Edited by Martin Cadwell, Wednesday, 23 Apr 2025, 12:44
mental health - love
[ 5 minute read ]
Outside of relationships
In trying to write about love I set myself a challenge. I thought that it would be difficult. I didn't get many hugs as a child and comfort came from a miserable mum.
I have met a limitation of my understanding of something that binds the human world together. Compassion I understand, because I understand suffering. Being nice to someone because you love them is something I had little experience of. My childhood seems to be held together by necessity, as in, being a child, it was necessary to satisfy some of my wants with; first, food and nappies; then better food and toys; then shoes that match; then clothes that comply with societal expectations for school-age children; and so on. I can recognise that I may have been loved as a child, but I seem to think I was just cared for.
Tongue in cheek, I suggest, that before anyone gets married, each of the intended spouses write a story of all the types of love they can think of; familial love; slow-burning and building love; love born from adversity; platonic love; community love; forbidden love; exciting love; mundane and tired love; extra-marital love, shared love for something or someone else; first-love; parental love; and love for a deity; there is more, but I am close to reaching the full scope of my understanding of where to find love. Incidentally, I had a girlfriend that loved being in love. I write that in past tense.
I thought I could write about love, just like the 'subject, verb and object' order in other languages around the world are different in different cultures, I thought I could make a mash of love and kindness, and strain the kindness out to leave a clean and valuable commodity. In effect, like those other languages, create sentences on love, that for many people are grammatical incorrect, but still comprehensible. I am wrong; There is a dark curtain that I cannot see through. It is a shutter that is eternally locked against me.
My story on love is heavily related to loss; the feeling when love is lost. Love tends to grow slowly and is not always known to the lucky person who naturally loves. When the object of love is removed from our reach; by the demise of someone, suddenly by accident, or through nature. The breaking of a relationship made clear to the unsuspecting other person in the relationship is brutal. No-one has the time or the resources to let the now 'spare' person down gently. It took months for love to grow and it is taken away inside of five seconds by a single sentence. Sure, it took twenty sentences to deliver it, but it is only the one sentence that is the determining one. I suspect that the discarded person would be like me, and so not good at writing about being nice to someone simply because it makes them happy.
Sometimes, I see glee on women's faces and I wish I had delivered their pleasure to them. I don't need them to know it was me but I would like to see it in real time. But people get arrested for that, or get a punch in the face from an irate husband.
When my wife and I were courting, we went to the library and learnt how to say 'I love you' in as many languages as we could find in the language translation books. None of them, however, were on Xhosa, or its parent language, Khoisan, with their wonderful clicks. Oh well.
Perhaps, I am not in love right now, and it is emotionally expensive to live as though I am in love. As an action to promote survival in a herd community, or a pair, it is no doubt extremely useful to watch out for your loved ones; typically these are people who share our own genes or are the carers / parents of our offspring. And, there we have it; outside of any meaningful relationship, one can only be driven by one's innate drive to procreate, or seek a series of temporary relationships through promiscuous sex; the physical pleasure of which, is a terrible substitute for love.
However, in spending quite a lot of hours dredging my mind, I am artificially in love and, I think, a little kinder.
At more than 4,100 words the story, almost complete but not yet embellished, it would take around 22 minutes to read. This, I feel, is too long for a blog.
The purpose behind writing the story was to show how I am learning how to come up with expressive statements to negate the use of worn and tired cliches. Ultimately, I want to be able to store phrases in my head to help to use as templates of understanding, much like heuristics, when I study something. I find that humanising dry subjects and concepts help me to explore more fruitfully.
What is Love? It seems that I don't know.
[ 5 minute read ]
Outside of relationships
In trying to write about love I set myself a challenge. I thought that it would be difficult. I didn't get many hugs as a child and comfort came from a miserable mum.
I have met a limitation of my understanding of something that binds the human world together. Compassion I understand, because I understand suffering. Being nice to someone because you love them is something I had little experience of. My childhood seems to be held together by necessity, as in, being a child, it was necessary to satisfy some of my wants with; first, food and nappies; then better food and toys; then shoes that match; then clothes that comply with societal expectations for school-age children; and so on. I can recognise that I may have been loved as a child, but I seem to think I was just cared for.
Tongue in cheek, I suggest, that before anyone gets married, each of the intended spouses write a story of all the types of love they can think of; familial love; slow-burning and building love; love born from adversity; platonic love; community love; forbidden love; exciting love; mundane and tired love; extra-marital love, shared love for something or someone else; first-love; parental love; and love for a deity; there is more, but I am close to reaching the full scope of my understanding of where to find love. Incidentally, I had a girlfriend that loved being in love. I write that in past tense.
I thought I could write about love, just like the 'subject, verb and object' order in other languages around the world are different in different cultures, I thought I could make a mash of love and kindness, and strain the kindness out to leave a clean and valuable commodity. In effect, like those other languages, create sentences on love, that for many people are grammatical incorrect, but still comprehensible. I am wrong; There is a dark curtain that I cannot see through. It is a shutter that is eternally locked against me.
My story on love is heavily related to loss; the feeling when love is lost. Love tends to grow slowly and is not always known to the lucky person who naturally loves. When the object of love is removed from our reach; by the demise of someone, suddenly by accident, or through nature. The breaking of a relationship made clear to the unsuspecting other person in the relationship is brutal. No-one has the time or the resources to let the now 'spare' person down gently. It took months for love to grow and it is taken away inside of five seconds by a single sentence. Sure, it took twenty sentences to deliver it, but it is only the one sentence that is the determining one. I suspect that the discarded person would be like me, and so not good at writing about being nice to someone simply because it makes them happy.
Sometimes, I see glee on women's faces and I wish I had delivered their pleasure to them. I don't need them to know it was me but I would like to see it in real time. But people get arrested for that, or get a punch in the face from an irate husband.
When my wife and I were courting, we went to the library and learnt how to say 'I love you' in as many languages as we could find in the language translation books. None of them, however, were on Xhosa, or its parent language, Khoisan, with their wonderful clicks. Oh well.
Perhaps, I am not in love right now, and it is emotionally expensive to live as though I am in love. As an action to promote survival in a herd community, or a pair, it is no doubt extremely useful to watch out for your loved ones; typically these are people who share our own genes or are the carers / parents of our offspring. And, there we have it; outside of any meaningful relationship, one can only be driven by one's innate drive to procreate, or seek a series of temporary relationships through promiscuous sex; the physical pleasure of which, is a terrible substitute for love.
However, in spending quite a lot of hours dredging my mind, I am artificially in love and, I think, a little kinder.
At more than 4,100 words the story, almost complete but not yet embellished, it would take around 22 minutes to read. This, I feel, is too long for a blog.
The purpose behind writing the story was to show how I am learning how to come up with expressive statements to negate the use of worn and tired cliches. Ultimately, I want to be able to store phrases in my head to help to use as templates of understanding, much like heuristics, when I study something. I find that humanising dry subjects and concepts help me to explore more fruitfully.