It has come together and I understand it. I like this. This is mine. To use Nietzsche’s terms, I have torn down the virtues handed to me and created my own. This has been in process for nearly three years now. This is a culminating moment.

The other night I wrote the first of these thoughts on love in which I identified the three motivations whereby people love. From these tonight in conversation I was forced to see the implications for these motivations on a conception of relationships.

First off. I can’t stand the current conception of relationships. You know what I mean. Its every love story we read, see, and hear. Its boyfriends and girlfriends, engagements, marriage. Its a conception of love that is vague and nonsensical, that chews us up and spits us out as something different. Either that or its just sex, attraction, infidelity. These are the black and whites in a world defined by a sense of relationships that I have come to loath. It entails an incredible power over another being, to suggest that one ought to have ultimate loyalty, complete fidelity, unyielding security in devotion.

The labels themselves are a security. We know what to expect of a girlfriend, a fiance, a wife. Even if the conception changes, the conception still is defined for us. That is why we highlight these defining moments, the ones where he “asks you out” or you kiss and you become boyfriend/girlfriend. Then the engagement. Then marriage. Its convenient. The rules are laid out. The expectations are clear.

Nonetheless, each of these labels are completely arbitrary. They speak nothing about the depth of one’s relationship. I am serious about this. When you look at them they are nothing more than socially defined points in an absurd relationship timeline. More distressing is the roles that they entail, the whole set of actions bestowed upon you by the title of “boyfriend”, “fiance”, “husband.” These expectations, this role, becomes a part of you as soon as the label is instilled. Even though you may create your own idea of these concepts, they still exist within a mental, linguistic, and social framework that cannot be avoided. The subtleties and intricacies of its effect is enormous and too much to discuss here.

But consider perhaps the worst two conclusions based on the current two conceptions that these ideas exist within. To do this we need to remember the three motivations for relationships–the first is the connection with another existence, the acknowledgement of their being, and a care for it. The second is the desire to be intertwined with that other existence, to be a part of their experience and to experience part of theirs. The third is the physical, which ranges from a simple handshake (as a physical acknowledgement of their physical reality) to sex.

Now, according to what is the more traditional and conservative view of relationships, friends can share the first two things but it precludes the third. That is, as friends you can recognize and care about another’s existence and you can become intertwined in their experience. You can do this on a shallow level or an extreme level and still remain friends. What makes you more than friends then? Sex. Its all about the level of physical intimacy. Sure there is an element of the second one that is inaccessible–your financial matters are difficult to intertwine without marriage…but it can be done and still be within the realm of decency according to these values (like when two guys go into business together). What makes a friendship more than friendship is the level of physical intimacy.  You don’t kiss friends. You don’t have sex with friends (at least according to this conception). Do you see what this does? It is an attempt to honor sex and make it sacred but instead it just singles it out, making it something scandalous and forbidden while also being the main mover of relationships. Essentially, the truly “deepest” of relationships are all about sex. Why get married? To have sex. Then you’re getting married just to have sex. How odd is that!  And if its not marriage, then its the fact that you are adopting whatever role you call it (girlfriend to wife) for sex. To put it badly, we are all whores bought with the price of adopting a social label.

Now take the opposite conception, the more liberal view that sex is more open. In the same framework it fails once again.  It honors the physical intimacy without the essential prerequisite, which is the first motivation–recognizing the other person as a person and not as a mere object of pleasure. By its own terms it fails to even create friendship–unless it is developed after the fact in a different sort of way–the sort of way that leads to something either like the more traditional view or is something new, but not just about open sex.

On the other hand, we have my conception.  I will keep only two terms for this conception, love and friendship, both of which I will redefine. Then I will add a third: allies, or accomplices if you would prefer that. Here’s how it goes:

Given the need to alleviate our loneliness in this existence as well as the essentially inescapably social nature of our existence we establish relationships with others.  There is a fundamental perquisite to a relationship and that lies in motivation number one:

• To begin a friendship we acknowledge the existence of another person. Normally we do this by exchanging names, a handshake or other physical gesture, and by getting to know each other

This is where it begins. On its shallowest level we call these people acquaintances. From here on out there are no rules. Every friendship is different, taking on a different character. There is nothing really beyond friends except allies, which is just what I call the strongest form of friends.  Instead, we all just have different levels of the three motivations working themselves out in different ways and varying strengths, creating the dynamics of closeness and understanding between us.

To clarify, I will venture to make a metaphor. The three motivations are like the three elementary colors. Every relationship is constantly changing colors depending on the strength and depth that their three desires are working themselves out in the relationship. As such, relationships are ever changing and every relationship is different.

Consider this a little more concretely. You are introduced to someone by a friend. In that first moment you lay the grounds for #1, the care for that person starting with simply acknowledging them. At the same moment you might find them incredibly fun and spent the rest of the night with them, thereby temporarily entangling your experiences. But you might not be attracted to them. Over the course of a few years you may develop a very close friendship in terms of the first two but maybe not in terms of the three. Or perhaps you care deeply for them and are attracted to them but do not feel your lives can be fully entangled. So your friendship might include sex but have no element of commitment.

There is nothing better or worse about each of these forms of friendships, they are simple different. The only bad scenario really comes when you have sex without the acknowledgment, which I wouldn’t call love at all.

To be clear, lets lay out the shallowest and most extreme forms (that I can think of ) of each motivation

1. Existence—–Shallow: Acknowledgement—Deep: Strong, unshakable value in that other person’s existence as a being
2. Experience—Shallow: Doing things together, having fun—Deep: Sharing most of one’s experience, intertwining plans and life goals
3. Physical——-Shallow: A touch or general attraction—Deep: Sex.

Now, what happens when one reaches the deeper forms of friendship in all three? Well then one can form a deep and residing friendship which I call “Allies in existence.” It is my concept that is most akin to marriage, but I don’t like the comparison and instead choose a diplomatic metaphor. It is someone you adore, who you share your experience with, who you intertwine your existence with. This is the only form of commitment in this formulation. And allies may be for life if they are good enough, or for as long as the alliance should last. Note that this alliance comes most strongly from #2, your experiences becoming intertwined. As such I guess it can function without the strongest form of physical closeness but I think that in its strongest form it should include all three.

The most important point here is that its all the same. There is no transition, only a matter of depth and form. There is no magic point where you become anything except at the point where you intertwine your existences so closely that you become allies. Even then you are still friends. Just really close friends. And no its not “just friends.” I’m just saying that its the same substance. Its still the same three motivations and means at work.  No magical change point. You’re just closer.

I really love this. I know its entirely mine. It entails an enormously different conception of relationships from what most people have. It will probably make it really difficult for me to sustain good relationships with the opposite sex, and this does make me a little sad. But I know it resonates from my deepest values, values which I have created after tearing down the conceptions of love and relationships handed down to me. Yes, I speak in Nietzschean terms because they are appropriate. I am incredibly satisfied and happy with these conclusions.  So it goes.

I’ve thought about questions like this for a long time. I spent a long time on “What is happiness?” This question is almost as complicated and interesting as that one.

I speak passively, even coldly, but this is obviously something thats been bothering me for a long time, something which I feel very passionate about. The question was there through my whole relationship with Kayley and has weighed heavily on my mind since it ended.

My first thought is to wonder whether the concept has any meaning at all.  But of course it does. We use it all too often. We mean something by it. The word “love” puts a name on a desire, just like the word “happiness.”  Happiness entails the desire for purpose and for a positive (subjectively so) experience in our existence (this was my conclusion before). What desire is love? Why do we seek it so diligently and so desperately?

Love, of course, is a social desire. As I am coming to understand it, love is born out of the intense loneliness of our existence. Our experience entails that we can only know ourselves, and even that somewhat hazily (as we constantly recreate and redefine ourselves in our every day lives). We cannot be someone else, i.e. we cannot experience their experience, seeing the world as they do, with their set of knowledge and memories, with their train of thought, with their bodily experience, and their social situation. So we can never fully comprehend another being. All we can do to connect, to comprehend another being, is to use our limited and woefully insufficient tools–words, physical contact, imagination, art. Thus loneliness is born, an intense feeling of disconnect. These people around us appear like objects, unknowns, unable to be comprehended.  Likewise we see others and know that we are not comprehended but are constantly misunderstood and mis-characterized. We desire to be comprehended and we desire to comprehend.

While our mediums of communication are, in the end, ineffective at completely knowing another person they are enough to give us a sense of another’s existence, a hope for the intertwining of two existences, for the beginnings of a mutual comprehension of another’s experience.

Nature has built for us a physical counterpart for this philosophical desire. We call its sex.  But in a broader sense it is the whole sense of attraction that we feel for family–for children, for lovers, for parents–all of which are either a part of us or which we exchange physical intimacy with in–all of which is physical

So as far as I can see there are three reasons we love, which essentially makes up the three elements of love.

1. The desire to comprehend another’s existence, and to be comprehended
2. The overcoming of loneliness, to share one’s experience
3. Sexual and physical desire

These are the reasons we seek relationships. Elements of these three are what form love. The second involves the sort of thing we have when we say that someone is “really fun to be around.”  The first is more implicit, involving knowing the other person–on a simple level their likes and dislikes, on a more complex one, their deeper desires, feelings, and preferences. Both one and two involve the sort of thing we share when we help each other out and listen to another’s thoughts, concerns and feelings.

Thats my basic conclusion. I have some more questions about the role of sex in relation to the first two but that is an issue for another moment. Specifically, I wonder about the classifications we use in “friend”, “lover”, “boyfriend/girlfriend”, “fiancee”, “husband/wife.” What do all these labels mean given the three reasons that people love? How does relationships change between each? What use do these labels have for us? I have some thoughts on it but I’ll wait for another post.

A sparkling guy with a weak little girl who chooses him over a decent cool guy who sees her as more than some pretty jewl–seems like a bad combination for a love story, especially seeing as it runs completely contrary to the movement towards a more independent, strong female population. It resurrects old concepts of the “prince charming” who is going to come sweep you off your feet as well as the impractical romantic nonesense of natural, easy, all-you-need-is-love relationships.

Not only this but the writing is subpar, the plot always thrown in but predictable, and–this is most important–the characters really aren’t that fleshed out. Bella is just a weak little girl, Edward a dashing, over-concerned, fatherly bigot and Jacob a vaguely cool, fun guy.

Right, so this is the point. I realized today that this is precisely why girls love Twilight so much.  What Stephanie Meyer has done is somewhat like a custom fairy tale. Most well written books spend a lot of time fleshing out characters and having decent dialogue with interesting and complex characters.  Meyer does not. She simply provides the reader with flat templates–two basic genericguy types (the stunning protective gentleman and the cool, laid back guy) who are madly in love with a stale and uninteresting girl. This vagueness allows the reader to fill in their own details.  The weakness in Bella speaks to the frailty the a lot of girls seem to feel (perhaps that we all feel as people, but particularly a lot of girls I think) so it is easy for girls to place themselves in that position. And what girl doesn’t want to be loved so devotely and have guys fighting for and over you?  But most importantly, girls have a choice between the two template which are vague enough that they can fill in all the little details of their ideal of a perfect guy. If they like the confident, beautiful, protective type they go for Edward and fill in all the details of their perfect guy, completing all those gaps in character that Meyer leaves. If a girl prefers cool, laid back, fun guys who are devoted but also willing to her be herself then they love Jacob and fill in the rest of the details for him.

Now with the girl firmly placed in Bellas shoes and with the ideal guy in place, the girl can go through four books of adventure of romance and worry and adventure.

This is why girls get so hot over the Jacob-Edward debate. Its all about a girls vision of the ideal guy–its about two ideal types, yes, but also more intimate than this. The genius of the Twilight series is that the girl will literally fall in love with either Edward or Jacob as they create from those templates their vision of the ideal guy.

And so we have the Twilight series, obsession of millions of women everywhere, falling in love with fictions and ideals.

An excerpt from my letter to Curt, written July 1, 2009–the day Kayley moved out.

So here it is. Finally. The culmination of two years of working it out, of experimenting, of struggling and trying. Most people were oblivious to this process. We put up a good front. Always a good face. We’re fine. We’re great.  Even in our little apartment here we mostly got along fine, keeping our uncertainties and difficulties out of the incredible and delicate process of loving each other.

Now, I will declare it calmly, but I’m delaying, trying not to let it become perfectly clear. I don’t want to say it.

Nathan, that friend of mine, he knocks at the door–so I stop writing. We are talking, chatting, trying to laugh. He helps me move the bookshelf.  The futon lies open and exposed in the middle of the living room, soft and ready to consume my tired and dreary body. I wanted to rearrange the furniture but only succeeded in turning the futon and moving the bookshelf. But it seems like enough. When I did it, the change made a strange feeling inside that is the wicked step-sister of contentment. I said out loud, “I am going to sleep here, in the middle of the living room.” Inside, I knew I could be ok with that. Posters–I’d get the posters I’ve always dreamed of having and put them right there where I’d place the computer desk, which was freshly chopped in half and looking puny without its other appendage. It wobbles now but its ok. And I’ll live right here in the living room, TV on one side with the Xbox, computer and books on the other side, and me in the center.

Nathan leaves and gives me a hug–odd yes but well deserved. “Run,” he says as he leaves, “Get out now. Do something you’ve never done before. Start now. Its healthy. Overstep your boundaries.” And he leaves.

I sit back into that perpetual quiet that has overtaken this apartment. I have learned to call it home. The thought sends a pain through me so I withdraw it, not taking the bait, the fears and horror and tears hiding themselves back within the deep caverns of my chest.

I switch into shorts and a white undershirt. I don’t warm up. I don’t stretch, I don’t care. I am out the door, around the corner of the building, under the tree and sprinting across the grass. The night is dark and heavy. A wind blows and I feel the first drops of coming rain. I cross the street with hardly a look and continue down a street I’ve driven on day after day for two years–but never walked on.  It looks the same from here and is not as long as I expected it to be–both unexpected conclusions that distract me from other thoughts.

I run to the bridge where I know a single bench sits. I’ve always wondered why there was this random bench there. Why would you place  a bench beside the bridge like that? I see this bench now and realize I am far beyond my comfort zone, which is where I ought to be. Never have I ventured this far from all places I’ve known without the comfort and restriction of a car. And I realize that comfort and restriction are one and the same.

I see now that there is a path that winds down past the bench. It turns sharply, a tree greeting each bend before turning back. To the right I see the underbelly of the bridge rise before me, the long enormous tubes of utility pipes an odd and unsuspected yet retrospectively obvious sight. It begins to rain a little and the wind picks up. As I approach the river, the noise grows louder–frogs, crickets, and odd birds mixing with the angry hiss of the wind in the trees and the vicious flow of the river.

The path juts off to the left along the river and I see that it winds lazily along the water, a well formed sidewalk with benches and picnic tables punctuating the scene. This was here the whole time? And I never came down here? 2 years? And this, this fantastic beautiful riverwalk–and I never took Kayley down here?!

The wind greets me rightfully with frustration.  The rain begins to beat with the earnest intent of instilling fear and adding to the mystery of the night. In my pocket, my keys jingle in time with my steps. I enter a section of darkness and the fear takes over–but I just keep moving. It continues like this, sections of winding light and dark, the river always on the right, full of odd shapes and sounds. A frog leaps out of my way, my foot nearly crushing its little body. Something bites my leg. Still I move.

Now at the other end, there are a few cars pulling away from a police car. It makes me feel criminal and the adrenaline impulse to run increases my pace. I sprint up to State St and cross to the line of downtown-style storefronts. I slow to a walk. I’ve passed these stores hundreds of times. They look different. I peer in every window. A fine dining restaurant, two coffee shops, a club, a comic store, and a flower shop. Further down, an antique shop, pub, and a gay bar. All right here, just down the street.  I keep walking; the last little bit is short and I am home again. the words stumble out like I stumble in. Now I write and I write of the experience. Anything so I don’t have to write of her, to remember all of the amazing times that I will never have any more, that are now over and gone–the amazing sense of tragedy hovers like a bug around the dim light of my faintly, calmly beating heart.

See, she’s gone and she isn’t coming back. It is final. It is the end. She’s gone. My Kayley is no longer mine. This Princess has been cut loose. I am now alone again, free again, but oh so alone again.