As One's Perspective Grows Do Things Mean Less?

I recently picked up a book by Karl Ove Knausgaard called "My Struggle." I started reading it, although once it started boring me I stopped, so unfortunately, I cannot recommend it, although some readers will undoubtedly find it to be magnificent. However, there were a couple lines in the beginning that really made me think.

Knausgaard says, "As your perspective of the world increases not only is the pain it inflicts on you less but also its meaning. Understanding the world requires you to take a certain distance from it."

Is this true? Can meaning and understanding be enemies of each other? Is this why sometimes it takes years after a relationship ends before you can really understand why everything happened the way it did? Is this why sometimes you don't realize how much you loved and depended on someone or something until after it is gone? Is this why the things we cherish the most are so often confusing and mysterious?

I don't know.

What do you think?

                                                               

3 Quotation Inspired New Year's Resolutions

             1) I want to try to be less judgmental. I want to better resist the temptation to label, categorize, and attempt to define those around me. Jon Ronson, a writer and filmmaker who has spent a lot of time studying psychopathic behavior, once said, “You shouldn’t define people by their maddest edges.” That quote has stuck in my mind and I think he’s absolutely right. In fact, I think it applies to more than just psychopaths. We so often judge people based on their most terrible decisions or their worst moments. We throw labels on people, and then refuse to let them change. We ignore anything they might do or say that goes against who we’ve decided they are, and exaggerate the significance of anything they do that supports our judgment. By being too quick to judge another person, we refuse to acknowledge the complexity of human beings, and fail to remind ourselves that there is likely much more to their story than we can ever know. So throughout the year I want to repeat to myself, “You shouldn’t define people by their ___.” What can the blank be? Pretty much everything.

2) I want to surprise myself. Several years ago, one of my favorite authors Neil Gaiman wrote the following New Year’s Wish. “May your coming year be filled with magic and dreams and good madness. I hope you read some fine books and kiss someone who thinks you're wonderful, and don't forget to make some art -- write or draw or build or sing or live as only you can. And I hope, somewhere in the next year, you surprise yourself.” I love this line! To me, surprising myself means having the courage to leave my comfort zone. It means embracing new experiences and challenges as a way to learn about myself. It means being open minded about the things, and the places, and the activities, and the people I may think I won’t like, because sometimes we find something new to love where we least expect it.

      3) I want to be more grateful for all of the things in my life. There is a quote I love by G.K. Chesterton that says, “When it comes to life the critical thing is whether you take things for granted or take them with gratitude.” I actually plan on hanging this some place where I can be reminded every day to be thankful for all of things that are precious to me.

50 Simple Holiday Pleasures!

1. Sitting by a warm fire
2. Picking out the perfect Christmas tree
3. Watching favorite Christmas shows
4. The smell of fresh pine
5. Baking holiday treats
6. Kissing someone under the mistletoe
7. The first snowfall of the year
8. Sipping hot chocolate
9. Listening to favorite Christmas music
10. Lighting candles
11. Christmas lights
12. Seeing family and friends you miss
13. Watching children get excited about Santa
14. Buying gifts for loved ones
15. Eating Christmas candy
16. Giving to those less fortunate
17. Singing Christmas songs
18. Making snow angels
19. Reminiscing about past holiday seasons
20. Ugly sweater parties
21. Eggnog
22. Putting up decorations
23. Playing board/card games with the family
24. Surprise presents
25. The sound of bells
26. Sleigh rides
27. Christmas stockings
28. Hugs
29. Making new memories
30. Streets and houses being lit up
31. Making holiday cocktails
32. Getting out the special holiday dishes
33. Going to Christmas mass
34. Funny drunk relatives
35. Dressing up for holiday parties
36. Getting Christmas cards
37. Counting down on New Year's Eve
38. An excuse to wear glitter
39. The smell of delicious food baking
40. Eating Christmas dinner
41. Snuggling with someone you love
42. Watching children open presents
43. The crisp cold air
44. Wearing scarves and gloves
45. Wrapping gifts
46. Feeling the magic of the season
47. Ice skating
48. Baked ham
49. Being too excited to sleep
50. Seeing the joy it brings out in people

Why I'm Not Sure I Really Want To Win The Lottery

The Powerball jackpot is once again ridiculously high, which means that I, like millions of others, will rush off to buy a ticket with dreams of winning tons of money. There’s a part of me that gets excited about all of the possibilities and opportunities having that much money would bring. However, if I’m being honest, there is also a part of me that thinks winning wouldn’t be such a grand thing after all. The truth of the matter is, I know the odds of winning the jackpot but I’m not sure I know what the odds are of me being happier in the long run if I win. I’m wise enough to know that it certainly isn’t 100%, but is it even 50%? Gambling a couple of dollars is one thing, but gambling my entire life as I know it is quite another.

Some people have a lot of financial stress and hardship in their lives that winning the lottery could save them from. Others are stuck at jobs they hate that money could free them from. For some of these people, the question of whether winning the lottery would make them happier might be a very likely yes. But although I am not very wealthy, I have very little financial stress and am doing the job that I love. So for me, the question is a bit tougher.

For one, I’m afraid if I were to be extraordinarily rich, I would feel like I’d never really know who my true friends were. I’d be forever trying to figure out if people were being nice to me and wanting to spend time with me because they like me or because of what I could do for them. I think that this issue alone could have the potential to make me depressed and lonely. I once experienced the pain of being betrayed and used by someone I loved and it’s a terrible situation to be in. I think that if I won that much money the possibility of that happening again would be almost certain. It wouldn’t be a matter of if I’m being used, only a matter of who is using me and who isn’t. The truth of the matter is, it would be terribly hard for me to be able to truly trust anyone’s intentions, and I’m honestly not the most trusting person to begin with. Feeling like I know who my true friends are is a priceless luxury that I’m not sure I want to risk giving up.

Also, I want the opportunity to be successful in my career, to make something of myself, to have a positive influence on people, to know that all of my hard work, dedication, and sacrifices paid off. If I won the jackpot things would change. People would no longer respect my ambitions, they would laugh at them. “You don’t need the money,” they would say, “let someone else have your job that needs it.” Everything I’m currently pursuing might start to seem selfish and silly. Any true talent or ability to add unique value that I might possess would likely be overshadowed or perhaps even ignored by the fact that I’m just incredibly lucky. Victory just isn’t the same if you feel, or other people feel, that you’ve had an unfair advantage. It’s like if you trained your entire life for an Olympic marathon and then on the big day you were allowed to have someone drive you to the finish line. You’d likely realize that it was never gold medal that you wanted, only the chance to prove that you deserved it.

Of course, those reasons to fear winning the lottery are a bit selfish. Think about all of the good I could do. Wouldn’t the ability to give so much to so many people bring me great joy? Perhaps, but even here there is the risk that it wouldn’t. The thing is, with great power and great wealth comes great responsibility. I’m afraid I would crumble under the weight of this responsibility. I’m afraid I’d stress about spending foolishly, about not doing enough, about spending too much on myself and too little on others. I’m afraid I’d end up like the man in the movie “Schindler’s List,” who saved many lives, but was still heartbroken in the end by the guilt that he could have done more.

So why will I even buy a ticket at all? I guess in the end, in spite of all the fears I have about winning, and the risk that having that much money would not make me happier, there are so many good opportunities and experiences it would give me. I don’t want to be the type of person that allows fear, uncertainty, or my own self-doubts, keep me from embracing opportunity. However, when the numbers roll out, and they are not mine, it’s not very likely that I’ll cry about it.

Rereading "The Little Prince"

There’s nothing like rereading one of your favorite books years after first discovering it to make you realize how life’s experiences have inevitability changed your perspective on things. I first read “The Little Prince” by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry during the summer I was seventeen. It immediately became one of my favorite books and still is. However, there are a few messages about love, friendship, and responsibility that I absolutely loved the first time that now seem like they are missing an important “but…” Maybe this means I’m more pessimistic and jaded now or maybe it simply means that somewhere in past 10 years I just grew up.

The first such passage goes like this, “People have forgotten this truth," the fox said. "But you mustn’t forget it. You become responsible forever for what you’ve tamed. You’re responsible for your rose.” This basically says that you are responsible for the people that love you. Forever is such an idealistic word. What it doesn’t say is that sometimes part of growing up is learning to let people go. It doesn’t warn about what can happen if you let that responsibility weigh you down so much that you become a much worse version of yourself. It doesn’t tell you that there is a difference between loving someone and being good for someone, and that you shouldn’t feel guilty for walking away from something that might not be in your power to fix.

There is another passage that says, “If you love a flower that lives on a star, it is sweet to look at the sky at night. All the stars are a-bloom with flowers...” But what if loving the flower doesn’t make it sweet to look at the sky? What if it just makes you terribly sad? What if your whole life becomes bitter as you dearly desire and miss something that you cannot have and will never have again? We all learn eventually that memories can be both a blessing and a curse.

Don’t get me wrong, I still think that this is a brilliant book and makes a lot of great points. I still enjoy reading it and reflecting on all of the messages that it contains. If you have never read it, I would certainly recommend that you do. The fact that I can no longer read it with the innocence that I once did, does not mean that I don’t appreciate it, I just think that life has taught me that love and relationships are not as simple as I once may have thought.

Cherish Life

Never forget

That it costs something to be who you are

Don’t learn this lesson too late

Know that there is difference

Between loving someone and missing them

Remember that life is a mystery

You won’t always know all the answers

Learn to live with uncertainty
Embrace the moment

Learn to love many things

Do as much as possible out of love

Grow

Change

Dance

Travel

Laugh

Meet new people

In new places

Learn from them

Have stimulating conversations

Surprise yourself sometimes

Be brave

Be kind

Be patient

Be grateful

Be strong

Be passionate

Be compassionate

Be beautiful

In your own way

Don’t take anyone too seriously

Don’t take yourself too seriously

Don’t take life too seriously

Cherish life

How Well Can We Really Understand Another Person?

I’ve always had an incurable curiosity about people, constantly being fascinated by individual personalities, how we grow and evolve throughout our lives, and how much the perspective we have of the world defines us. Those of us that are readers, writers, filmmakers, storytellers, etc. are constantly thinking about these things from the standpoint of fictional characters. Having a deep understanding of people and characters is something that all truly great story tellers seem to share.

But if we move away from the world of fiction, and think about the real people we actually know, especially those who are closest to us, how well can we really understand each other? Personally, I think, that for even the best judges of human nature among us, the answer is not very well at all. People are complicated.

In most of our relationships we often only get to know one version of someone. We only know who they are when they are with us. There are so many other versions of them, in different times, in different places, with different people, that we will never know. We are also hindered in our ability to truly understand another person, by the fact that we tend to see them how we want them to be. It’s human nature. We are especially prone to do this in romantic relationships. I like the line in the book Eat, Pray, Love by Elizabeth Gilbert where she says, “In desperate love, we always invent the characters of our partners, demanding they be what we need of them, and then feeling devastated when they refuse to perform the role we created in the first place.” It’s so true that we tend to create roles for people to play in our lives, and this ultimately limits our ability to understand who they truly are. Perhaps this is why we sometimes feel like certain strangers can see us more clearly than some of the people we have known for years. 

Another reason that understanding one other is so difficult is because people are always changing. People are constantly growing and evolving, sometimes gradually over time, and sometimes much more suddenly than we might think. It is often impossible for us to understand what is happening deep inside someone, and how that is impacting who they are, and who they will become.

One might say, if we can never really get to know each other, than what’s the point of even trying to get close to someone? But we must not forget that we don’t need to completely understand someone in order to love them, or be happy with them, or learn from them, or help them. There is a quote from a Philip Roth book that says, “Maybe the best thing would be to forget being right or wrong about people and just go along for the ride.” I think that there is some truth to this. Sometimes the best thing things in life, and in love, come when we learn to embrace the mystery. Maybe it’s okay to accept what we can’t understand and allow people to surprise us.

My Response To The Question: What Good Is Art?

A couple of weeks ago, I asked readers to answer this question, “What Good is Art?” and received some wonderful responses. Now, it’s time to share my answer to the question.

Art, in its various forms, literature, music, film, photography, etc., is immensely valuable to the human soul. I honestly believe that it is what gives life meaning for a lot of people myself included. One might question this, saying, “What about God, or love, or the people you care about? Aren’t those things more important?” But you see, to me, art is a way to feel connected with the spiritual world. Even prayer, one could argue, is a form of it, and to be honest, certain music has made me feel closer to God than anything else ever could. As far as love and relationships, the painter Vincent van Gogh once said, "I tell you, the more I think the more I feel that there is nothing more truly artistic than to love people." I believe that he was right.

Although there are many different ways in which art can be meaningful, I believe that truly valuable art is significant for one of three reasons. It provides an escape, it teaches you something, or it helps allow you to heal.

Escape art is what we experience when we become so absorbed in a book or a film, in the lives of the characters or the story, that for a moment we are able to forget our own. It allows us to experience vicariously places, events, and emotions that we may never have felt otherwise. It helps us to forget, even if just momentarily, our own problems, struggles, and pain. I am a firm believer that escape art is good for the mind, good for the body, and especially good for the soul. It is sometimes almost like medicine to me, I honestly cannot imagine living without it.

Art also provides value when it teaches us something. Sometimes the lesson is obvious, other times we learn through stories or metaphors. Some art forces us to think about things in a completely new way or opens our minds to new perspectives or possibilities. Sometimes art has the ability to convey a message in a way that nothing else can, and has the ability to make all of us better, wiser, and more compassionate.

Last, but not least, art can help us to heal. We can pour our hearts into the creative process and turn suffering and painful experiences into something positive. Art isn't always about the end result; sometimes the value is in the making of it, the intense emotions it allows us to express, and the things we learn about ourselves in the process.

Relationships and Loneliness

The ends of so many relationships begin the same way. You start to feel lonely with someone. And loneliness within a relationship is really hard to fix. You can’t just go to the other person and say, “Help me not feel so lonely with you.” Could they even do that if they wanted to? First, they would have to understand the source of this feeling and there is a good chance that this is something that you cannot even define yourself.

I think that the things that we crave the most from other people are never things we can ask for. They are things that must happen naturally and cannot be forced. We can ask someone to try to understand us but we cannot ask someone to want to. We can ask someone to notice us but we cannot ask someone to stop seeing through us. We can ask someone to be kinder and more patient but we cannot ask someone for true love. We can only recognize and appreciate these things when someone can give them to us, and learn to forgive them when they can’t.

It’s hard because it’s often nobody’s fault. Sometimes we end up in this situation merely because we had the courage to let ourselves grow and change. And somewhere along the line we grew into someone that the person who used to know us best doesn't understand anymore. 

I’ve always thought that a truly wonderful relationship, just like a truly wonderful day, should be easy. It should be magical in a slow, sensuous, flowing kind of way. When you lose that flow I think is when the loneliness starts to fill in the gaps. I just don’t think you can force it to come back through therapy, or effort, or changing. You can either wait to see if it does or move on. There are those who leave to soon and those who stay too long. And sometimes timing is everything.

Chase Scenes in Love Movies

I dislike chase scenes in love movies. I used to think they were incredibly beautiful, poetic, exciting, and romantic. I imagined having a love story like that, finding someone who would do anything to chase me down and confess how much they needed me in their lives. Then I grew up. I realized that running away is really quite adolescent. If you really truly love someone you don’t leave them unless you are too weak or too immature to stay. You don’t leave just because they haven’t said the right words yet or expressed their love the way that you want them to. You don’t run away just to prove a point. You are able to suffer for them if necessary. You give without needing anything in return. And if the situation becomes toxic, and you do find you must eliminate them from your life, no amount of chasing on their part, nothing they say or do should make you change your mind. Save the drama for the theater.

The 'Albatross' and "The Wind Is Not Depressed"

I recently stumbled across an article published by The Sun magazine in 2004 titled “The Wind Isn’t Depressed.” It is based upon conversation between authors Michael Ventura and Robert Bly about “art, madness, and the joy of loss.” Although there are certainly viewpoints expressed in the article I do not agree with, it did bring up an interesting point that I really liked and thought was worth sharing.

In one of Bly’s poems he writes,

                “Why do we imagine that we are responsible for all

                The pain of those near to us? The albatross that lands

                On the mast began flying a thousand years ago.”

Ventura mentions that one reaction to this could be that it is an abdication of responsibility and that this cannot help us understand how we are responsible for each other’s pain. Bly responds to this by saying, “When something goes wrong in a marriage, and it all comes to grief, it’s our habit to think, It’s my fault. But from the view point of an older culture, each of us has had many past lives, and the suffering that you and your spouse just went through is not coming from your connection to each other. It’s coming from those past lives. The albatross began flying a thousand years ago.”

As we struggle with relationships, especially those that go sour, we are constantly fighting to try to figure out where the blame lies. In times when this is unclear, which is often, some of us default to blaming ourselves while others tend to blame the other person. Few of us embrace the perspective that sometimes the ultimate conflict between two individuals actually begins way before they even met, in all the past moments of their lives, and in the lives of those before them that have had an impact on the person they have become. Although I certainly believe that there are times where it is important to accept responsibility in the failure of a relationship, I also believe that there are times when we should realize that there are forces in our lives pushing us in a certain direction, and that there are some crashes in life that we couldn’t have prevented even if we’d tried. In other words, you can’t blame everything on Bly’s ‘albatross’ but there is liberation and value in knowing that it’s there.

3 Quotations to Live By

Hello my friends.

There are 3 things I am constantly trying to remind myself. I would like to share those with you. Some of you might not agree, some of you might see these points as being so obvious that they hardly bear repeating to yourself over and over again. But I hope that a few of you find these quotations as important as I have in my life.

You see, I think we can underestimate the power of inspirational quotations sometimes, their ability to define us, how much words that we consistently repeat ourselves in our heads can shape our thoughts, our lives, and our actions.

Many of you, already do this on a regular basis. But not all of you. And the three quotations that I’ll share may not mean much to you, and that’s ok. But I encourage you do find words that do. And try as much as you can to live by them.

So here is the first.

“Everyone must learn this lesson somewhere. It costs something to be who you are.”

Most things in life require a certain degree of sacrifice. Everything has a price. And a big part of the price we pay for something is our time. This simple fact is obvious in some areas. For example, most of us understand that a perfect GPA cost us hours of time studying, or that most sports achievements required hours of training. And there are few shortcuts.

But sometimes we forget this in other aspects of our lives. For example, most of you that are very popular spent hours talking and spending time with other people. And those that have artistic talent spend hours with that art. And many people that are good cooks spend hours in the kitchen, and history buffs spend hours watching the history channel and so forth.

So because we each have a limited number of hours, we can’t have everything, and we absolutely cannot be everything that we might want to be. So we are constantly giving up pieces of who we might have been. For everything we gain, a friendship, children, degrees, careers, learning to play a song, vacations, gardening skills, video game accomplishments, knowledge about other people, we are losing something. And for everything we lose we gain something. And we don’t always understand at the time what we are gaining or losing.

Some of the most successful people didn’t always have a lot friends growing up or a family that spent a lot of time together. Some of the greatest artists had hard childhoods. Even the time we spend suffering matters. So every time you miss out on something you would have liked to have think about what you might gain instead. Because you are going to have unfortunate things happen to you in your life and you are going to have to decide how much time you want to sit around feeling sorry for yourself and how much time you want to spend turning that experience into an opportunity to learn something new, or meet someone new, or become someone new.

The late Steve Jobs, the genius behind many of Apple’s greatest innovations, once said, “You can’t connect the dots going forward; you can only connect them backwards.” There are things you might learn today that you might not use for years. But eventually it might help you in ways you never imagined. It’s just so important to try to get the most out of every experience.

                                                                 

Think about if the way you are spending your time is worth it. Think about if it is getting you closer to where you really want to be. Never forget the cost.

The next bit of advice I’d like to give you is this. “Always remember what your true values are and be conscious to whether or not the life you are living is consistent with them.”

And when I say your values I mean YOUR values. These may not be the same values your parents have. These may not be the same values some of your friends have. They may not be the values you were taught growing up, or from a religion, or the same values you had two years ago. Of course, they may very well be, but the point here is to decide for yourself what your true values are and to understand that as you grown and learn and have new experiences these may very well change and that’s okay. What’s not okay, is when deep down your values haven’t changed, but you have, and you start behaving in a way that is no longer consistent with what you really believe in.

When I ask you today what you want out of life, most of your answers to could be translated to, “I want to be successful.” But what does this mean? Doesn’t this mean different things to different people? I don’t think success is about particular goals or achievements. I think that true success is living a life that is consistent with what you truly value.

Having this kind of success is not easy. Because first of all you have to know what you truly value. Sometimes this requires digging deep inside your soul, asking yourself difficult questions, questions that may be painful, questions that may take days or months or even years to answer. And you can never stop being conscious of how the answers might change over time, because what you truly value at 25 might not be the same as what you truly value at 50, and you have to accept this, you have to be willing to grow. No one else can do this for you, or can tell you what your heart believes in, and although wiser people, or culture, or religion, can help guide you to what the answer is, you must not depend on them to give it to you. Because there is no “one size fit all” answer to what you should value, and the only “right” answer is the one you find by searching your soul.

And then, once you have some idea of what’s truly important to you, you have to remember it. This might be the hardest part because so many things, so many other obsessions, and distractions, and people, and jobs, and family, and obligations, and day to day life can get in the way. But if you fail to remember, you might find yourselves working to become “successful” at the wrong thing. It is so easy to get caught up in other lifestyles, to be influenced by those around you into believing that happiness can be found in something else. And it’s not really a good feeling to find you’ve succeeded at getting something you thought you wanted but still not being happy because you let yourself forget what you really value.

So please, find a way to remember every day, maybe through meditation, or reading, or solitary walks, or appreciating nature, or listening to certain music, or through conversations with certain people, or going to a church, or a graveyard, or the sea, whatever is you need to do to remind yourself.

So after you know what you value, and remind yourself of it, you need to make sure you are living a life that is consistent with it, and when you find that you aren’t, you need to have the courage to change. Because sometimes this means walking away of from things, a career you may have been successful at, people that you love, places in which you were comfortable. It might mean having to take risks, having to give up a certain level of security, and perhaps having to deal with failure, uncertainty, criticism, and poverty. So no, I’m not telling you that it will be easy. But I promise you that it will be worth it.

Finally, the final quotation I would like to share with you today is by author Rainer Maria Rilke.

"Have patience with everything that remains unsolved in your heart. Try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books written in a foreign language. Do not now look for the answers. They cannot now be given to you because you could not live them. It is a question of experiencing everything. At present you need to live the question. Perhaps you will gradually, without even noticing it, find yourself experiencing the answer, some distant day."

                                                                  

Learn to live with uncertainty. The way you deal with uncertainty and the amount you are able to handle without going crazy will define you in a lot of ways. Sometimes taking the initial plunge the easy part, but learning to live with immense uncertainty day in and day out and to stay in the water long enough for something to happen is what will set you apart. Good luck.

Why Not Wanting To Get Married Doesn't Make You Selfish, Shallow, Or Immature

When two people decide to “tie the knot” the decision is typically followed by elaborate celebrations and being enthusiastically congratulated by about everyone they know. All of this can be rather annoying to those who do not view marriage as essential or even particularly desirable. It is not that marriage isn’t a wonderful thing for many people, but that the alternative life of choosing to pass on being in a long term committed relationship is very much misunderstood. Many people associate a lack of desire to marry or commit to a long term relationship with a fear of getting hurt, selfishness and/or shallowness, or eventual unfulfillment. Perhaps in some cases this is true, but many times this is a very false assessment.

If you remain single by choice, perhaps even after a long line of lovers have tried to persuade you into loving ‘til death do us part’, often times family and friends will say to each other, “I think he/she is afraid of getting hurt.” They imagine that you’ve been burned so badly in the past, had your heart crushed so severely, or lost someone so important to you, that just the thought of loving someone new is terrifying. But it’s not always about an unwillingness to get close to someone, to open your heart, to make yourself vulnerable enough to fall madly in love. Sometimes it’s about a desire to simply embrace that love in the moment without trying to control the future.

Doesn’t this often make you more vulnerable to pain and suffering instead of less? You are willing to allow the people you love the most to leave you whenever they feel like it. You are willing to accept the intense loneliness and longings such goodbyes might bring, the kind of loneliness lifetime partners will likely never have to feel. You are choosing to the forfeit the security of a committed relationship in spite of the risks, but why? Maybe it is because, as Anne Morrow Lindbergh once said, "Him that I love, I wish to be free-even from me." Maybe you just don’t believe that true love and chains can live in the same place.

Maybe American Psychologist James Hillman was right when he said, “Loving in safety is the smaller part of loving.” Many people can commit themselves to a relationship that they think or hope will end in “happily ever after,” but it takes an entirely different type of courage to pour your heart into something that you acknowledge you’ll eventually be forced to let go of.

Perhaps it’s not that you fear intimacy, but that you refuse to ignore the reality that as life and people change love does too. It takes courage to admit that people can grow out of things, even each other. For some people, the comfort and safety of marriage is just not worth the possibility of being forced to eventually live a lie. Marriage can be an illusion in the sense that it forces you to make and believe in promises that humans do not always have the power to keep. As writer Michael Ventura once stated in one of his columns, “We can promise to want to love someone for the rest of our lives, but we can’t control falling out of love any more than we can control falling in love. We’re all aware of this terrible uncertainty whether or not we admit it, so our promises are no more than good intentions and (as promises) they ring hollow.”

Sometimes two people can start out in love and eventually find themselves in a situation where they only bring out the worst in each other. You can find yourself in a spot in a relationship where you try and try and try but find yourself somehow incapable of not continuing to hurt the other person. In Derek Cianfrance’s movie Blue Valentine, a couple struggle with this exact situation, and in one scene the woman (Cindy) says to her husband during a fight, “I can’t stop this … I can’t stop what’s happening … can you?” As painful a reality as it is, sometimes the best people can do is put their hands up at the scene of wreckage and walk away. You just don’t want spend years of your life trying to fix something that is permanently broken. As Will Grayson says in the John Greene book of the same name, “When things break, it’s not the actual breaking that prevents them from getting back together again. It’s because a little piece gets lost-the two remaining ends couldn’t fit together even if they wanted to. The whole shape has changed”

One of the greatest misconceptions of marriage is that it is the only way to achieve a certain type of fulfillment. But the problem is people like to talk about the joy and fulfillment of finding someone that you can spend forever with, without considering the cost. As Ralph Waldo Emerson once said, “For everything you have missed, you have gained something else; and for everything you gain you lose something.” This is absolutely true of a long term committed relationship; the price of this so called “fulfillment” does not come without a steep cost.

The cost isn’t just about being able to do whatever you want and be a sloppy, drunk, slut on the weekends if you feel like it. It’s easy to see one could grow weary of that lifestyle, and the weariness is exactly why many people settle down. It’s about all the people you will miss out on, and what they could teach you about yourself, that your mate never will. It’s about playing the same roles your entire life. It’s about never again experiencing the joy of when you first fall in love with someone. Or even the joy of leaving someone and then coming back to them and falling in love all over again. Not to mention the fact that marriage often does not lead to the fulfillment we thought it would anyway.

But what about this thing called faithfulness? So many people have been taught to idolize faithfulness. I love the quote in The Picture of Dorian Gray, by Oscar Wilde that says, “Faithfulness is to the emotional life what consistency is to the life of the intellect-simply a confession of failures. Faithfulness, I must analyze it someday. The passion for property is in it. There are many things that we would throw away if we were not afraid that others might pick them up.” The demand for faithfulness is a need to claim a part of another person. Why do so many people rush to be someone else’s property? I believe in freedom, especially the freedom to give yourself in love.

“Non-marrying” types are also often accused of being shallow, selfish, and/or immature. But maybe the people who chose to only love once in their lives are really the shallow people. Perhaps there is more selfishness in fidelity, in choosing to only share yourself with one person, in tying someone else down so that you never have to worry about experiencing the sharp pangs of jealousy or the reality that not only is there someone else that could take your place, but it might be better for everyone but you if they did. Maybe it is more immature to want to cling to a relationship. If you’re not clingy, jealous, or insecure, fidelity just seems rather silly.

Part of the argument that “non-committers” are selfish is that they hurt and disappoint so many people by leaving. But within marriages don’t people hurt and disappoint each other every day? And if someone stops loving you, is it really a terribly selfish thing to want to be with someone that you can make happy? Vows are great and all but deep down don’t most of us just want to be with someone that stills laughs at our jokes, smiles when they see us, and kisses us in the rain?

Similar to the fulfillment theory is the soul mate theory. People love to say, “You just haven’t met the right person yet.” But even if we were to meet our soul mate, and I do think one can have multiple soul mates in a lifetime, why do we need to live with them forever? As Elizabeth Gilbert says in her book Eat Pray Love, “A true soul mate is probably the most important person you’ll ever meet, because they tear down your walls and smack you awake. But to live with a soul mate forever? Nah. Too painful. Soul mates, they come into your life just to reveal another layer of yourself to you, and then leave.” You can love someone forever without being with them forever. I wish we could stop celebrating marriages so that when they end we no longer have to call them failures. As Patrick McBride said, “The end of a relationship is not a failure any more than the end of a book is a failure.” Even the greatest love stories have to end eventually.

I guess in the end people have to do what’s right for them. It’s easy to criticize people for being delusional but in many cases, a relationship, as many lies as it might be based on, is the best shot they have at happiness. People are afraid of not believing in monogamy because they like resolutions. The want the false illusion of security, they want to believe that promising something has the power to make it happen, and they want to think that they won’t die alone. They want to think that maturity will bring stability. Like the people who look for patterns in the lottery numbers, they love to downplay the impact of chance on our lives. Once again, this is not an argument against marriage. Last night, I watched the movie When Harry Met Sally where throughout the film there are elderly couples talking about their lives together. It is hard not to see that “growing old together” can bring joy. But some of us are born to love strangeness and get bored with familiarity. There is a quote from the tagline of the movie Closer that states, “When you believe in love at first sight you never stop looking.” Some of us don’t really want to fall in love just once but over and over again. We are addicted to the magic of the ability to love someone before we even know their mysteries, or perhaps because of the mysteries. To us, there is more beauty in strangeness, and as said in "The Zoo Where You’re Fed to God" by Michael Ventura, “All paths cause pain, so to choosing the safe over the audacious will not give you less pain only less beauty.” And we want to soak up as much beauty as we can during our brief time on this earth. So romance or security, what shall we choose? We can’t always have both.