Valentine's Day 2006

Valentine's Day is a special day each year to focus on the courtship romance between man and woman, and thus is a cherished commemoration of something uniquely human.

As the finest and most intense of communication between two adult humans, it is the social glue from which civilization is built. A woman for every man; a man for every woman, that seems ideal. But....

Nowadays that unifying cement has been crumbling severely. The 1960's call of "Make Love Not War" so nicely describes the problem, and solution too. When every man and every woman is regularly enjoying that nicest and most joyful of physical-emotional-intellectual-spiritual interactivity, there is little need to romp in the game room nor on the battlefield.

As there are equal numbers of male and female babies born, it seems reasonable that the intent of the Creator is that they be paired up, all of them. And all of the time, from sexual maturity's beginnings onward. No one left out.

Yet we human creatures are wonderously complex creatures indeed, and one of the effects is that this "pairing" has lots of complexities too. And we have the problem much as other large mammal grooup creatures do, that of "bullying," a leftover from mammal nature, that still romps as human sometimes. The human female made a wonderous invention long ago to cope with that, I believe; let me explain.

Along with such wonders as a large brain, opposable thumbs, upright two legged locomotion, we were also designed and built for lovemaking fully in celebration of joy of union and life. The typical man's physiology is built for 2 times a day, woman's 6 times per day, per measured "resolution time" needed to reset the system. No reason at all for anyone to do without loving. This wonderful invention of the human female no doubt was made eons ago, to wear out the prior "dominant male bully" social parasite on mammal groups, thus enabling the group to retain the other males and thus retain their ability to help the group survive and add their genes, making those groups more powerful than the groups where an aggressively violent domineering male spent his time destroying the other males, killing them or maiming them so they would be easy prey for the predators on the herd; while in the protection of the herd of females which similarly protected their young as well as the dominant male got protected among them.

In opposition to the social parasite of the bully among mammal groups, the human female's great invention of 24/7 sexual avaiability has been one of the most powerful processes uniting mankind harmoniously for the group projects that have built civilization.

But there is lots of "doing without" going on nowadays. What is it that has so crippled, handicapped, weakened so many people, forced us into modes of life so loveless? As I ponder that question, once again this Valentine's Day rolled around once more ... well, there have been the kind of guys that have to control other people; their craving assaults of infinite variety on other men pays off in that the women often are left with but little choice for mating or perish without progeny, so those bullies perpetuate their kind quite well, as they have done since antiquity. And once again, as on occasion at other parts of time of civilization, there is the threat of disease spread that way; this time it started about a couple of decades ago.

Another background factor that surely has applied throughout civilized time, is that there are four ways people perceive their world, and each of them has four ways of interacting with others. The effect here is that in lovemaking, as in other activities, they may be doing what seems to be more or less what others do, but are really experiencing it significantly differently.

And effect of this is that lovers are not all the same. And yet this is very often not obvious; each of the pair of lovers may be perceiving the activity quite differently (beyond the gender mechanism differences) and believing the other person is having the same experience as they are: one person might be experiencing a soaring spiritual connectiveness high, while the other is experiencing an emotional passion so intense, or a celebration of union declared in social position, or even a romping physical sensuality so delicious. Gender has little to do with which a given person typically experiences most intensely. The point here is that it is likely that they are different and each is unaware that their partner is experiencing something else. How much does this matter? The problem shows up in subsequent activities, each believing they are bonded at the same parts of life.

Often people get in relationship, even married, without checking with the other as to exactly what they believe and expect to supply and receive in the subsequent interactivity. Each lives in their own dreamland to some extent. As long as this is perceived as delightful newness to life as a result of doing things together, it works. But these are missed connections, often tiny, yet as the missed connections accumulate along with the frustrations thereof, the individuals of the pair have to forgive more and more, until something just demands attention. The stacked pile of frustrations may be quite invisible to the other person, even not considered a kind of thing needing attention. And it is quite difficult to deal with these accumulated frustrations, because they were originally made up of parts of experience that uniquely are of the individual's way of perceiving life (sometimes called "Temperament") which are not part of the other's way of experiencing life in their natural flow. If a breaking point is reached, the relationship is broken off, and each is dumped back into solitude and even significantly bent out of shape thereby, as a new starting point.

It is not just the bully kind of men that play the game of courtship to "win", seeking only a partner who is wanted by someone else, thus making it a game between the two men instead of really between the woman and a man. A type of woman plays a woman's version of that kind of courtship too. "See who I am out with?" kind of thing. "May the best man win" is another related phrase. Thus courtship becomes much of a public display to others to impress them ... the partner is only a prop in this activity... yet for some kinds of people this can work quite well, if both are into the same game. I doubt that their lovemaking is much different, however; and they do not care. It is the group involvement that counts for them, proof of how great they are, so as to be high in the social status arena and receive the benefits thereby.

So it seems to me that such people would not deeply comprehend the slogan "make love not war," so it could not guide them. What if that kind of people work themselves into leadership positions strongly affecting the lives of the rest of us?

How do women respond to all this? It seems to me that they typically are making effort to attract the "hunks" (often a bully of some kind, unfortunately for the women) of choice, while avoiding the attention of the men they don't want. And putting out there that they "don't come cheap." Creating scarcity produces leverage in that game as it does in other kinds. And there is the amusing witicism about "a woman needs a reason to make love, but a man only needs a place."

So that is what I see when I look out at the world from my matelessness solitude and other related discomforts, this Valentine's Day 2006.