Monogyny, Death, Xenophobia
Finding yourself in a loving relationship is easy. Humans are puzzle pieces and we’re designed to reconfigure our shape so we can fuse peacefully with another shape. We’re creatures that want to be with other creatures; we gravitate towards each other, then we want to stick together. We want love.
And that love is relatively easy to find. The formula is simple. Be confident while still humble. Stay in your league. Groom yourself. Make mistakes, but keep persisting. Then, sooner or later (if you really want to fall in love), a bird or a bee or a transgender Pikachu will magically appear. And if you’re not an entirely selfish person: it will happen, LOVE!
But that’s when things get complicated. Falling in love is passive. After all, it’s a falling movement. Standing in love is an altogether different beast. You found a match, you connected: great, now what? You persist, happily riding along the string of romantic normalcy. You make each other happy. You fuck often. Make love occasionally. You’re happier together than apart. Everything is right… you love them so much, you even take pleasure in the beauty of their flaws… yet something will continue to nudge you…
You crave for you and your partner to become beautifully committed for life. You want to stabilize each other. You want to become enclosed. You want to say — this life is tragic, full of unceasing change — but you and your lover will fuse and rise above this chaotic context of life and internally make vows that you will always be there for each other. Theoretically, this is perhaps the greatest thing we can do as humans, to truly commit to love another unconditionally. Practically, it’s at best beautifully banal and at worst a kind of death knell to your identity. You’ve made this decision to love and now for the rest of time you must make good on it. No newfangledness of different bodies. No adventure into the worlds of different people on any intimate level. Just the joyful rhythm of the same. There is difference in this repetition, new beginnings in your endings, yet, there is a reason movies typically end with a marriage ceremony.
And so another craving grows in you, a nudge for radical openness. Everything is evolving above you, below you, inside you, all around everything. Astrophysically, galaxies and solar systems are being formed and passing through various stages of development; organic life, landscapes, culture, the roaring of the ocean, platonic plates, everything is shifting; and you yourself — your tastes, your goals, your mind is evolving at an ever accelerating speed. So you think: Loving someone seems comfortable, but is it authentic? Is commitment a kind of xenophobia? A kind of germophobia? Is commitment just something we do because we’re afraid of facing how volatile and incredibly complex we are? Or less hyperbolically the question can be posed like this. Can we outgrow commitments? You can have lifetime commitments. But you can also have multiple lives in your lifetime.
The other night I was out with two black guys, one Asian girl, my mutt of a self, and two white chicks at an Italian restaurant. The Asian girl was talking about how we are all becoming one race because all of us at that table had smashed their genetic material together in some way or another, and how this biological interlocking synced with a more environmentally interlocking with the internet and airplanes and cars and mind-reading technologies (cell phones, SMS). All human life is becoming one indeed, so really, I’m just wondering why everyone is still hooked on trying to find “The One”?