While rooting through my documents I found this thing I wrote once upon
a time.  I’m not sure if I believe it, or not… it seems
incomplete… just rambling thoughts in my head.  But I figure
that’s why I started the blog in the first place, to get the rambling
thoughs down.  So here it goes:

The best feeling in the world is being
in love with someone. The worst is knowing that you can never be
with that person.

Maybe it’s unrequited, the object of
affection that does not return the same.

Maybe it’s distance, a separation by
continents slowly drifting away from each other.

Maybe it’s circumstance, lives that
aren’t going in the same direction, obligations from before ones
birth.

Maybe it’s those few differences that
keep you apart.

Maybe it’s uncertainty, about all these
things, about the nature of love itself.

Love is supposed to conquer all, so
maybe the inability to overcome means it’s not love. What is that
dividing line between infatuation with the idea of someone, or a love
of who the person is? ‘Tis a specter of an idea, an apparition that
disappears as it’s in our grasp.

Infatuation, lust, commitment, the
three aspects of a single ideal. Few are the relationships that
contain all three though. Arranged marriages rarely have the first
or the second, only to have them develop over time if ever. Our
literature, art, and history are awash in romances of the first two
kinds. Cupid’s arrow, our animal urges… these things define our
very notion of love in this day in age. Yet in the end they say
little, if nothing at all, about how long a love last. They are so
very basic, so hardwired into our being, that we cannot resist them
once we have the freedom too.

The brings us to the fundamental nature
of relationships in a world of relative freedom. It would seem
obvious from observing nature that the need to commit for life is the
last impulse to evolve. It makes sense when you realize that
commitment actually works against an individual’s ability to pass on
their genes. Yet in the larger context of a society, or a species as
a whole, the ability to mate for life creates a stability that allows
us to pass on more than our genes, but our memes as well. If it
weren’t for some evidence to the contrary (prairie voles mate for
life for instance), once could almost conclude that the need to
commit for life is responsible for our civilization. It’s possible
that the traditional social taboo attached to divorce is not merely
an expression of misogynistic control. It my be a result of the
conflicting evolutionary urges.

So in a society where we are no longer
necessarily bound to the tradition of marriage everlasting, we find
that relationships grow and fall like the leaves of season.