Emotions are so often cause for great confusion, and confusion can lead to so many problems for so many people. I am lucky in a way because I understand my own emotions fairly well. I try to be honest with my emotions and what motivates me and why. I am also humble about my own humanity, but can be arrogant about my own views. I think I am because I actually do understand my place in the world.
Things in life are often more simple than we make them or allow them to be. Right is right and wrong is wrong, and while most things have shaded areas that include both, a choice between right and wrong is easy to make if you can sacrifice selfishness. The type of selfishness I mean does not mean doing things without any self interest, but in having real and sincere consideration for others and what is right and wrong.
People sometimes don't or won't take a stand on some really critical things in life, or take real responsibility, but instead choose the easy paths or try to avoid accountability or risk. This is true in everything from war to bigotry to relationships to fighting injustice. The easy path may avoid involvement in aspects of life that require some work or loss at times, but if you have a conscience you can't escape the easiest path is sometimes the one that might first appear the hardest.
This is true in relationships, where real honesty is stated but seldom really expressed. We all keep so many secrets from the people we say are the ones closest to us. Now there is a right and room for some secrets, but is that really being a mate to someone? Is it so hard to just lay your entire soul wide open to someone? Can they love you enough to accept you completely for all your faults and shortcomings? What is real betrayal, and what is real honesty?
I am married to someone to whom I can't tell my deepest desires and dreams and feelings, because she will twist them and use them to attack me. That is sad to me, but I made the choice to marry her hopeful that the relationship would evolve so she could accept me with my views on love and sex and life.
Now I am not conventional. I don't think being locked into having sex with one person forever and ever is normal or right for me. I don't go out and look for lovers, but it feeling spark I don't think to deny them is healthy either, and neither would I deny any lover the experience of love with another. I think if you are in true deep love with a lifemate and companion that you can allow those excursions and they will only wind up enhancing your life together because there is no temptation to run away for something you can have so freely, so even the desire for it is less because it isn't denied forbidden fruit anymore. And if you can share it, even better. I live without that, but wish I didn't have to, and that there was freedom, but that is more of a socital thing.
So what lies between love and lust, and shouldn't both be allowed to be healthy experiences that just flow. We are a culture so hung up and self-denied and have made sex so secret and dirty that we have not only inhibited sexuality, but the love and life pleasures that go with it. That repression spills over int a sense of frustration that bleeds with violence and other sicknesses that keep us from real progression.
She lets life shit in, and allows it to take away from her happiness, which steals happiness I need from me, so I search for it elsewhere. Most real cheating happens because people hold out and back on each other and have false expectations from each other. I am so much more free but am so hurt by the repression around me, and it makes me sad inside that I can't live and be how I know I really am inside. In simple terms, with a really healthy fedelity based relationshoip externals aren't even thought about because you wind up caught up in too much happiness to have the time or inclination.
I think our urges are there for a reason, and when we have them we should fill them. If we did, we wouldn't feel starved and eat when we shouldn't. There should be a comfort level there. I think sex is like a check valve designed to bring fulfillment and release pressure, so if you don't answer it and repress it you make your own anxiety. If you don't have that, then when you love someone you can give them yourself unclouded. The tension aspects of it all tend to vanish.
So I know this much about myself. That not always, but mostly when I have desires that they need to be met, and right now I have to hide who and how I really am inside. That I am stuck with one woman who has the passion of a rock and repression of a guilty nun. I get nu-nu-nunone..... So that leaves me frustrated and bitter and angry, and I have to fight those emotions that would vanish if I had what I needed...
But there are things that supersede my own desires and needs, that are my real rewards, like raising my son. I am devoted to him and trying to make a good life for him and teach him, but I see my wife's head trips hurting him, making him more angry as he realizes her problems and excuses, and him eventually being mean and defiant because of her. I can't stop it and she won't listen. She has problems with depression and her addiction to her medication that are both killing and destroying her, and she refuses to admit or even discuss the possibility that she might be wrong about a damn thing. So there will be no changes until she hits the wall.
My son will have anger and defiance and anxiety as a phase, but as he matures he will find a path out of it because of what I have already taught him that he just has to see for himself.
He clings to being a child because of the environment we live in here... this town and these people, who, to me, are substandard and ill. This society is sick, and I am glad that he is in conflict with it.
He has so many of my habits and values. I hope he sees and learns how to apply himself. My wife gives him escapes from responsibility that will hurt him and his education and chances, so I have to work at it all the time and find ways to compensate.
Meanwhile I am left alone, left as half a man because I don't have a lover/companion to partner to, and it isn't me at this point. I have tried everything from kind to mean to understanding to everything. I can't enable her sloth or depression any longer, so that transition will be difficult as well.
So I have to settle for spurts of lust every so ofter, and it isn't that often or often enough, to fill the gaps left by a lack of love, and that just sucks....
Monday, June 12, 2006
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