why we should forgive

To forgive is to overlook, or rather to look through. You look through the ego to the sanity that is in every human being as his or her essence. It requires honesty to see whether you still harbor grievances and failed to forgive someone. If you do, become aware of the grievance both on the level of thought as well as emotion, that is to say, be aware of the thoughts that keep it alive, and feel the emotion that is the body's response to those thoughts. Don't try to let go of the grievance. Trying to let go, to forgive, does not work. Forgiveness happens naturally when you see that it has no purpose other than to strengthen a false sense of self, to keep the ego in place. The seeing is freeing. Jesus' teaching to "Forgive your enemies" is essentially about the undoing of one of the main egoic structures in the human mind. The past has no power to stop you from being present now. Only your grievance about the past can do that. And what is a grievance? The baggage of old thought and emotion.

Recognize the ego for what it is: a collective dysfunction, the insanity of the human mind. When you recognize it for what it is, you no longer misperceive it as somebody's identity. Once you see the ego for what it is, it becomes much easier to remain nonreactive toward it. You don't take it personally anymore. There is no complaining, blaming, accusing, or making wrong. Nobody is wrong. It is the ego in someone, that's all. Compassion arises when you recognize that all are suffering from the same sickness of the mind, some more acutely than others. You do not fuel the drama anymore that is part of all egoic relationships. What is its fuel? Reactivity. The ego thrives on it.

- Eckhart Tolle

different aspects of love

Romantic love is typically blind; we feel it for those we don’t really know. And it tends to be very me-oriented. I love her because of the way I feel when I’m with her; because I have fun when I’m with her; because I find her beautiful, sexy, smart, funny, and so on. A more mature love comes when we care more about that person’s happiness than we do our own selfless love that parents show toward children, a willingness to do without so that the child or our mate can do with. Romantic love drives us to be with the other person at all costs; mature love drives us to want to see the other person happy, even if that means not being with us. “If you love somebody, set them free,” as Sting famously sang.

“Love is wanting to possess the good forever.” This “possession” of the good is not the satisfaction of selfish desire in a superficial eros, which values the beloved for what he or she provides to the one who loves, but is instead a relationship to the beloved that draws the one who loves toward the beloved as a free-standing good. Someone who loves seeks “giving birth in beauty,” either to children or to ideas and virtue. Love opens itself to the eternal by extending the love of parents to their children or by building virtue and love of what is transcendent in the one who loves.

Reflecting on the refinement of romantic love in the context of the Christian tradition, Pope Benedict XVI comments that “love looks to the eternal. Love is indeed “ecstasy,” not in the sense of a moment of intoxication, but rather as a journey, an ongoing exodus out of the closed inward-looking self towards its liberation through self-giving.”

love is what we have decided that we value in life

Love is all its various forms is ultimately about caring--caring so deeply about another person, group, idea, or place that we would be willing to sacrifice our own health, comfort, and even life for it. One hallmark of great art is the amount of care that we sense has gone into it. When people scoff at modern painting, their typical objection is that it looks as though the painter simply threw paint on the canvas with no care. We find ourselves drawn to art that looks as though the artist struggled with it, put a great deal of thought into it--cared about it.

Love is about feeling that there is something bigger than just ourselves and our own worries and existence. Whether it is love of another person, of country, of God, of an idea, love is fundamentally an intense devotion to this notion that something is bigger than us. Love is ultimately larger than friendship, comfort, ceremony, knowledge, or joy.

- Daniel Levitin

why we need friends

Most of us value the opinion of our friends more than the opinion of some stranger off the street. This is true especially when it’s a question of who we think can offer the best account of our character. Unlike strangers or occasional acquaintances, we know our friends and they know us. Indeed, friends tend to know each other better than anyone else. It is my contention that friends know each other better because of the sort of relationship they have. Our friends know us so well not only because we disclose our identities more fully to them, but also because our identities are more closely linked to our friends. Though we have usually developed a sense of self by the time we enter into most of our friendships, once they are entered into these friendships—and typically alter—that understanding.

Like other close relationships, friendship is a relation that exerts a special influence on the self. This relation’s unique capacity to affect personal identity results from the level of intimacy it encourages and the security that it offers the individuals involved. Though the effects of friendship on personal identity may not be as dramatic as the effects of the relations that individuals have with their parents or care-givers during their formative years, the friendships that individuals have in childhood and over the course of their lives do serve to shape their selves. As relational theories like Sartre’s explain, a sense of self not only emerges within a social framework, it is something that is affected continually by social relations. Though our sense of self tends to achieve an increasing degree of stability as we move toward adulthood, our selves are never fixed. Rather, our selves are always evolving. As we grow and change through the course of our lives, so too does our conception of self. Our selves change subtly but constantly in response to our relations to others and the information these relations provide.

Friendships are especially influential when it comes to the self because we let ourselves go with our friends. Unlike in other situations in which individuals may feel that they need to be on guard or otherwise forthcoming with respect to personal information, individuals tend to tell and show all to their friends. Individuals are less reserved in their speech and behavior with friends than they are with others generally. Individuals tend to be more open with their friends because they feel safe with them. The open and honest communications that friendships encourage are important to the formation of self because selves are formed relationally. As Sartre argues, a self is an idea that an individual forms reflexively in response to the information she derives from her social relations. Our relations with others allow us to see ourselves. In order to show us ourselves, others need information. Without ample and accurate information, others cannot do that effectively. Without a reasonable degree of openness, the understanding of self that an individual can derive from her relationships is at best a superficial one.

Real friendships however are not superficial. We trust our friends and tend to be open and honest with them. We are able derive a dependable sense of ourselves from our friendships because we share ourselves more fully with our friends and because we trust the information they offer. Our friendships contribute to the shaping of our selves because of the unique closeness and camaraderie that they promote. Unlike with other individuals, we share our deepest thoughts and dreams with our friends. The trust and closeness implicit in the relation makes it possible for us to tell our friends our most embarrassing secrets. Often without knowing what will result from the activity, we spill our hearts out to our friends. Often to our surprise, the relations we have with our friends make us to realize things we never knew about ourselves. The conversations we have with our friends commonly compel individual insight. The unexpected arguments we engage in often expose deeply held personal principles. The experiences we share disclose to us interests and dispositions that were hitherto unknown. Ultimately, giving ourselves over to friendship gives us a fuller sense of ourselves. Friendships inform our sense of self because the journey to self is one of mutual discovery. Selves are forged through our associations with others. The structures of our selves are affected by each successive relation. Friendships influence the shaping of self more than other sorts of relations because we are so deeply invested in them.

- Jennifer McMahon

the importance of friends for Self

Most people have friends. Friends are individuals with whom we share our time, our dreams, and even our insecurities. Friends are indispensable sources of support in our times of need. They are the ones whose company we seek in times of joy. We cherish our friends in large part because we feel we can be ourselves with them. It is my contention that we not only share ourselves with our friends, but that our selves are structured by our friendships. Our friends contribute to making us who we are. Our friends affect us in indelible ways. We would not be the same without them. Personal identity is established relationally.

In order to have a self, Sartre asserts that the individual needs others. He contends that corporeal and linguistic interactions with others “are the necessary condition of all thought which I would attempt to form concerning myself”. In Sartre’s estimation, personal identity is not something that exists independent of others. Rather, it is something that emerges within a social context.

The reason that the consolidation of self requires the input of others is because the individual is incapable of developing an objective sense of herself without assistance. Ultimately, a self is an idea, a concept that is formulated reflexively. What it means to have a self is to possess a sense of oneself as an object, or thing. To have a self is to apprehend oneself as an entity with concrete characteristics, definitive aims and aversions. A sense of self is essential to the individual because it makes it possible for the individual to make informed choices. Imagine trying to make a decision about a career if one had no sense of self, no sense of personal aptitudes and interests, no sense of personal dislikes and incapacities. It would be impossible. A sense of self guides an individual in her decision-making. Though individuals need selves, they cannot develop them in isolation.

Sartre asserts that selves are created frcm the internalization of information that social relations provide. He maintains that our selves are continually influenced and altered by our relationships. According to Sartre, from the time we are small children, we look to others to learn not only about the world, but about ourselves. We search others’ eyes and analyze their comments in an effort to glean information about who we are. Sartre believes that our interactions with others are the living mirrors that keep us continually informed of our selves.

We cannot escape the fact that we are social beings. Though we might want to, we cannot get away from the fact that we need others in order to have selves. In Sartre’s estimation, individuals exist in a position of uncomfortable and inescapable dependency when it comes to the consolidation of self. We can develop a sense of self only in relation to others, but all too often the assessments they offer are shallow stereotypes or demeaning characterizations that fail to recognize our intrinsic capacity for growth and change.

In conclusion, both Sartre and Seinfeld reveal that others are essential to the development of self. Both Sartre and Seinfeld demonstrate that we discover our identities with others. They reveal that subjectivity is predicated on sociality. What Seinfeld does more effectively than Sartre is illustrate the positive role that friends play in the development of personal identity. The sitcom reveals that our friendships affect our selves more than do other sorts of relations. It illustrates that friendship facilitates self-discovery. Instead of fostering apprehension about friendship, Seinfeld evokes an appreciation of the security that this relation provides. Seinfeld shows how much we depend on our friends for our identity. It makes us appreciate how much we need our friends to be ourselves.

- Jennifer McMahon

trust and openness

Disclosing more of the true self to others is critical in creating intimacy and bonds of empathy. It's only by being open and vulnerable, sharing our inner being, our plight, and our struggle to be that we establish empathic bonds.

life is like travel, people are important

If I were to die today, what would I think about as I die? I would think about the accomplishments I was able to achieve...to turn something from nothing. I traveled the world, learned a great deal, ate different kinds of cuisines, and so on. But then, I would think about my relationships with my family and friends. The friends who knew me well, who I laughed with, cried with, drank with...the people I experienced the highs and lows with. Me being able to be myself around them, to trust them, to confide in them, to reveal myself to them. The long talks...

When near death, most people reminisce about the experiences of deep connections they had with others--family, friends, and colleagues. It is the empathetic moments in one's life that are the most powerful memories and the experiences that comfort and give a sense of connection, participation, and meaning to one's sojourn.

Traveling is not so much about where you are traveling to, but who you are travelling with. It's the same with life. Life is not so much where you have been and where you are going, but who you are going with.

dream job / dream wife

To have a dream job is to have a job that you consider is meaningful within the greater context of your life.

Is it better to find your dream job? Or is it better to get the highest-paying job you can put up with and then in your free time, work on the stuff that coincides with your purpose in life.

18th century model:

Work: Hobby

Wife: Mistress

20th century model:

Love what you do (work).

Love who you marry.

How have we fared? Most people are dissatisfied with their jobs and dissatisfied with those who they married (divorce rate is over fifty percent). Instead of going around feeling sorry for ourselves that we failed in the game of life by not finding the perfect person to marry or finding the dream job that we should have, maybe we just have the wrong attitude or perspective. Who said that we were going to get that dream job or dream girl?

Instead, I think the better more reliable way is to go back to the18th century model. First, get a job that pays the highest that you're willing to put up with. Investment bankers make a lot of money but it's a hard field to get into first of all, and the hours, stress, and competition is the price you have to pay to make millions of dollars a year. Doctor, lawyer, and other similar professional jobs require years of training and study. There is no free lunch. So deciding which high-paying job depends on one's ability to delay gratification. In any case, find the job that pays the most that you can put up with, and in your free time, work on the stuff that provides meaning and flow for you, whatever that may be. This way you'll be both financially stable but also feel content and balanced.

Second thing, find a marriage partner that is chill. Someone you can deal with for at least ten years. Someone who is emotionally stable, frugal, reasonable, intelligent, etc etc. Passionate love, like any drug, can never last forever. Love is ultimately a verb, not a noun. You don't fall into love, you practice and build love day by day, year by year. Rather than a diamond that keeps on glowing from day one, love is like a plant that needs to be taken care of and nurtured and slowly it grows to be a thriving tree/flower/whatever.

I heard somewhere that ideally one should have three partners in life. One for passionate love/sex, one for raising children, and one for retirement, a companion that shares your interests. Now if you found a person that can be all these things, than that's great for you, but often I find that people who end up getting divorced got married for one reason and things start falling apart when they move on into another phase in life.

And for men. Most men just biologically desire sexual variety, even men who have perfect-looking model wifes....Tiger Woods, Kobe Bryant, etc etc. But I think men that they take the time to truly invest in a marriage and discover agape love don't have this problem. I think for most men, the reason they have mistresses is to satisfy their occasional desire for sexual novelty and diversity.

The top dream jobs people want, I noticed, usually have to do with: food, wine, film, art, photography, literature, journalism, sports, and helping people. The words that come to my head when I think about these things are: art, pleasure, creativity, love. The sense that we want to create something beautiful that we can enjoy and perhaps more importantly that we can share so other people can enjoy.

love 101

If you are in passionate love and want to celebrate your passion, read poetry. If your ardor has calmed and you want to understand your evolving relationship, read psychology. But if you have just ended a relationship and would like to believe you are better off without love, read philosophy. Oh, there is plenty of work extolling the virtues of love, but when you look closely, you find a deep ambivalence. Love of God, love of neighbor, love of truth, love of beauty—all of these are urged upon us. But the passionate, erotic love of a real person? Heavens no.

what is love?

No one can live happily who has regard to himself alone and transforms everything into a question of his own utility; you must live for your neighbor, if you would live for yourself.

- Seneca

No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main.

- John Donne

The myth of "true" love is the idea that real love burns brightly and passionately, and then it just keeps on burning until death, and then it just keeps on burning after death as the lovers are reunited in heaven. This myth seems to have grown and diffused in modern times into a set of interrelated ideas about love and marriage. As I see it, the modern myth of true love involves these beliefs: True love is passionate love that never fades; if you are in true love, you should marry that person; if love ends, you should leave that person because it was not true love; and if you can find the right person, you will have true love forever. You might not believe this myth yourself, particularly if you are older than thirty; but many young people in Western nations are raised on it, and it acts as an ideal that they unconsciously carry with them even if they scoff at it.

But if true love is defined as eternal passion, it is biologically impossible. To see this, and to save the dignity of love, you have to understand the difference between two kinds of love: passionate and companionate. According to the love researchers Ellen Berscheid and Elaine Walster, passionate love is a "wildly emotional state in which tender and sexual feelings, elation and pain, anxiety and relief, altruism and jealousy coexist in a confusion of feelings." Passionate love is the love you fall into. It is what happens when Cupid's golden arrow hits your heart, and, in an instant, the world around you is transformed. You crave union with your beloved. You want, somehow, to crawl into each other.

Berscheid and Walster define companionate love, in contrast, as "the affection we feel for those with whom our lives are deeply intertwined." Companionate love grows slowly over the years as lovers apply their attachment and caregiving systems to each other, and as they begin to rely upon, care for, and trust each other. If the metaphor for passionate love is fire, the metaphor for companionate love is vines growing, intertwining, and gradually binding two people together. The contrast of wild and calm forms of love has occurred to people in many cultures. As a woman in a hunter-gatherer tribe in Namibia put it: "When two people come together their hearts are on fire and their passion is very great. After a while, the fire cools and that's how it stays."

Passionate love is a drug. Its symptoms overlap with those of heroin (euphoric well-being, sometimes described in sexual terms) and cocaine (euphoria combined with giddiness and energy). It's no wonder: Passionate love alters the activity of several parts of the brain, including parts that are involved in the release of dopamine. Any experience that feels intensely good releases dopamine, and the dopamine link is crucial here because drugs that artificially raise dopamine levels, as do heroin and cocaine, put you at risk of addiction. If you take cocaine once a month, you won't become addicted, but if you take it every day, you will. No drug can keep you continuously high. The brain reacts to a chronic surplus of dopamine, develops neurochemical reactions that oppose it, and restores its own equilibrium. At that point, tolerance has set in, and when the drug is withdrawn, the brain is unbalanced in the opposite direction: pain, lethargy, and despair follow withdrawal from cocaine or from passionate love.

So if passionate love is a drug—literally a drug—it has to wear off eventually. Nobody can stay high forever (although if you find passionate love in a long-distance relationship, it's like taking cocaine once a month; the drug can retain its potency because of your suffering between doses). If passionate love is allowed to run its joyous course, there must come a day when it weakens. One of the lovers usually feels the change first. It's like waking up from a shared dream to see your sleeping partner drooling. In those moments of returning sanity, the lover may see flaws and defects to which she was blind before. The beloved falls off the pedestal, and then, because our minds are so sensitive to changes, her change in feeling can take on exaggerated importance. "Oh, my God," she thinks, "the magic has worn off—I'm not in love with him anymore." If she subscribes to the myth of true love, she might even consider breaking up with him. After all, if the magic ended, it can't be true love. But if she does end the relationship, she might be making a mistake.

Passionate love does not turn into companionate love. Passionate love and companionate love are two separate processes, and they have different time courses. Their diverging paths produce two danger points, two places where many people make grave mistakes. In figure below, I've drawn out how the intensity of passionate and companionate love might vary in one person's relationship over the course of six months. Passionate love ignites, it burns, and it can reach its maximum temperature within days. During its weeks or months of madness, lovers can't help but think about marriage, and often they talk about it, too. Sometimes they even commit to marriage. This is often a mistake. Nobody can think straight when high on passionate love. The rider is as besotted as the elephant. People are not allowed to sign contracts when they are drunk, and I sometimes wish we could prevent people from proposing marriage when they are high on passionate love because once a marriage proposal is accepted, families are notified, and a date is set, it's very hard to stop the train. The drug is likely to wear off at some point during the stressful wedding planning phase, and many of these couples will walk down the aisle with doubt in their hearts and divorce in their future.

The other danger point is the day the drug weakens its grip. Passionate love doesn't end on that day, but the crazy and obsessional high period does. The rider regains his senses and can, for the first time, assess where the elephant has taken them. Breakups often happen at this point, and for many couples that's a good thing. Cupid is usually portrayed as an impish fellow because he's so fond of joining together the most inappropriate couples. But sometimes breaking up is premature because if the lovers had stuck it out, if they had given companionate love a chance to grow, they might have found true love.

True love exists, I believe, but it is not—cannot be—passion that lasts forever. True love, the love that undergirds strong marriages, is simply strong companionate love, with some added passion, between two people who are firmly committed to each other. Companionate love looks weak in the graph above because it can never attain the intensity of passionate love. But if we change the time scale from six months to sixty years, as in the next figure, it is passionate love that seems trivial—a flash in the pan— while companionate love can last a lifetime. When we admire a couple still in love on their fiftieth anniversary; it is this blend of loves—mostly companionate—that we are admiring.

- Johnathan Haidt

back to hunter-gatherers

We are shedding our agricultural traditions and, in some respects, returning to our nomadic roots.

Few of us still live in the house where we grew up. Rather, many of us have several places we call home—our parent's house, the office, our own residence, and perhaps a vacation spot. We migrate between them. We no longer grow our own food. We now hunt and gather in the grocery store and then carry home our catch—as Homo erectus did over a million years ago. (I am not surprised that we like fast foods either, or eat between meals here and there as we move through the day; our ancestors certainly ate as they marched along.) We commute to work again. And we have a loose network of friends and relatives, many of whom live far away.

These are habits from our past. We are shedding the sexual attitudes of farm life too. In preindustrial Europe, a wedding often marked a merger of property and an alliance between families. So marriages had to be stable and permanent. This necessity is gone. A woman's job was to bear her husband's seed and raise his young; hence our agrarian forerunners required virginity at marriage. This custom is gone. Many of our farming ancestors carefully arranged their marriages. This practice is largely gone. They banned divorce. This is gone. They had a double standard for adultery. This has changed. And they celebrated two marital mottoes: "Honor thy husband" and "Till death us do part." These, too, are disappearing.

For the past several thousand years, most farm women had only three basic options: to be uneducated, subservient housewives; to be cloistered nuns; to be courtesans, prostitutes, or concubines. Men, on the other hand, held the sole responsibility for the family income and welfare of the young.

Now vast numbers of women work outside the home. We have double-income families. We are more nomadic. And we have a growing equality between the sexes. In these respects, we are returning to traditions of love and marriage that are compatible with our ancient human spirit.

Other things:

Women have begun to space their children farther apart as well. In societies where woman gather or garden for a living, they tend to bear their young about every four years. This gives the mother uninterrupted time with her infant before she bears a second child. Today this trait, birth spacing, is returning.

Women will continue to work. Female chimpanzees work. Female gorillas, orangutans, and baboons work. For millenia, hunting-gathering women worked. On the farm women worked. The housewife is more an invention of privileged people in ranked societies than a natural role of the human animal. The double-income family is part of our human hertiage.

Margaret Mead once said: “The first relationship is for sex; the second is for children; the third is for companionship.”

cambodian refugees

The next morning in meditation, all my caustic old hateful thoughts come up again. I'm starting to think of them as irritating telemarketers, always ailing at the most inopportune moments. What I'm alarmed to find in meditation is that my mind is actually not that interesting a place, after all. In actuality I really only think about a few things, and I think about them constantly. I believe the official term is "brooding." I brood about my divorce, and all the pain of my marriage, and all the mistakes I made, and all the mistakes my husband made, and then I start brooding about David...

Which is getting embarrassing, to be quite honest. I mean—here I am in this sacred place of study in the middle of India, and all I can think about is my ex-boyfriend? What am I, in eighth grade?

And then I remember a story my friend Deborah the psychologist told me once. Back in the 1980s, she was asked by the city of Philadelphia if she could volunteer to offer psychological counseling to a group of Cambodian refugees—boat people—who had recently arrived in the city. Deborah is an exceptional psychologist, but she was terribly daunted by this task. These Cambodians had suffered the worst of what humans can inflict on each eachother—genocide, rape, torture, starvation, the murder of their relatives before their eyes, then long years in refugee camps and dangerous boat trips to the West where people died and corpses were fed to sharks—what could Deborah offer these people in terms of help? How could she possibly relate to their suffering?

"But don't you know," Deborah reported to me, "what all these people wanted to talk about, once they could see a counselor?"

It was all: "I met this guy when I was living in the refugee camp, and we fell in love…I thought-he really loved me, but then we were separated on different boats, and he took up with my cousin. Now he’s married to her, but he says he really loves me, and he keeps calling me, and I know I should tell him to go away, but I still love him and I can't stop thinking about him. And I don't know what to do."

This is what we are like. Collectively, as a species, this is our emotional landscape. I met an old lady once, almost one hundred years old, and she told me, "There are only two questions that human beings have ever fought over, all through history. How much do you love me? And who's in charge?" Everything else is somehow manageable. But these two questions of love and control undo us all, trip us up and cause war, grief and suffering.

- Elizabeth Gilbert

love is irrational, it has to be

Attraction is essentialist in nature. As Shakespeare put it, "Love looks not with the eyes, but with the mind."

If you stick with me for my intelligence, wealth, or beauty—as opposed to for me, myself—then our relationship is fragile. The psychologist Steven Pinker outlines the worry here:

How can you be so sure that a prospective partner won't leave the minute it is rational to do so—say, when a 10-out-of-10 moves in next door. One answer is, don't accept a partner who wanted you for rational reasons to begin with; look for a partner who is committed to staying with you because you are you.

This commitment might seem irrational, but it is an attractive irrationality, and if the person is interested in you as well, this can be very attractive. "Murmuring that your lover's looks, earning powers and IQ meet your minimal standards would probably kill the romantic mood," Pinker notes. "The way to a person's heart to declare the opposite—that you're in love because you can't help it."

- Paul Bloom

why women want diamond rings

The psychologist Geoffrey Miller has argued that many of the more interesting and ostentatious aspects of human nature have evolved through sexual selection, as a way for people to advertise their worthiness to one another. They are ways in which we reveal our fitness, and Miller would include dance here, and much of sports, art, charitable activities, and humor. For him, the brain is a "magnificent sexual ornament."

I am not going to discuss Miller's grand theory in detail here, but there is one insight that he has about sexual attraction that is worth exploring. The first is costly signaling. The idea is that displays of personal quality are only taken seriously if they involve some cost, some level of difficulty or sacrifice. If anyone can easily do the display, then it is worthless, because it is trivially easy to fake. Costly signaling shows up in the gifts we give to one another, particularly during courtship. Miller asks, rhetorically, "Why should a man give a woman a useless diamond engagement ring, when he could buy her a nice big potato, which she could at least eat?" His answer is that the expense and uselessness of the gift is its very point. A diamond is understood as a sign of love in a way that a potato isn't, because most people would only give one to someone they care about, and so the giving signals some combination of wealth and commitment.

Financial value is not the only signal of commitment. The economist Tyler Cowen points out that the best gifts for someone you live with are those that you, yourself, wouldn't want. He points out that even if his wife would enjoy the complete DVD set of Battlestar Galactica, it would be a lousy gift, because he would also get pleasure from it, and so the giving doesn't signal any particular love for her.

Other signals include changing your name, moving, and getting a large tattoo with your lover's name on it (and it can't be one of those stick-on tattoos that you rub off with hot water!). Marriage is obviously a commitment, and it becomes more costly (and more of a sign of love) if it is difficult to get divorced. Prenuptial agreements, however rational they might be, have the opposite effect, as you are explicitly signaling your worry that the relationship might end and shielding yourself from the costs. A man getting a vasectomy after his wife is no longer fertile is signaling that he won't leave her and have children with a younger woman (but, again, if the vasectomy is reversible, it's not as romantic.)

These are all signs of commitment, of love, though it should go without saying that this sort of costly signaling is not always welcome. Cutting off one's ear, for instance, is typically excessive, as is tattooing or self-mutilation after a first date. While these successfully signal interest and devotion, they also convey desperation and madness.

- Paul Bloom

why we seek sexual novelty

In a relationship, the first problem with novelty is that men and women express their needs for it differently.


On a crisp spring day in the 1920s, President Calvin Coolidge and his wife were scheduled to tour an egg farm in the Midwest. Soon after their arrival, the president and Mrs. Coolidge were taken on separate tours. When Mrs. Coolidge passed the chicken pens, she paused to ask the farmer if the rooster copulated more than once a day. "Dozens of times" came the reply.

"Please tell that to the president," Mrs. Coolidge requested. When the president passed the pens and was told about the rooster, he asked, "Same hen every time?"

"Oh, no, Mr. President. A different one each time."

The president nodded slowly, then said, "Tell that to Mrs. Coolidge."

"What are the four needs of man?" a friend asked. Without waiting for a reply, he answered, "Food, water, pussy, and new pussy.' Like most men, I chuckled when I first heard the line. "But," I countered, "what are the four needs of woman?"

Without missing a beat, he replied, "Food, water, sex, and cuddling."

Men want sexual novelty outside a relationship/marriage. Women want sexual novelty within the bounds of a relationship/marriage.

Speculation: The former is probably due to man's evolved desire to propagate his seed in as many women as possible. The latter is probably due to a woman's desire to have a man stand by her and raise children together and also a signaling mechanism for a man to show his commitment to a woman (cuddling).   

unrequited love

J'ai tant rêvé de toi que tu perds ta réalité.


I've dreamed of you so much that you're losing your reality.

he replaced Cool with kids

"To have a child is to give fate a hostage."

- John F. Kennedy

I'm through being cool. Or, more accurately, I'm through entertaining the notion that anybody could even consider the possibility of coolness emanating from or residing anywhere near me. As any conscientious father knows in his bones, any remaining trace elements of coolness go right out the window from the second you lay eyes on your firstborn. The second you lean in for the action, see your baby's head make that first quarter-corkscrew turn toward you, well…you know you can and should throw your cherished black leather motorcycle jacket right in the nearest trash bin. Clock's ticking on the earring, too. It's somehow…undignified now.

Norman Mailer described the desire to be cool as a "decision to encourage the psychopath in oneself, to explore that domain of experience where security is boredom and therefore sickness and one exists in the present, in that enormous present which is without past or future, memory or planned intention."

I encouraged the psychopath in myself for most of my life In fact, that's a rather elegant description of whatever it was I was doing. But 1 figure I put in my time.

The essence of cool, after all, is not giving a fuck.

And let's face it: I most definitely give a fuck now. I give a huge fuck. The hugest. Everything else—everything—pales. To pretend otherwise, by word or deed, would be a monstrous lie. There will be no more Dead Boys T-shirts. Whom would I be kidding? Their charmingly nihilistic worldview in no way mirrors my own. If Stiv Bators were still alive and put his filthy hands anywhere near my baby, I'd snap his neck—then thoroughly cleanse the area with baby wipes.

There is no hope of hipness.

As my friend A. A. Gill points out, after your daughter reaches a certain age—like five—the most excruciating and embarrassing thing she could possibly imagine is seeing her dad in any way threatening to rock. Your record collection may indeed be cooler than your daughter's will ever be, but this is a meaningless distinction now. She doesn't care. And nobody else will. If you're lucky, long after you're gone, a grandchild will rediscover your old copy of Fun House. But it will be way too late for you to bask in the glory of past coolness.

There is nothing cool about "used to be cool." 

- Anthony Bourdain

Anthony Bourdain, the rebel chef, the king of Cool, has turned in his Cool card for kids. I guess the game of Cool was no longer meaningful for him. Like I said before, replacing one framework of meaning for another... 

evolutionary explanation for marriage

Marriage is here to stay. Right or wrong, hot or cold, people will continue to get married. Even the most primitive civilizations have the institution. No social or political order will ever be invented without it. We had better understand it. Marriage is the gimmick used in each society so that the local witch doctor, medicine man, milkman, diaper service and others know where to send the bill for their work. If the human infant developed as rapidly as other animal babies, our society and its institutions would be vastly different. As things stand, the world is organized mainly to guarantee the survival of the next generation. Adults come off only second best, as is reasonable to expect.

The baby turtle is in business for himself from the moment he is hatched. He never sees his parents and couldn't care less. Most other baby animals are able to fend for themselves as adults within two or three years. But the human animal requires about fifteen years before it is of much use to itself or anyone else. For this reason, mainly, the human animal will always find it necessary to live in a group. For the purpose of mutual assistance for survival. The human infant is a total loss as far as being any help. He must be supported, educated, protected for about a fourth of his whole life span. Someone has to be charged with this responsibility. Enter marriage.

- Willard Beecher

Man & Marriage

Man's genetic instinct focuses on availability and fertility so as to spread his genes more widely, while a woman's genetic interest is to find, and keep, the best-quality man she can whose fitness and resources will improve the survival chances of her children.

But for men "mate guarding" -- that is preventing other males from impregnating their mate -- may be a more efficient strategy than promiscuity in many circumstances, and might account for the invention of the institution of marriage. Remarking that human fertility is low, taking on average 120 occasions of regular intercourse to get pregnant, Angier suggests that a man has a choice of two equally effective strategies: he can sleep with a lot of women (the quantitative approach) or he can sleep with one woman for months at a time, and be madly in love with her (the qualitative approach).

Pornography

Men watch pornography. It's a fact. Men get horny and they need something to satisfy it. Often pornography is the easiest and most convenient way to do it, regardless of whether one is in a relationship or not. Women have a hard time understanding that men can often separate sex from love--for example, men can have sex with a woman they clearly don't love. Women have a harder time doing this because of biological and cultural reasons (hormones, risks of getting pregnant).

Is pornography a problem? I don't think so, because most if not all men watch pornography regularly. It's been around for a while and I don't see a social breakdown in society or men increasingly treating their women in a negative way. Pornography is to men what chocolate and sweets are to a woman. Biological desire. Nothing more, nothing less.

But, feminists argue that pornography is bad because it objectifies women and treats them as sexual commodities. It treats a relationship between a man and woman on purely sexual terms. If that were true, why would a man stick around if all he cared about was sex. What about love, marriage, raising kids? Yeah pornography often demeans women, encourages not-normal sexual practices, and show things that don't happen or should not happen in real life, but movies do the same thing. They are in the business of unreality. Do you think after I watch Terminator 2, I'm going to run around shooting at people? Do you think after I watch the Matrix, I'm going to jump off a building thinking I can fly? People like escapism sometimes.That's what pornography is. Fantasy on video.

The trouble with this wide-open pornography is not that it corrupts, but that it de­sensitizes; not that it unleashes the passions, but that it cripples the emotions; not that it encourages a mature attitude, but that it is a reversion to infantile obses­sions; not that it removes the blinders, but that it distorts the view. Prowess is pro­claimed but love is denied. What we have is not liberation, but dehumanization.

A recent issue of Sky, a magazine targeting young people, contained the fol­lowing letter in the advice column: "My problem is that I don't enjoy sex anymore. I'm a virile 22-year-old. I regularly have sex with my girlfriend, but I have no pleasure anymore.... Is there something that I'm doing wrong?" The advisor replied, "Shootin' air, eh, babe? You've caught the sex problem of the 90's: pelvic apathy...Actually all that's happening to you and your bald best mate of 22 years is that you've both managed to forget there's another human being slaving away at the far end of your plank. Remember that person with the high voice and the lipstick?" This exchange was an unwittingly ironic counterpart to all the "sexy" ads throughout the issue. And how dehumanizing to refer to a woman, someone's lover, as "that person with the high voice and the lipstick."

Meanwhile, Mademoiselle offered this advice to young women whose arms start to ache while pleasuring their partners: "Your best bet—short of looking meaningfully at the bedside clock or developing the forearms of Martina Navratilova—is to get him to give you a hand."

In 1997 NBC featured a story about some college students—men and women—who regularly make a practice of getting drunk together and then hav­ing sex with whomever happens to be nearest at hand. According to one student, it is a great way to get his sexual needs met quickly without the "time-consum­ing" hassle of actually dating and getting to know somebody.

In a world filled with fast-food chains and junk-food advertising, many peo­ple are deliberately starving themselves or gorging themselves into oblivion. Consuming food for which we have no real appetite, we are never satisfied and lose our ability to gauge our own hunger. In a similar way, the barrage of constant sexual images and perfect bodies being offered up to us like delectable pastries (or perhaps popsicles) leave us sexually numb and out of touch with our own de­sire. We can get almost any kind of ethnic food in our own hometowns these days, and we also have more sexual choices than ever before in terms of partners and techniques. But when eating is divorced from hunger and appetite and sex is divorced from desire and relationships, both experiences become onanistic, soli­tary, unfulfilling.

- Jean Kilbourne