25 May

The Unsatisfactory Husbands Club. Thought this was very powerful, I’ve posted a lot about love and how little I think we understand it, thinking of it as a feeling. The stories of these couples shows what happens when that initial rush of feelings unfolds in actual life, over years. Loved the phrase that we are mostly incapable of seeing the ‘icebergs’ waiting for us in a relationship, in that first flush of emotions. And that a person can be ‘swooped up’ too young - couples who met while very young are often riding a totally dysfunctional train, the article points out. What is love? I think it’s absolutely not a set of feelings, and relationships prove this. No relationship will last long based on feelings. Love is two things - firstly recognising the absolute difference of each person, as an individual. And then living the sparks the clash of those differences between people create. It’s how a person is different to you that attracts you to them in the first place. That excites you like nothing else. And yet in relationship mode we move Heaven and Earth to try to be the same person. Often out of the necessity of trying to organise a joint life. But it’s those differences and the sparks they cause, not always happy sparks, that are love. And sometimes they’re the wrong differences and wrong sparks, and the relationship can’t work, or will be always dysfunctional. We’re born alone, we live alone, and we die alone. Even in friendship and relationship. That’s not a contradiction, it’s that aloneness that generates the sparks. We don’t understand that it’s respecting that aloneness that generates real love. Many have such a weakly developed sense of their own self that they substitute an idealised idea of friendships and relationships, to avoid their essential, unavoidable aloneness. It makes them co-dependent on others, using them to provide their sense of self-worth. And as the article says, they then live their entire lives as teenagers. They don’t mature, they have ‘besties’ into middle and old age. Mass schooling transformed our adult lives into adolescent lives, so our emotional immaturity actually meets no correcting obstacles in adult life, which is increasingly just high school. Social media pours petrol on this fire.