“It takes more than love to make a romantic relationship work.”

I don’t know if this is an actual cliche or if it’s one of those things that seems so obvious that it sounded like one the very first time someone realized it. Regardless, it is true because love is innately fantastic and fucking terrible.

You need a gigantic pile of other good stuff to balance it all out, or when the inevitable unpleasantness happens, you fall on your face. It can be one of those poor, bad times most folks’ vows warn them about, or–let’s pretend you have a wonderful, happy, fairy-tale quality life and there are no grey clouds EVER and your love is pure and eternal (which is a load of bunk, but OK)–one of you dies. Surely losing your Disney-style partner will tear out your insides and that is what your love earned you. Love requires mutual vulnerability, which is why where there is extreme happiness there will always be extreme pain.

However, if you have enough other good stuff it is not all doom and gloom. And that is why I wish that for just a short while, we could obsess over what indeed that other stuff essentially is, instead of continuing society’s mind-numbing obsession with love and romance, the knowledge of which doesn’t amount to a pile of beans in the long-term. Falling in love is easy! Romance is everywhere and transient! Anybody can have an affair with most anybody else and that doesn’t mean they should, or that it will last, or, rarest of all, that they’ll be happy.

Life is dripping with frustrating examples, but the kicker is, if we knew what that other stuff was, if we knew what it really takes–and no, the answer isn’t “work,” goddamn the Protestant work ethic–then we could all stop wasting our time and skip to being happy and/or move on.

That is what I’m talking about–being happy.

To have a good, happy relationship, you can’t be obsessed with the notion of romance or else you find yourself neck deep in expectations galore that only set you up for failure and frustration. Our culture beats the idea that we should be over our heads our whole lives, and if you don’t think so, consider personal ads. At this point in time it’s totally normal and acceptable and often suggested to place a personal ad for a romantic partner. But what about personal ads for friends or any other kind of intimate relationship? Go and try it and see what kind of “friends” turn up. I guarantee they’ll want more than just hangouts. You see, even the word “intimate” has been tainted by the OwR! But unromantic intimacy is SO very important and sometimes I feel like I’m taking crazy pills because its value is so infrequently expressed.

I think I take romance’s image so personally because of that 9 year relationship thing that I’m in. You see, people’s ideas about love offend me in the same way that a 1950s child wearing a plastic feather headdress and making “woh-woh-woh” sounds would offend a Native American. It is totally inaccurate, simplistic, and cheap. To claim an understanding with such an apparent total lack of any is insulting no matter the subject.

I am working on figuring out what that necessary other good stuff is and so far I have a three-part hypothesis: to make and keep a romantic relationship alive and healthy, all partners must possess respect, complimentary values, and a balance of power. You also need all those others things that all non-business relationships require, like actually liking each other, being able to converse easily, having a few things in common, and so on. But for an acquaintance or friendship to blossom into perennial romance you need R,CV & P.

Personally, I think respect is the most important factor because that’s the one that enables fire to ignite time after time after time. After all, being in love is not a constant thing. All things that burn exhaust themselves at least for a while, so it’s important to have the ability to fall in love over and over, and more deeply and passionately, throughout the duration of the relationship. To have fire you need the freedom and safety of respect. Freedom to explore yourself and each other and all that life has to offer, and the safety of the knowledge that regardless of how that exploration goes, if you fail or succeed, at the end of the day you’re not going to be looked down upon for it. I believe it is respect that allows the phenomena of adoration, for you can’t think somebody is “just SO amazing!” if you don’t truly marvel at their humanity.

Complimentary values are a bit more pragmatic, but oh so important for carrying out your romance in the world in which we all live. They will allow you to deal (or not deal) with jealousy, prioritize your time and lives, and make sure that everyone in the relationship feels that they matter and life is well spent. If it is very important to one partner to have children and the other never wants children, that’s bad romance joojoo. If one person likes to flirt and thinks jealousy is retarded and another partner thinks jealousy is a legit way of showing that they care, again abandon ship. The whole cat and mouse thing that the OwR teaches us leads many folks into such situations and it’s just not a water in which love can swim for long.

The balance of power rules over the other two. Each relationship can have totally unique and atraditional power structures but regardless of distribution it needs to even out “in the wash.” For example, let’s look at the much-criticized “traditional” western gender role romantic relationship. The masculine partner wins the bread and uses a stern hand with the children and the feminine partner reigns over the household and is sensitive and all of that. IF both partners honestly respect each other for the role they fill, and their own roles are in line with their values and are emotionally fulfilling, and each has equal power over different things (maybe the M earns the money but F handles all the finances, that sort of thing), they can have a healthy, happy romance together. Where we’ve run into problems galore is that these roles are NOT for most folks, and yet most try them out anyways because they think they’re supposed to.

When there’s an issue with any of these three factors, there will be tension. And where there’s tension there will be arguments, misunderstandings, etc. But if the foundation of respect is strong enough, you bet your booties you can realign the power and reassert the values of the relationship, too.

And you can fall in love all over again. <3<3<3

For ’80s Night, oh yeah!

Now we look like superheroes! We have rad powers of Bowie and friendship.

This is Marigold. She is a voracious lover, possibly autistic, and has either cat-pica or an oral fixation.

This is Toast. His hind quarters are fully grown but his front half is still all kitten. He likes looking at things and being a brat.

This is a video of Toast chasing his tail after taking a bath. I guess he didn’t recognize it in its totally-not-fluffy state? I don’t know, but this went on for entirely too long. It’s a gigantic file so be warned! (I’m trying to figure out how to make this smaller and maybe streamable? We’ll see. . .)

. . .

Now there’s a bear whose easy-goin’ style rivals Ian’s

More tantalizing photos are available here

Today’s was a quote by some quote-guy about how encouragement is the most important gift you can give to somebody and if people were encouraged more we’d have more “great minds” in the Einstein-Gandhi-Mother Theresa vein. This seems like an almost too simple and obvious solution to the world’s problems, but maybe it’s not. With encouragement people would push themselves more creatively and our arts and sciences would progress more freely and blah blah blah, but I think the biggest advantage would be that all those encouraged people would, as a side effect of the given encouragement and resulting tryings, probably feel better about themselves in general.

Imagine a world full of people with hearty self-esteems, and I don’t mean people who are cocky and narcissistic, but honest to goodness secure people. People who wouldn’t feel so easily threatened and would be less likely to engage in agression, people who wouldn’t be mean to those with lesser abilities than their own just to make themselves feel superior, people in whom jealousy and pettiness would have no purpose and therefore little existence. However, at second glance the problem of how to actually make the biggest impact with encouragement is clarified. My parents were always very supportive in that you-can-do-anything-you-put-your -mind-to sort of way, but I still ended up with poor ideas of myself and slumped through several years of depression.

This encouragement, then, seems to need to be rather specific. Perhaps if they had said, “I think you should do X because you’d be great at X-ing and I look forward to the results” instead of “of course you can do X, you’re so talented!” I’d have fallen into the well-adjusted category (sooner?).

And so I’d like to make a Call to Action! Woo! We must make a point to recognize other’s specific strengths and encourage them to develop and augment those strengths into skill and achievement, while offering our help along the way. Anyway, seeking out virtues in others is always a good exercise in humility and therefore worth some non-self-centered time.