Love is a Crock

[20sgal88]

I am so disenchanted with love. I believe it’s hopeless. I don’t think there’s any such thing as a good man. There’s a catch to everything. We’re animals and men are really in touch with their carnal side much to the dismay of loving women that want commitment. It makes me wonder how the anyone gets married at all. The fact that divorce rates are at nearly 50% should answer that question. I just feel so dead inside, unenthused and disgusted at everything and everyone.

 

The other day whilst at work, I cleaned the teeth of a young male patient. At 20, his supple baby face struck me and I found it interesting how he could grow a full beard like that at only a year past adolescence. His eyes were doe-like, his features soft, lacking the creases of age and worry. As I peered into his nearly pristine mouth, I noticed that his maxillary anteriors still had prominent mamelons. He had not yet been alive long enough for the incisal edge to wear down smooth, crisp, and straight. Despite this, I found him incredibly good-looking but felt guilty for this. For surely, a dirty old 27 year old woman such as myself shouldn’t be eyeing the likes of a baby. Cradle-robbing cougar, I felt like. But men do it all the time. Always take younger wives and concubines for themselves often half their age or more.

 

I watched my parents’ marriage crumble after 27 years; watched a close friend of mine have an affair with a man who left his wife after 35 years, only to have the illicit romance for a year while it itself succumbed to its inevitable demise; heard about the Mexican American comedian George Lopez, and how he and his wife split up after 15 or so years of marriage (and after she had given him one of her kidneys in a life-saving surgery), he still had the gall to throw it to another broad …I’ve watched friends and acquaintances around me flounder in their love lives and it just makes me realize how incredibly stupid everything is. Never mind my pathetic and frustrating experiences with “love”. What is that anyway? Some extreme affinity for some schmuck one considers attractive enough to engage in coitus with? Acts on the brain like a damn drug and blocks all sensibilities and reason. Conjugation must occur in order for propagation to result. Like some sick factory. To bring in more humans into this mess. Blech….All is NOT well with my soul.

[trust101]

Some extreme affinity for some schmuck one considers attractive enough to engage in coitus with? - lol!

 

You're just focusing on one side of the coin. There are couples past 60, 80 even, who have been together since their teenage years. That is why people aim to fall in love. They think they will be the lucky & select few that fall into that minority bracket, & find their love of a lifetime.

 

When love ends, people try again, because they think the next romance is the permanent one. When that fails, they think the next partner they meet will be the one to grow old with & so on.

 

It's sad about your parents. But the reality is, as you get older you not only change physically but everything about you changes. What type of person you are. & if that doesn't match to your current partner, who would have also changed, then things will eventually end until you find someone that is compatible with you in your current state as a person. If that makes sense.

 

You're 27. You haven't lived half your life. Look at Clinton & mhowe's stories.

[Movingforward3]

You need to find hope, again. Look at your numbers. 50%+ don't get divorced. Relationships breakdown, but they also flourish.

We are weak with temptation. Society as a whole has not been good at resisting temptation or valuing fidelity. On the contrary, women who kick the man to the curb now our celebrated for how brave they are now to stay.

However, there is hope. Love still lives. I still believe I will find it. I hope you will be live in it, too.

[Andrina]

It's like sifting a ton of sand before finding the treasure sometimes. The trick is to end a relationship as soon as you see a deal breaker. 50% of the time you see dogs around you, but also 50% of the time, there are people who give you faith about the goodness in them as a partner. The majority of people I work with are men. It warms my heart when I have small talk with my co-workers, or overhear them, and they make wonderful comments about their wives that shows how much they are thinking of them and how loving their relationship is. My parents have been married for 60 years. As most people have minor flaws, they irritate each other to no end, but their love for each other is very touching.

 

Relationships take daily effort, which each person should practice, and if one needs a reminder to show more effort, that should be communicated. The only thing a person has control over is choosing a person who they perceive as a good risk, and putting in that effort. If it fails, it's devastating for a while, but a person with a fulfilling life besides their partner, will pick up the pieces and move on.

[mhowe]

Love is a verb and a noun, a thing. It is a living, breathing entity that must be fed and exercised daily for it to thrive and flourish. It is also a descriptive verb that colors every aspect of one life with a different lense.

 

Your concept of love is attraction...and that is too one dimensional. But it is such a small component of the entire piece.

 

People divorce or break up because the mystery of the connection has died. The trust, respect and desire to be together has been neglected to the point that the love stopped growing. That too takes conscious effort.

[Seraphim]

Love is a choice. Marriage is a choice. Both people have to make that choice. We can only control ourselves. However when you find someone with the same goals and similar beliefs and morals and has similar interests and they love YOU, that is the best. Lots of people have that.

[tiredofvampires]

Love is not the problem. It's what people think love is.

 

Love is not an insatiable desire to possess someone. Love is not having a fantasy about who someone is and projecting that upon them because you'd like for them to be a certain person. Love is not desiring someone's image. Love is not lust or infatuation. Love is not hoping someone will cure you of what ails your soul or hoping they will fill a void of self-love or meaning. Love is not feeling wanted by someone. Love is not feeling admired and complimented by someone. Love is not fulfillment of a sense of security. And the list goes on.

 

Healthy love might contain a few of those elements, at times, but is not defined by any of those, and some of them are downright no part of love.

 

It's hard to spell out all the ways people use "love" to address a vast terrain of self-serving motives, but I've listed a few top ones that come to mind as the great masqueraders. Notice, most of those are about "me", and of course, it makes sense in a love relationship that both parties are lifted up and edified by being together. But the focus is not oneself, when it's love. That's the paradox. At least, looking into my own heart, what I identify as true love (doesn't have to be romantic) relates to a feeling of expansion beyond "what's in it for me." And incidentally, I think it's interesting that you've chosen to call "love" in general "a crock", and post this in the "Love" forum, as though the fidelity of spouses and the cohesion of marriages encompasses all there is to experience about love. That's extremely narrow-minded, and shows you're looking at love in a very circumscribed way. You might say, "Well, I meant to qualify this as 'romantic love'", and to that I say, the fact that you didn't qualify it means something.

 

Of course, love also isn't complete self-sacrifice, either (except in extreme situations, like dying in place of someone else whom you love.) So adding to the list above, love isn't wanting to be loved, or doing anything and everything to get it, including giving up your basic values or integrity towards yourself. This is a HUGE area of confusion for people, and why you see so many people ready to jump off a ledge over love gone wrong. That's not love, that's making an emotional business deal with someone and having it not pan out, and feeling like your "investment", your profit, has failed. That's just another brand of self-interest, one that revolves around dysfunctional ways of getting needs met and carrying certain wounds unresolved from the past. How do you know that George Lopez's wife wasn't making those kinds of mistakes? Maybe she was trying to get blood from a stone, even giving a kidney to do so, when she should have never gotten into the marriage in the first place. I saw him last night, coincidentally enough, in a re-run of one of his shows, and I couldn't stand him (as usual). Not that that means anything, except that perhaps part of what is insufferable about his persona onstage translates into him as a person. Comedians don't hide behind facades the same way actors in roles do.

 

Love itself is baggage-free. Relationships might have certain conditions in them that need to be met, and that can be reasonable and healthy, but love itself is without condition.

 

Most of the examples you're talking about involve a lot of conditional love, and some of the things I've listed here. The confusions around what love is. I think most people get married having no idea who they are marrying. Most of all, they don't know themselves. And at different paces, people who jump into lifelong commitments without knowing themselves or the person they are marrying, grow up and find out. And that's often why divorce happens. That's the better case scenario -- people growing in wisdom. Or, people leave a marriage in order to keep making the same mistakes and pursue the same confusions about love.

 

So don't blame love. Blame the confusion and its many aspects around love. We're doing the best we can, but it's often pretty off-target.

 

By the way you're hardly a "cougar" for desiring a man 7 years younger than you. It's true that there's a much bigger maturity gap between you and a "baby" of 20 than if I, at 47, were to be into a guy of 40. That's nothing, as age gaps go at that phase of life. More of a gap at your age. But a cougar would be an "older woman" hitting on him, and you're not that. You're older, but not an "older woman."

 

You're young -- so you have time to shake off this cynicism. Don't let it take root too deeply, because the people who make it a life credo and don't let it go are the ones who are living a pretty miserable existence at 47. And a loveless one at that, always railing at the unfairness and the crappiness of life, rather than noticing all the moments that offer them a chance to love truly.

[NorthDallas40]

I found him incredibly good-looking but felt guilty for this. For surely, a dirty old 27 year old woman such as myself shouldn’t be eyeing the likes of a baby.

 

Why not? There's no reason for guilt about finding someone attractive, even if you have a boyfriend.

 

Just because someone is in a relationship - or is of a certain age - doesn't mean that their attraction to attractive people just suddenly turns off like a lightswitch. To suggest otherwise is preposterous.

 

I'd suggest you stop beating yourself up over matters over which human nature has far more control than you.

 

I watched my parents’ marriage crumble after 27 years; watched a close friend of mine have an affair with a man who left his wife after 35 years, heard about the Mexican American comedian George Lopez, and how he and his wife split up after 15 or so years of marriage

 

You're looking at it the wrong way. Assuming that all of those relationships started off on a good foot and generally went well, that's 77 combined years of memories, many of them I'm sure are very meaningful to the people involved.

 

As Dan Savage says, "Every relationship is doomed to fail... until it doesn't."

 

A breakup isn't an eraser; those years still happened, and they still matter.

[20sgal88]

Wow everyone. Thanks for the thoughtful, wise replies. Was in a crappy mood and needed to vent.

[TMifune]

Love is like a Crocodile. Hmmm. I like it

 

......it can be intense and scary sometimes....it's got thick skin and beady eyes, is kinda cute in its own way....and if you turn your back on it for even a second it'll bite you in the ass!!