I think romantic love has become the de facto religion for many secular, often liberal types in contemporary industrialized Western nations. The old gods fell for a lot of us a while back, and since we choose our mates through a process of romantic love, that's become the big thing for a lot of people. Popular songs and movies and all sorts of entertainment have romantic love as their subject matter to the point where many of us believe it truly makes the world go round, because we find ourselves awash in it.
In an essentially capitalistic society such as ours, romantic love can become a brutal, almost fascistic system for weeding out the winners from the losers and the weak from the strong. People can play cruel games with the object of driving the point home to some "loser" that they do not deserve romantic love and that they, in our society, count only as expendables. Many of us then turn to our "winners," the ones we've selected, and make this person the central object of our spiritual devotion. For this reason romantic love, if we collectively choose it as the main system for selecting our mates, desperately needs reform as an institution.
When I came to an impasse with Jenna during the Summer of 1992, I decided to just let go and let things die down between us and see how things would shake out if I chose that course of action. At a party the night after my twenty-eighth birthday, as my commitment to this course of action started to solidify with me, I ran into Gil Wilson. I knew Gil from the West Austin part of town we both grew up in. We went to elementary, junior high, and high school together. At the time of this party, Gil, when he sat down to talk to me, told me he was homeless by choice.
Gil also asked me this, "Let me ask you this then, are you still having encounters with your mind?" In 1986, Gil had asked me if I was, "Still crazy." At the time I told him no, and that would explain Gil's attempt to more diplomatically phrase this question at that party in 1992. What I still can't explain lies in all that Gil talked about soon after he asked me this question. I often feel like a fool as I still attempt to pick up the pieces from that time in the Summer of 1992, when, later that August, I checked into the psychiatric hospital some weeks after I made things right with Jenna and let her go. Gil's conversation with me motivated me to make things right with Jenna and thereby abandon my plans to just let her go and let things cool down. I made things right with Jenna three days after my conversation with Gil.
What I initially took away from that time in 1992 had to do with the central question of love. My experiences during that time pointed to the possibility that an entity exists who loves me very, very much-even though women such as Jenna never did. If my hypotheses proves true, then this entity is a very, very jealous god and does not want to share me with the Jennas of this world. Anyone who might trifle with me would do well to know this. Anyone who vies for my affections, no matter where they might come from with this desire, would do well to know that they must share me with this entity, and that I belonged to this entity first.
In an essentially capitalistic society such as ours, romantic love can become a brutal, almost fascistic system for weeding out the winners from the losers and the weak from the strong. People can play cruel games with the object of driving the point home to some "loser" that they do not deserve romantic love and that they, in our society, count only as expendables. Many of us then turn to our "winners," the ones we've selected, and make this person the central object of our spiritual devotion. For this reason romantic love, if we collectively choose it as the main system for selecting our mates, desperately needs reform as an institution.
When I came to an impasse with Jenna during the Summer of 1992, I decided to just let go and let things die down between us and see how things would shake out if I chose that course of action. At a party the night after my twenty-eighth birthday, as my commitment to this course of action started to solidify with me, I ran into Gil Wilson. I knew Gil from the West Austin part of town we both grew up in. We went to elementary, junior high, and high school together. At the time of this party, Gil, when he sat down to talk to me, told me he was homeless by choice.
Gil also asked me this, "Let me ask you this then, are you still having encounters with your mind?" In 1986, Gil had asked me if I was, "Still crazy." At the time I told him no, and that would explain Gil's attempt to more diplomatically phrase this question at that party in 1992. What I still can't explain lies in all that Gil talked about soon after he asked me this question. I often feel like a fool as I still attempt to pick up the pieces from that time in the Summer of 1992, when, later that August, I checked into the psychiatric hospital some weeks after I made things right with Jenna and let her go. Gil's conversation with me motivated me to make things right with Jenna and thereby abandon my plans to just let her go and let things cool down. I made things right with Jenna three days after my conversation with Gil.
What I initially took away from that time in 1992 had to do with the central question of love. My experiences during that time pointed to the possibility that an entity exists who loves me very, very much-even though women such as Jenna never did. If my hypotheses proves true, then this entity is a very, very jealous god and does not want to share me with the Jennas of this world. Anyone who might trifle with me would do well to know this. Anyone who vies for my affections, no matter where they might come from with this desire, would do well to know that they must share me with this entity, and that I belonged to this entity first.
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