as those they felt when they met the one. Why it sometimes doesn't work. I don't know. An inability of the self to deal with outside influences, an inability to realise that just because you've met the one, the hard work of keeping a relationship going, of understanding and appreciating another human being, the sheer shit of everyday life is not wiped away but needs constant attention.
I'm definitely not a new age person in fact I scoff at all that dippy hippy stuff with great fervour and I'd normally be the last person ever to give any credence to that whole 2 souls bound together throughout eternity stuff but, when I met F for the first time that was exactly what I felt. It wasn't the pull of animal magnetism nor was it a feeling that I'd known him before, it was a certainty that we'd been together before and we would be together again even if we missed each other in this lifetime.
Jude girl had a theory that every person who you're with leads you to "the one". That is, character aspects of every partner you have (even one night stands) are character aspects of the person that you're meant to end up with and by going through the journey you will eventually arrive at being with the person you're destined to be with. She would say that if you're married and the marriage breaks down then even if it felt like a grand passion it wasn't the grand passion but instead a forerunner of what you are meant to experience. To a certain extent I agree with her on that.
Oh sod it CB I don't know. I know what I've felt and what I've heard from others but whether its right or not for everyone I don't know. I still agree with you that there is no excuse for sitting with a pot of hagen daz (other than the fact that you want a pity party while you reassemble your troops so to speak.
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