Attraction Differential

A great sage (I suspect it was the tireless Anon once again) said "Obey your instincts." Now in the haste of modern life many influences demand obedience, and sadly there are always stray people lacking direction who thus fall prey to confidence tricksters, simply because they seem to know what they are talking about. I'm always suspicious of people who primarily issue imperatives in their speech, maybe except my football coach, who literally barks orders. Now I need to be getting to the point, how our eyes need to stay open.

Let us telescopically zoom in on love and romance, the way modern culture depicts them. ( Not so close that we must stare at other people's displays of affection. Look in the mirror and you should see quite enough, thank you.) My view of the past presents me as an evangelical believer in the romantic tropes of back in the day.  For example, The One: an exclusive soulmate figure with whom the matching agent is no less than Destiny and without whom there is no Happily Ever After.

With ideas like these filling my head I set out to search for love and soon thought I found it. But my instinct refused to believe the narrative I was forcing upon myself. I ignored the annoying instinct until one day it screamed out: "Love is not this way!" The attraction was compromised from the start by an unfortunate pink hue coming from rose-tinted glasses I was wearing at the time.

Let me explain myself; you see, attraction is a funny thing, it's like binary. When it's on, it's like two magnets close together, they slam into one another and cleave together. When it's off, nothing will happen, like preoccupied strangers in the street. Factors of attraction vary, from physical appearance to virtues and appealing character but there's got to be attraction, it's not magic.

The problem begins when romantic love is made the be-all and end-all of life and happiness, until misguided souls settle with insufficient attraction. The cart is before the horse. There may be other motives which do not qualify as attraction because they are only marginally related to the object of affection, like how the two of you will look, what others will think, other calculations, etc (which are given disproportionate weight despite only being by-products, side effects.) This is the real dynamic behind that oft-rehashed complaint now popularized by the movies: "I feel like you are in love with the idea of being in love and not in love with meeee!" **tears, and then an overdue break up***

In a lovesick mind, having to pep talk oneself every time before facing the partner is more tolerable than being alone. Consequently, these shut their eyes and ears from dissonant facts that indicate that they have been settled for, shielding themselves from the truth by going to extra lengths to obligate their partners to stay with them. But love is not this way. Granted, arranged marriages between total strangers have worked, which somewhat  complicates my argument on the necessity of initial attraction. Never mind,  I'll figure it out. All I'm saying here is, there's no faking love in a relationship, no matter how "romantic" it is made to look.

Why am I talking like this? How do I know? I've been that guy, I've been on both ends of an attraction imbalance, both settling for others when my options dried up and being settled for by others. One kind of feels a nagging pain in the instinct in either format. Unless an isostatic adjustment balances the inequality, which may not happen even with prolonged exposure, do not proceed by any means. Just wait. Keep your eyes wide open in the meantime.

Revise history, quick!

I'm worked up as I write this. It's the newspaper's that's done it this time. I see deception and disinformation flying around and I get so mad.

History as taught is a heap of lies. Sure, there are facts in there to be crammed: dates, names and places, accurate ones too. But that's just data. The truth of history is much more important than its minutiae. And the truth of history is what mainstream academic "History" has never ventured to teach. Remember, also, that the victors are the ones who write official "history" and dispense "justice". The fittest survive to immortalize their heroes in dogmatic myths. Later generations recite it in their daily papers.

They say "if you repeat a lie often enough it becomes the truth." Well, it doesn't. Life in the 21st century is a continual bombardment of lies. We are drowning in it. Mass media beams it all day. "Education", so called, embeds it in our thinking. Corporates sustain the deception to profitably maintain relevance. Pop culture conforms the masses into the required psychological stances. (Chris Brown: "Don't wake me uuuuup!") It has reached a level that is one wanted to start fixing society's junk, one looks at the multifaceted problem, sees the multitudes of its adherents and vested interests, wonders where and how to start, gives up. The task is worse than Herculean, it overwhelms and tires merely by contemplating the sheer scale of its impossibility. This is the reason I'm worked up - tired as I am of heaps of lies incessantly being told even now.

Things simply have to make sense to me. But it's hardly ever that straightforward out here.

Example. Over the years, one learns that the innocent pay for the crimes of the guilty. It's a hard fact. However, facts are like prostitutes; they readily lend themselves to competing interpretations, without discrimination, especially if the price is right.

1. Paying for crimes is highly demoralizing, moreso paying for others' crimes. Rationality seems to suggest becoming guilty: as attested to by popular culture's disdain for "naive" people and their "inexperience."

2. OR be innocent anyway. Moral rectitude demands it.

The truth is oscured from view by "facts". All varieties of statistics can be made to mean something compelling, and reinforced by graphs and charts. In short, there is a distinction between "data" and "truth". Too bad how data has become the nerd's crowing glory.

There's every risk I'll burn myself out railing against the system like this. The world is fixed in its ways, and proud of it. I just ask anyone to show me where they are obligated to buy into its deceptions.

Failure to Perform

Men regard themselves in the light of their usefulness to society. Thus, male unemployment results in low male self esteem. This is because a man's perceived contribution to society is tightly bundled with his own positive or negative conception of his identity and worth.

While this raises the spectre of ultracompetitive behavior in males, it remains an inevitable fact of the male psyche. A guy who feels like society's third wheel, say due to unemployment, feels it heavily as a bad reflection on himself. The resentful backlash that results from such existential unease is felt particularly hard in his close personal and family relationships.

 
This emotional kick in the balls can have such a far-reaching impact as to result in total failure of the actual physical balls, as corroborated by accounts of marriages and relationships which proceeded swimmingly - until the dude lost his job. Certainly the financial setback is a big worry, but the chief terminal injury to the relationship is the man's utter inability to construct a relevant self-narrative of his own usefulness in the world. Needless to say, this attitude only births a self-perpetuating downward spiral, but a man will be a man even if it literally kills him.

In short, if a man doesn't get up to go to work, he probably can't get it up either.

In other words, failure to perform (work) is a major cause of failure to perform (sex).

More explicitly put, male unemployment is a failsafe psychological cock-blocker, which is quite effective, seeing how all sex begins in the mind.