Monogamy

Before I had any idea what a real relationship was like I always wondered how you could cheat on someone if you really loved them. I saw it all around me, every time someone would stray they would say “I only love you”, “I still love you”, or “I took them back because they love me”. It’s not that I ever thought of sex as love, I’ve had sex with far more people than I’ve ever loved, I know the difference, but rather it was that I couldn’t understand completely deceiving the person who was supposed to be everything to you, going outside of the known emotional boundaries you both had set. But really, it’s little more than any other incident of the numerous betrayals or lies every relationship swarms with and it was jut my conservative catholic upbringing screaming in the back of my head that this lie was somehow worse than all others.

Absence makes the heart grow fonder and familiarity breeds contempt weren’t just said without reason, they were felt. Nothing ruins a relationship like “love”, love means this person bears all to you, all their nasty inner workings, their dark history and expects you to see them the same way and vice versa. Love is boring, it’s doing the same things everyday with the same person, that’s why people go on vacations together and come back “more in love then ever” or separated, they either remember what doing new things together is like or realize there’s more out there for them.

Cheating seems to be a betrayal of the whole point of being in a relationship, which seems to be keeping each other away from other people. What a strange ideal, what a cruel goal. Much to my chagrin I suffer from jealousy just as everyone else. I can’t reason myself out of it, Like so many hack musicians, I can’t tell my feelings how to feel. With all my evolutionary advances I can’t control the rage at the thought of someone else taking what is only ”mine”. “Mine” is the problem, when you have few things you value, that are only “mine”; the costs of losing them go up. Being poor keeps people afraid, afraid to think new things, afraid to stray from the already paved road to success, and afraid to lose what they already have. Going back to the days when we lived in caves and on plains and protected our mates because in was safer in a family and children took so long to become adults. Most of us share the hardship of surviving with our ancient relatives but those who don’t have an easier time losing things or people because if that happens they still have others, they can still survive. Swingers are usually pretty comfortable in the other aspects of their life, professionally, physically, financially.

To overcome this wired in understanding is surely an innovation of the mind, to tell your feelings what to feel, to reason with emotion. This is not something that comes easily; this is altering the way we think, giving up everything we were thought, beyond that, feel. I can see the logic, I can understand it, but how do you work a feeling a certain way? Can you just talk yourself into it if you talk loud enough for long enough? Do you have to completely alter everything in your life to make up for this new thought process? Is it a complete life change?

Being a libertarian is fucking hard

So everyone is supposed to be able to do anything they want as long as they’re not hurting anyone when they do it. I have always tried to live my life with this philosophy, it’s the most surefire way to be a “good” person. What I skipped over in my young ideological mind was the part where someone you love is doing something that isn’t hurting anyone but you still don’t like it.

So here I am questioning all my morality simply because suddenly the “right” thing doesn’t feel “right”. I want the ideological existence I strived to be, I never want to feel anger, jealousy, isolation, or vengeance because I feel like they are a waste of my time. Anyone can be gone at any time and the years have left me a paranoid coward, not the unshakable girl I was as a teenager. I want to be the kind of person that can hear almost anything and be okay with it, or at least see it in a new point of view.

I’m working on the jealous part now, vengeance was never much of a problem, I’m still angry sometimes but it’s not out of hand at all, it’s just the closeness, which I suppose was a “problem” before if the past is any indicator. I always pull away, does everybody? It’s weird, no one likes pulling away or being distant, but it always happens to me. So is this what it’s like for everyone? Are you really always alone in the end like every person who wants to sound tough says? It’s so weird that we can be aware of our surroundings and fellow animals and yet be the only ones that really understand “alone”. Dogs try to die alone, most animals do if they can help it, why is that? Is that like trying to save their relatives from moving or moving the body from their living space? Maybe they are giving themselves back to the earth, like leaving behind everything they had in life and going off alone to offer their body’s to whatever passing animal really needs an easy meal that day.

Maybe all my problems do stem from this weird death complex, do the majority think about dying everyday. Everything I plan to do depends on how I feel about death that day. It’s weird, I feel like my old self, my apathetic 17 year old self that just thought about death and how hollow everyone and everything in life was. Someone I would laugh at now.

Back to the matter at hand I guess, how do you support all these things you so strongly believe in when they all seem hollow anyway? I feel like I don’t want or need anybody because they aren’t really there at the end anyway and no matter how special you think your connection is there are a million just like it and it could happen with any one of many people who share your obvious values and interests. It’s easy to make it work, all you do is say sorry when you give up, and if it works on the other levels, food, shelter, electronics, then eventually everyone says sorry and they pat themselves on the backs for being grown ups. Such a strange world we live in, people still believe in life after death, that love is an actual emotion, and the atomic family, we are one tenth of a billionth degree from reaching absolute zero when all atoms stop and we slowed down the speed of light and the majority of people still think they will shed their mortal coil and acend to paradise!