RELATIONSHIPS | LOVE | SOLITUDE | LIFE
Love Comes for All, but Stays With Those Who Have Embraced Solitude
Or why being long-term alone can prepare you for long-term love
“Who knows how to make love stay?”
1. Tell love you are going to Junior’s Deli on Flatbush Avenue in Brooklyn to pick up a cheesecake, and if love stays, it can have half. It will stay.
2. Tell love you want a momento of it and obtain a lock of its hair. Burn the hair in a dime-store incense burner with yin/yang symbols on three sides. Face southwest. Talk fast over the burning hair in a convincingly exotic language. Remove the ashes of the burnt hair and use them to paint a moustache on your face. Find love. Tell it you are someone new. It will stay.
3. Wake love up in the middle of the night. Tell it the world is on fire. Dash to the bedroom window and pee out of it. Casually return to bed and assure love that everything is going to be all right. Fall asleep. Love will be there in the morning.
Though the above quote is extensive I decided not to condense it. I would have diluted its humor. By the way, Tom Robbins is the author who inspired me to become a writer, so I might be somewhat biased about him.
I would like to add a 4th way or reason to make love stay in this piece. As I noted love comes for (nearly) everyone, but stays for fewer of us.
So how can we make love stay?
The problem does not lie with love but with us. The following might sound counter-intuitive, but I’ve often experienced it. I was inspired to write about this after a conversation I had on an FB group with some Greek friends a couple of days ago.
And yesterday I also talked about this with Benighted in the comment section of this mental health poem:
The counter-intuitive bit is this: The more hungry or needy we are for love, and/or the more we fear of being alone, the more we (usually) increase our chances of finding love and of said love fleeing later.
Love hunger acts as a short-term love magnet and as a longer-term love repellent. And love starvation might increase the effect of both — well, provided it’s not too obvious.
Deep down we are hungry for love, not sex. This also applies to the most sexually promiscuous, perhaps those in particular. Sex, with exceptions, is the journey, not the destination.
We all need it, of course, but more in terms of human connection, embrace, tenderness, caresses, sharing of scents, taste, and other senses than a deeply rooted inherent need independent of love.
It’s an excellent anxiolytic though, love or no love. More effective than any pharmaceutical variant, and with far fewer side effects.
Sexless love is super lame — Emmanuel Rhoides, a famous satiric Greek writer who was honored to be excommunicated by the Greek Orthodox Church, called platonic love “A soft rusk for those lacking teeth” — while loveless sex is, or can be, empty.
The latter can feel, at its emptiest, like you are masturbating with another body. I don’t believe friends with benefits can fully insulate themselves from love, because people are not robots — or at least both parties cannot be robots.
They can work, but only as short-term sooth breaks between the real thing. Sex is a great anxiolytic, as I noted. All that released oxytocin has a biochemical effect too. Let’s get back to my main point though.
I posit that the least hungry or needy we are for love the more we are ready for long term love. Not just find it but make it stay.
Put another way the more content we are with being alone, and for a long time, the more healthily we can function as a partner for someone else. We have to tame our need for love to a want.
Render love a choice, not an impulse or, even worse, obsession. When we are perfectly OK on our own love will come and stay, provided of course we do not fully shut ourselves from the world.
I also posit that those who cannot stand being alone, not even for a day, cannot and will not make love stay. If you cannot stand yourself why would your potential partner stand you?
People like that are not really looking for love, they are looking for crutches. What are you looking for dear reader, crutches or a rocket engine companion?
Let me know in the comments, about this or any other point, and thank you kindly for reading for more than 30"🙏🏽
