…is what’s wrong with society. You all have gotten some version this spam e-mail, usually from a .ru domain;
“You know, they are so many people in the world, but some of them are alone, because they didn’t find their halfs yet, as it is so hard.
If you are alone and want to find your love, you can write me and we’ll start communicating. I’m alone and looking for a good man, who will give me his love and care. Who knows, maybe we can fill up our lonely hearts with love.”
If you’re looking for someone else to make you whole, you’re looking in the wrong place. If you want to be wanted, if you desire to be desired, if you need to be needed, you are part of the problem.
I cringed when one my many nephews said, right after he’d been divorced within a year or two of being married, that he’d found this other woman, and how great she was, and how they were meant for each other and he knew it because of some mundane coincidence or other. The ink on the divorce papers was still drying. I didn’t know what to say at the time, but he was running from one hell-of-his-own-devising and straight into another.
No, Young Grasshopper; if you’re not whole, or complete already, no one else can make you whole. If you’re searching for someone else to make you whole, you’re looking for love in all the wrong places. You’ll be let down, because getting what you want, the way you want it, is impossible. You’ll feel betrayed, because what you thought you had was something you can never have. This is the stuff of murder, of self destruction and suicide. It’s what’s wrong with our whole society.
Those in government (and gangs) know just enough about this to take advantage of it. We look to them for “salvation” of one kind or another when all they have to offer is entrapment. They want to own you in the same way you want to own someone else, or be owned by someone else. They want you dependent on them in the same way you want to depend on someone else, or you want someone dependent on you. They want you to need them in the same way you need other people, or you want other people to need you. This is the stuff of mass destruction, war and mass death.
That word we throw around so much in America, Independence, I am only just realizing, has a far deeper meaning than I’d previously suspected, and I think it is extremely important.
None of this stuff is new, and so these words aren’t mine. It’s as old as the hills, and yet we fall for this trap over and over.
Yup. Part of the reason I married the gal that I did was I could see she was quite independently able to take care of herself, and at the same time NOT looking to just take care of others. We are complimentary, so we each fill in the others’ weakness with our own strengths, but we’d both still do OK totally on our own. Kind’a nice, knowing that.
I figured that if only one person was going to comment it would be Rolf. As for the silence; I wonder if it’s mostly a stunned silence, a thoughtful, contemplative silence or a dismissive silence.
My somewhat tentative thesis is that the closer I get to the bare naked truth the more silence comes as the response. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, but I am left wondering.
I have this model developing. Its a graph structured something like a layer cake. The top layer represents the preaching to the choir, rallying the troops sort of stuff, and that gets lots of responses. “Look at those bad and/or stupid people over there. We arent like them, are we? Hell no!” and so on. That usually gets plenty of response. The middle layer is the useful information– things people need to understand, with some things that aren’t always easy to swallow but hit hard in a way that might inspire thought or reveal things we normally keep hidden, that we deny, but that need to addressed. There is where I think the response is closest to zero. The bottom layer would be the manipulative, hateful bullshit of the kind the left uses constantly, and there again the responses will be many. It’s just a theory, and more data points will be needed to fill it in, like more photons getting through the diffraction grating.
In the spirit of maybe getting someone to interact within that middle layer; my marriage started out exactly in the worst way described in the post. We both thought we were a perfectly wonderful family. We had two perfectly wonderful children, I was a reasonably successful business owner and the sound engineer for a reasonably successful regional music group and she was a music teacher in one of the better schools. Underneath that veneer of wonderfulness was a monster with its teeth locked firmly into the both of us. That monster could be called culture. We both married for what we thought the other could give us, looking for love in all the wrong places, with all the dastardly results. Half the families in America, at least, live this way. Maybe closer to all. And that, as I pointed out, is also the problem with the country. You want to fix it? I don’t think you do, because I don’t think most of you even see the problem.
Right now I am only starting to see what’s been going on. My wife is confused because she doesn’t understand why I don’t yell at her anymore or make demands, or why I don’t get angry when she yells and makes demands. She figures I’m up to something. She’s still playing the game, like democrats and republicans. If there is to be any hope for her either I will have to wake up and be stronger or she’ll have to find it somewhere else, or we die off and the cycle continues. As it has been for twenty years, she’d have been doomed, right along with me, for sure.
Alcoholism or other addictions, and they take many forms including well excepted ones, divorce and probably running into the arms of someone else only to start the same cycle over again, only the next time with more resentment. We really suck, and half or more of this nice little, Norman Rockwellian community is in the same situation. Kids are on drugs, their parents are too weak and wrapped up in their own selfish problems to do anything positive, try as they might. It’s tragic, and it’s EVERYWHERE. You think you’re immune to it? So did I, Young Grasshopper. I KNEW I was immune to it. Like every dumbass, I hold myself I was going to be the good father and the good husband that so many others failed to be. I could will it. I “knew” it even while the pathology had me. We’re born into it.
I blame Disney. For far too many people, marriage is the goal rather than a beginning, and a profoundly useful institution, and a lot of work. They see the princess get married, and then it’s ride off into the sunset and happily-ever-after. Ummmm. NO. It’s work, a LOT of work. It’s growth, change, challenge, diapers, mortgages, sickness, egos, differences of opinions and values, etc., etc., etc. We have no media role-models any more on how to deal with that reality of daily life together with another person. And it’s not getting any better.
As some wag once said, “No man is complete until he’s married. Then he’s finished.”