Loving someone

 

Subject: Loving someone

Love is like an aphrodisiac, it's chemistry at its most deceiving, it often plays us for a fool. There's nothing rational about love, it's ephemeral , transitory, it ebbs and flows, its of the mind and has little rational basis. It often binds us in a vicelike grip making us do crazy things in the postponement of sensibility. I'm not speaking of a mother's love for her child, that deep unfathomable maternal connection or a fathers love for his children but I'm speaking of an attraction towards someone else for reasons which are hard to define. I'm also speaking of a gender based love since my love for another man would for me be philosophical, not physical. So it has to be a girl and she can't be a member of my own immediate family.  Lust can play a part but it's transitory and short lived, so we exclude that as deviant. What is it in that attraction for a woman where a thousand girls wouldn't cause a ripple and yet the one becomes fascinating.

What is this fascination is it their looks, of course yes but it's much more than that, is it their posture the way they hold themselves as they go about their business, is it their vigour or singleminded persona, is it the way they speak, their accent, what they say. Is it that unfathomable cross current of emotion, like a zephyr which strikes your antenna.

It doesn't happen often but when it does you are beguiled like a sailboat caught in a sudden draught of wind, unstable and off course.

We do crazy things when our minds are turned but especially love as we play with its consequences. Our normal progressive step by step assumptions are blown away as you risk everything on the pitch and toss of reciprocation.  I remember having left my love standing on the quayside in Sydney to sail home on a promise to see my parents only to receive a Dear John letter not long after landing in Blighty. A normal rational human being would have bided their time but no, some sort of madness unfurled in my brain and it demanded flying half way around the world to have the truth, which was staring me in the face, spelt out to me, that she had moved on.

In the film Mrs Wilson, based on a true life story an army officer who worked for military intelligence and lived a cloak and dagger existence in the work he did, also lived cloak and dagger in his personal life having three clandestine marriages and supporting a charade of the loving husband and father to all three families. On his death the truth slowly reveals itself and the women try to make sense of their lives living with a multiple adulterer. The story is further muddied by his working for Intelligence and they, knowing of the deceit were fully complicit happy for it to be hidden behind the Official Secrets Act.

It's a story of a man's love acted out in three families and the ghastly truth that his definition of love was so different from theirs, he role played the loving husband in the knowledge that as far as he was concerned, no wrong was done and the provision of a home for each, plus with a complicated division of his time, his marital responsibilities were complete having fathered sons to all three  and his responsibilities to them were met by being their loving but partly absent father. So in this bewitched state he planned his life, to have children and make commitments "till death do us part". His love survived in all of them as they remembered the time he spent with them fondly and it was only when the charade was revealed on his death that hurt and recrimination surfaced.

Love then in a monogamous life is both a force and sometimes the cause of so much unhappiness. In it we continue to strike out, time and again basing our decisions on ephemeral  things rather than by plotting a course, step by step on a reality which only others see.

The Muslim practice of arranged manages is perhaps a better way of consummating our desire based on the practicality adage, "the family knows best", instead of the firework show and bright lights which, only when dimmed reveal the true nature of the affair.