Sometimes love hurts

Of all the emotions we experience as human beings, love has to be the one that brings the most joy to our lives.  We all know people who do not have enough love in their lives or who have had to experience the heartache of a love gone wrong, lost or gone unreturned. It can be absolutely devastating and some people never recover from it.  

The joy that love brings to your life is unequalled.  The overwhelming love that I feel for my children, the love we have for our families and friends or the life-defining love that I have for Mr Rocker - remove any of these from my life and I would be a lesser person.

Experiencing love is made possible by being open to feeling it.   That emotional availability has a flipside – emotional vulnerability.  By being open to love, by its very nature, you open yourself to the possibility of emotional pain.  It is the pain of love that makes some love bad for us.  Being hurt time and time again by those who think they love you and show you that love, can be absolutely soul destroying.  

I love whole-heartedly (I openly acknowledge that I am a person of extremes) and absolutely and as a result I always run the potential of being badly hurt.  I wish I were different.  I look around me and see people who are able to go through their lives on a far more even keel, they have far less of a rollercoaster ride than me. 

Yesterday I had a moment of clarity when I realized that I only get to ride to ride that rollercoaster if I buy a ticket.  I can only be hurt by you if I let you into my heart.  If I choose to NOT be open to your selfish and conditional love then it cannot hurt me.  Lesson learnt.  Taken a while, but learnt all the same. 

You don’t get to hurt me if I don’t keep looking for your love.  Your love is bad for me.  I am no longer buying a ticket.  I don’t actually NEED your love, I thought I wanted it, but hell how it’s hurt.  You don’t get to hurt me anymore.  

If you choose to love me and it’s good and healthy, then my life will be richer for it.  If you cannot give love selflessly and openly, then my life will no poorer.  You, on the other hand, will never get to experience the true joy of love because you have no idea how to give with a free heart, never mind receive. 

Really, we're just friends, there's nothing going on, honestly....

 He says...

In a conformist world, married people are discouraged, forbidden even from having true friendships with members of the opposite sex. It hardly ever happens. There are always barriers to the friendship. As a bloke you may THINK you're friends with your friend's wife, but are you really? Chances are she's an extension of your buddy, somebody who is around when you socialise with him. You may drink together, laugh together, have a really good time together, but can you really sit and do those things one on one, make proper meaningful eye contact and the like? Couples friendly with couples is exactly that, two on two. When the equation changes, the dynamic and friendship changes too and probably fizzles out one way or another.

There may be good reasons for that. How many inter-gender friendships can remain truly platonic? Where there exists attributes that translate to physical desirability in the eye of both beholders, how long before platonic deep friendship breeds chemistry? And then how long before chemistry breeds desire, and so on.

I'm not saying it's all wrong, that Mr Rocker is right and the world should change and we should all be free to pursue as many deep friendships with the opposite sex as humanly possible. That's just not realistic. Jealousy, insecurity, suspicion, dishonourable intent and any number of other negative things will put paid to that. What I am saying though is that having a relationship with Mrs Rocker that is free of jealousy, insecurity, suspicion and dishonourable intent has given me the most amazing opportunity to befriend women in a way that very few married men have had the opportunity to do. And no, I don't mean on a level that leads to having sex with them! It's an awesome thing to be able to converse and interact with women on all levels.

I suspect it's the same for Mrs Rocker. It's a relatively new thing for us as a couple to have this all this freedom to socialise with opposite gender friends, but it really is quite liberating and we always seem to have so much to talk about when one of us has had a night out (or even in) with a good friend.   

Throwing yourself at the ground with the intention of missing

He Says...

Since trumpeting my disdain for the typical male syndrome of liking the thought of landing up in bed with two beautiful women (read it here), without planning it or even trying specifically to achieve it, I've ended up in that situation more than a couple of times. Sheepishly, I now have to consign my casual indifference to the bin. They ARE all that they are cranked up to be, especially if you partake as an unselfish gentleman. But it hasn't changed my views that the desire to have a threesome with two girls should ban you for life from ever having one.

As a kid I read Douglas Adams' “Hitch Hikers Guide to the Galaxy”, there were a few zany funnies that stuck in my head from those books, I thought the Vogon Poetry was really cool, and I also latched on to phrase “the art of flying lies in throwing yourself at the ground with the intention of missing”. Adams probably never meant I the way I took it, but for me it was about the phenomenon of unintended positive consequences. Living as an honourable ego-free gentleman with a good understanding of the thoughts and desires of modern women has given me an awesome life.