Blogging for Love

I ache when I read a lot of peoples' blogs. Some people are in an incredible position of hurt. And usually the hurt in question is relationships.

Most of this comes from women. Men write like their blog is a newspaper or trade magazine. They'll review some new X-Box game, comment on international affairs, or discuss an upcoming software developers conference. If there is hurt going on in their world, it is kept below the surface; it is there, you just have to look hard to see it. You'll see flashes of real anger about politics for example, and that often is an avatar of what is really going on under the hood, so to speak.

In women's blogs, the hurt is right at the surface. I read about marriages coming apart. I read so often about men who come up with over-complex Freudian explanations of why it is they should have access to sex but not have to be involved in a committed relationship to obtain it. I know for a fact that men do not actually ponder their own minds deeply enough for these explanations to be genuine: it is an artifice designed to be pleasing enough to the women they peddle it to such that the sex will continue.

I often think that people can overthink relationships, and overanalyze them, and blogs have convinced me this is often true. Relationships are built primarily on feelings. Chief amongst those feelings is love, of course. Romantic relationships are unsustainable without love. But there are others as well. There must be a feeling of common cause. There must be empathy. There must be altruism – the willingness to give up something in or about onesself. You can't be altruism all the time, but no relationship can survive without the occasional flash of it.

Spirituality is an important part of marriage, too, I think. Most marriages are performed by a religious cleric of some sort, and for good reason. Nurturing your relationship under the watchful eye of a Deity, or at least allowing that it is a puzzle piece in the grand cosmic scheme of things, helps to convince you that your pairing is a part of the way the universe is meant to unfold. This aspect helps to bind you in a way that goes deeper than flesh – a pentecostal moment of sorts.

The relationship cannot be sorted out with the mind. A relationship is not a logical creature other than in its overarching purpose of propagating the species. When you take two human beings predisposed to irritable or grumpy moods, each with their own richly earned psychoses about toothpaste caps and toilet seats, and try to glue them together for life, you have gone to a place beyond logic.

It is love that binds us together, and takes us in unity past the raised toilet seats and squabbles about who pays the credit cards. Love takes the complex and makes it simple. It takes the incomplete and makes us whole. As St. Paul would say, and why so many include this in their wedding ceremony:

Love is patient; love is kind; love is not envious or boastful or arrogant or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; 6it does not rejoice in wrongdoing, but rejoices in the truth. It bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. Love never ends.