What’s Love Got to do With It?

I never understood Tina Turner’s song until the movie It came out. I see nothing romantic or sexy in this movie whatsoever. How Hollywood could think there was anything lovely in this movie at all is beyond me, and I totally am in agreement with Tina Turner that there just isn’t anything in the movie about love….what….oh….my assistants tell me Tina Turner was in fact not singing about anything involving Stephen King. Never mind!

Seriously though, love has always been a subject of profound confusion to me. Fortunately (or unfortunately) for me, it seems to be pretty confusing to the whole frickin’ world. There may be other subjects with more words written, but I doubt if any subject has inspired more poems, more songs, or more movies than love.

When you grow up abused and neglected, you frankly just don’t get it. You know that you yearn for a human to think highly of you, but you are afraid that it is all a sick joke. Mommy may love on you this moment, but the next she is going to be beating the unholy crap out of you while you hide behind a chair. And Daddy? He is mainly a source of terror. Yes you worship his every word and bully deed, but you are so scared of him (and we all know that to be feared is better than to be loved).

Trouble of it all is, you need love. Baby starves without milk, or fails to grow tall if there isn’t enough. And love is the same. You don’t give the baby love, and they may grow up, but they grow up emotional monsters. Grow up thinking that love is wrong, or a weakness, or a perversion. If you are very very lucky, the abused merely grow up thinking that love, like money, is something only the lucky or the strong acquire. Well…..I looked up love in the Ferengi Rules of Acquisitions…..oh my…some of the best advise I’ve found is in here…like this rule: There is no profit in love; however, a strong heart is worth a few bars of Latinum on the open market. Keep it on ice.

Yeah, I’ll share that link for the benefit of humanity. Kinda my Valentine’s present to my readers (there are more than one….right?):

https://memory-beta.fandom.com/wiki/Ferengi_Rules_of_Acquisition

Ok, ok….I’m well over five hundred words in, and have yet to say anything of real substance. Until recently I had nearly forgotten what love was. My marriage taught me that all my old illusions about love were no more than that. Bitter dregs at the bottom of the wine barrel. Ashes of all the burnt hopes. Desiccated corpses of the butterflies I saw flitting about in my youth. So much forgotten, and often I wonder if it is worth trying to rebuild.

Somehow, I have found love again. She deserves so much more than what I have to give her, but she loves me, and so for her sake, I have to try. Thank God she is patient.

Why all the humor, why so unwilling to be serious? I could speak unflinchingly about the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr, about Plague and Death. Why is love so hard to talk about? What does love have to do with the incessant pain that is life?

It is late in the post, and only now do I feel the strength to say: We need each other, but so many of both sexes have been so badly abused. And we hear about how our expectations of the other sex are unrealistic, but all we have is a defensive “yeah but,” and we instead argue that it is actually the other sex that is unrealistic. Women say we are too influenced by porn, men say women are too affected by romance novels. And each expects the other to change and conform to what “we” naturally are, but any request for us to change is seen as abusive or rejecting. We demand vulnerability, but insist we be allowed the luxury of staying behind our own castle walls. My sex is allowed any cowardly, rude, vindictive, insulting, even physical form of expressing anger without consequence, but by God you better fight fair and play by the rules.

908 words, just to accomplish what Westly said in a few succinct lines. In the end, whether it is too late or not for me, I hope it is not too late for the reader. Get your fracking act together a little bit, and then go for the person you love. Hold them to a high standard, but not an impossible standard. Hold yourself to a higher standard than you hold them. Seduction, like intelligence, has a wide range of types and talents. Maybe you can’t be Marilyn Monroe or James Dean. But you can still rock someone’s world. Someone who, by the way, needs their world rocked just as much as you do.

Quit stroking your scars, and stroke her cheek. Quit focusing on what you don’t have, and focus on how wonderful she is. And yeah, some sombitch in the past broke your heart. Well, if God is just, they will get theirs someday. Focus on the Other in the best broken way you can. And maybe….just maybe…..it will all be worth it in the end.