What Was The Question Again?
Irradiated by LabRat
I’ve only been home a day or so and am still catching up, so I don’t have much in the way of backlogged ideas for blogfodder. Mostly, I’ve been enjoying being in my own bed with my own pets with my own spouse in my own household. Phoenix is a nice city as cities go, but it’s not really “home” anymore.
That said, while surfing around at other people’s places, I ran across a question I’ve seen a lot, that seems to crop up on surveys and inane first-date interviews everywhere- “Do you believe in true love?”
What struck me as odd about the question on the eleventy-billionth reading is that I have no idea what it’s even supposed to mean. What the fuck IS “true love”, anyway?
If it’s “a deeply and sincerely felt emotional affectionate and romantic attachment”, then not only do I believe in true love, I think it’s pretty common. It can probably be differentiated somewhat from lust and infatuation, but millions of happily married and otherwise long-time couples across the face of the earth make the question somewhat trivial.
If it’s “a bond that can never be broken no matter what because love always comes through”, then that strikes me as not only a fictional thing, but still a silly question. Relationships require work, romances no exception, and if anything it’s much easier to hurt the other person and damage or destroy the relationship when you are so intimate that you know all the vulnerable points that can be hit. I’d chalk this up to the difference between fantasy and reality, but what makes the question really bizarre is that this is exactly what the fantasies are ABOUT- every single love story isn’t about two people forgiving each other for anything and effortlessly getting along with each other, they’re about conflict and misunderstanding and going to lengths to demonstrate one’s dedication.
The underlying question- and the one that gets our attention again and again- is always “will the bond survive the pressures on it”, and what the pressures are depends on the setting, culture, and the sophistication of the fantasy; immature and youthful fantasies tend to rely mostly on very dramatic outside pressures (RIVAL CLAN OF VAMPIRES!), but still tend to feature stupid misunderstandings and other user-generated errors. More mature ones tend to focus on pressures like a job that takes all of one person’s time, monomanias, and the sheer passage of time and lessening of newness, but even in fiction “and so they were incredibly attracted to each other and thus they stayed together forever” never makes the cut. Love stories often continue to qualify as such when external pressures keep a couple apart, and are certainly not an unfavored genre.
So if it’s not love as most of us experience it (note we rarely witter on about “true sadness”, or “true amusement”), and it’s not “romances that don’t require work”, nor is it “romances foreordained to end happily”, what the hell is it supposed to BE?
The world needs an answer to this. We have surveys to fill out.
May 19th, 2011 at 3:57 am
Love is like pr0n. I can’t really define it, but I know it when I see it.
May 19th, 2011 at 4:24 am
What a good question. I’m guessing it’s like “true grit” without Kim Darby.
May 19th, 2011 at 6:09 am
Tu blath. It means “to bet.”
May 19th, 2011 at 11:47 am
Dear LabRat,
Did you ever wonder how much of our ability to operate automobiles in heavy traffic, with its need for operating controls with both hands and feet, as well as good depth-perception and judgment of rates-of-closure, depends on legacy code left over from our days brachiating about the trees?
If we came from, say, a long line of ground-dwelling critters, do you think we’d have the hand-eye coordination and trajectory-plotting chops to make a left turn on a city street while shifting gears without getting t-boned by a bus?
That’s what I wanted to ask you the other day when I was driving around, but couldn’t remember it later. It just came back to me now for some reason.
May 19th, 2011 at 11:51 am
So … it’s pets first, and then spouse in the bed?
May 19th, 2011 at 11:54 am
My wife was twaddling on about unconditional love when we first met years ago.
I took this as a challenge, to find a condition she might require.
She stopped short at Dalmeresque behavior ( “But of course I put the boys’ heads in the fridge … I didn’t have a good recipe for human head” ).
May 19th, 2011 at 11:57 am
This is a little sappy, but to me it always wanting what is best for your significant other, and never doubting that they want what is best for you.
My wife and I may argue, or disagree, but I never doubt that she has my back.
May 19th, 2011 at 12:12 pm
Tam: Likely. As it happens in more recent evolutionary terms we DO come from a long line of mostly-ground-dwellers- large African apes and then pretty much the entirety of Hominidae- but tree-living was the state of primatehood for so long (since the Cretaceous) that the basis for much of our vision and coordination probably rests in that state rather than the ground-dwelling one.
Or, put much more briefly, this is why gorillas, despite being large herbivores, don’t have eyes on the sides of their heads.
I will now have a difficult time not thinking of Santa Fe rush hour traffic in terms of Proboscis monkeys versus crocodiles…
May 19th, 2011 at 12:58 pm
Reminds me of “The Ultimate Question of Life, The Universe, and Everything”.
If you’re not clear about what you’re actually asking, the answers will be at best opaque, and at worst nonsense.
I think it may be that “true love” is a mythological thing of poor definition, and Frankly Not Important, to the extent the term has more than a purely derived meaning.
(By which I mean, “true love” is two words, both of which have meanings, and the first of which is - as you note - a common enough modifier of words like the second.
But the fact that they can be grammatically correct when combined doesn’t mean that the composition is meaningful.)
May 19th, 2011 at 1:31 pm
As far as the fantasy thing goes, I actually prefer strong relationships dealing with outside pressures rather than the endless break-up/make-up merry-go-rounds that seem to dominate a lot of popular entertainment.
May 19th, 2011 at 2:00 pm
Tam & LabRat —
Remember, as the Wise Man once said,
“People are just monkeys with car keys.”
May 20th, 2011 at 10:30 am
Most folks let their subconscious do the driving, while engaging their dream programming for entertainment.
Unfortunately, this gets motorcyclists killed, since motorcycles are neither unusual, or dangerous to automobile drivers, and therefor not important ( invisible ) as far as the subconscious is concerned.
For teenage drivers, that “not important” set of objects is much, much larger …
May 20th, 2011 at 10:55 am
I agree with George, or as The Bard put it, “love’s not love that alters when it alteration finds”.
True love doesn’t end because you had an argument, or because you thought he looked hot in his uniform but now he’s been overseas for 14 months and his picture can’t keep you warm at night, or because she gained 25 lbs and cut her hair, or because one or both of you have run out of desire.
It takes work, and sometimes it’s terribly difficult, but true love does exist.
May 23rd, 2011 at 9:49 pm
I tend to define “true love” (to the extent I’d use the term at all, which is not much…but it’s still a classification that exists in my head and is important enough to have demonstrably affected my past behavior) along the lines of “that which continues to exist (or conspicuously fails to continue) once the hormone rush of the first few months of a romance inevitably peters out”.
So my response would be “yes, it exists, and yes, it’s important…but the sort of people who prattle on endlessly about it are those I am least likely to believe have any real experience with it”. A man or woman who’s been married 20 years probably has some insights on the subject, whereas it’d take some pretty exceptional life experiences to convince me that anyone much under 30 knows what it really feels like.
I don’t necessarily buy into _defining_ it specifically in reference to resisting existential pressures (really tough pressure is a feature of romance stories because it’s a feature of stories generally…easy challenges aren’t interesting enough to tell stories about), but the correlation is definitely important.