The Nature vs. Nurture debate...

There is a quote I love that applies to all aspects of my life where my patience is tested. It's by Lao Tzu who said, "Nature does not hurry, yet everything is accomplished."

Lao was a philosopher and his philosophy makes sense! Our generation waits for nothing by choice. Nature tells our impatience to shove it. We’re made to wait regardless and only through hindsight does peace come to explain the wait and bring clarity to the agony we experience in waiting for something to happen. 

For many of us, we spend weeks, months, even years waiting for love. We wonder where he or she is? We wonder why they haven’t found us yet (or us them) and we wonder when they’ll come knocking.

For the most part I agree that patience is necessary and all that is natural comes into place without our external influence but that doesn't stop nature from perplexing us. Weeds still spread within the earth, seeds are sown, we plough through old weeds to start anew, new trees sprout and I'm not nearly scientific enough or stupid enough to pretend to try to explain ecosystems but somehow everything in the world works together, grows together, exists together to help another’s survival.

While all that is natural exists to keep us going I can't help think of the nature vs. nurture debate when it comes to love. Weeks ago I overheard a conversation where two people argued over whether or not people fell in love. One argued that nobody simply falls in love it is a conscious choice.

If its a conscious choice then it's more meritorious because you're mentally willing to accept the changes that will come with the partnership, your wits are about you and beyond your resistant thoughts (I don't want to call it better judgement) you submit to that desire to pursue the desirable. I tend to side with this argument because it means that love is something we can all continually work on if we accept the choice is in fact our own from the very beginning.

When we exclude ourselves from the decision making process and submit our minds and bodies to science and butterflies, then feelings permissibly fly out as quickly as they fly in. In accepting that our body, mind and heart succumbs to another’s power involuntarily and separate to our consciousness, we open the door to a river deep, mountain high stretch of excuses that exempt us from responsibility. I hate that. I’m all about owning your actions.

Science suggests that blinding hormones induced  by passionate love(making) dissipate and are responsible for that euphoria that most couples feel when they’re in love or when they’re intimate. The chemicals that imbalance our brains and fuel our hearts (adrenaline, dopamine, norepinephrine, phenylethlamine and a whole bunch of others that I can’t spell or pronounce) fluctuate in strengths through the period of your relationship. Slowly they remove your blinders and rather than extending that period wherein you are stupefied by love, it halts it and forces you to think rationally. This is where problems begin. Couples see each other differently believing a partner has changed when in  fact, it’s likely they haven’t at all – the chemicals have just worn off and it takes more than what is ‘natural’ to sustain the connection you have.

So when nature shoves nurture aside, relationships expire. When nurture partners with nature, relationships are more likely to survive.

I’m yet to experience love so I’m happy to be proven wrong but I think it’s always a decision to put someone else first. It’s always a decision to say yes or no to a date. It’s a choice to keep seeing each other. It’s a choice to give your heart away. You may lust after many. You may connect with several people in the world. You can even love them but you can only be in love with one person at a time. It is simply too much work to otherwise divide your heart. When we focus on nurturing we can only fully invest in one true love. The second we stop nurturing what was once natural is when we falter in our treatment of those we have loved and cracks in our love shack tear the foundations of what we have built.

Lao was right, nature does not hurry, so love comes when it’s supposed to but all is accomplished when people nurture what is natural. As such, there is no such thing as falling in love, just an agreement to keep working on it. 

The art of overcoming fear to find love

Since writing this blog, I’ve assumed the role of relationship counselor for many friends  and happily so! To all those telling me your stories keep doing so because it gives me great material for these blogs. One common thread among those seeking love is fear – of rejection, of a failed relationship, of over exposure and then it struck me what love in its nakedness is all about …embracing fear. 

We begin with our quest for love with a fear of rejection, I know many people happily in relationships now who fought entry into a relationship because they didn’t want to ask the girl they were interested in out. It’s what also helps maintain sexist roles in relationships…most women shy away from the idea of asking the man of their interest out for that same fear. Most of us concede that since we do a great deal within the relationship, we deserve courtship and deserve not to go through the humiliation of knocking on one’s heart and having that door shut in our faces. Like a Monet painting what seems nice from far can be a huge mess up close, so we even avoid finger-painting  and just dabbling in it.

When a relationship falls apart there is another fear that takes over…the fear of falling for someone because of the all consuming changes in life that quickly follow those three words that take a world of mustered courage to exclaim. Having loved and lost, a tower of terror is quickly built to barricade one’s emotions.  I have one friend now happily in a relationship who after her first breakup, swore off love for a year. It happened as everyone said it does, love came when she wasn’t looking and she fought it with all of her strength. In her mind, she would have happily never loved again because the work required to sustain a healthy relationship was frankly too daunting for her to invest herself into it. Courage is said to be fear that has said its prayers, so she said hers, embraced love and gave fear the flick.

Her relationship before this crumbled because of another type of fear; fear of physicality and stuffing it up! In her first relationship she was unable to show affection. She put this down to her conservative upbringing and her inexperience. She was wrong. The entire relationship was and that’s what had held her back from taking a leap of faith and a pirouette into passion. Her second relationship was different. Her new love made sure of it and with that security came the removal of fear of intimacy. It was something that even the most experienced had faced at some point in their relationships. 

Another friend shared a similar story of her first time with her new boyfriend. Emotionally famished from relationships’ passed, she had no desire to satiate her new boyfriends hunger for her. She was robbed of her ability to reciprocate love because of the avaricious way that her affection had previously been sought. Love; once tightly knit was unwoven and tangled and needed her new sweetheart to stitch up her old heart. Without pressure or persistence, he promised her a lifetime of love at her leisure. She found somebody to fix the seams of her frayed heart and her fear of being hurt diminished. 

For a while, fear of losing her love reared its insecure head in her relationship. Nothing but God had a promise of forever but for some reason, the brave of us keep seeking love.

I wondered why anyone would stupidly throw themselves into a situation that they feared and the answer of why we try came through Ernest Hemingway. I’ve always been a huge fan of his writing because he has great conviction in his commentary.  He is frank and I love honesty even if I disagree with it.

One of my favorites (that I do agree with) is when he said “the best way to know if you can trust someone is to trust them.” It is so perfect in its simplicity. 

What is indirectly explained is that in order to cure our curiosity, we face fear to fall in love and answer our own questions about people. 

Hemingway is also famed for saying, “man can only be destroyed, but never defeated.” To say this means we never truly lose in love, we learn lessons, we gain confidence in our ability to give love, we solve the mystery of what we’re looking for and though emotionally, temporarily, we feel destroyed, we are never completely overcome by the battle. 

We’re all amateur artists, trying to craft a future for ourselves. In our painting, a significant other will often appear, and with every heartbreak a new stroke of our brushes better defines what the significant other should look like. 

We fear error but we need trial to complete the picture. We take our time, because you can’t rush an artist and we fight fear for love, for the chance of living the masterpiece.

Love triangles and less than terrific timing...

Jessica likes James but her friend Julie likes him too. Julie has banded with Jessica's frenemy who also secretly happens to like James. None of them have discussed it with each other for fear of open competition or acceptance of defeat. They will all continue to court and pursue till James takes his pick. Lucky James.

 James is a little popular and a lot confused. He flirts with all but chooses none. James' friend Jono is more astute in his search. He knows exactly what he wants and that is Jessica but Jessica can't decide if being with Jono is where her life has been headed towards or if she'd rather toss both and go for their friend Jack. Friendships will be tried, loyalties will be tested and hearts will inevitably be broken. For the sake of peace, should all step away and bow out of the battle gracefully or should they follow their hearts with the belief that there is nothing more valuable than finding love?

James was in love once but when it was over, he saw the ugly side of his ex. He shook hands with bitterness, rubbed shoulders with rage and flirted with fury, but he stomped all over regret and refused to let it toy with his mind. Even though the outcome of his breakup would have allowed it. She moved on far quicker than he would have expected.

 Affairs, betrayal and recycling of relationships are something experienced the world over so it was all too important to find the person that shared his ideals and would promise the same security that he promised in a relationship second time around.

Betrayal was the basest of human actions yet James having experienced it in his past relationship had peace. It seemed everyone he knew was dating someone who somebody else loved before and although he didn't like it, he accepted the loss and soldiered on. He would rather an old love have love than halt the love of a heart that could never truly be his. This was simultaneously noble and stupid.

Jessica  had other wonderful friends who had caught partners in the act of cheating. The cheater and the mistress would go on to live happily ever after, while the cheated would be left to contemplate the loss, experience extreme lows and for the first time know loneliness. Fortunately, Jessica's friend was surrounded by wonderful people to uplift her but she'd often question why the person at fault got to know joy first?

Jessica would often tell her that it was important to experience a period of loneliness to build one's character so that when love came knocking she'd be complete enough to answer the door and let love in. Without development of one's self, it would be a relationship of dependance not one in which she could give yourself wholly to her other half.

Enter unfortunate timing for James and Jessica.

James and Jessica were chatting the other day and he sweetly contemplated that experiences lived out without a loved one were empty, futile and incomplete to him. He pondered that until his plus one could share in the joys of his life, he wouldn’t know contentment. This was the most beautifully expressed quest for love that Jessica had heard in a long time. She would have fallen for him instantly if she wasn't aware of the call to be guarded while he was still healing. He wouldn't be ready to love her for a while and so she accepted his friendship and would happily help him heal.

The problem here for Jessica was that while James claimed he was ready to move on, he continued to tell Jessica how perfect his ex (Gretchen) was. He mused on all of Gretchen’s good qualities and feared that he would never find those qualities again. Jessica didn’t voice her issue with this but if she had that night over, she would have asked, why you would want a repeat of your last relationship, if that formula failed you? He was blinded by love and it would be a while before he could see past Gretchen's good qualities. This was testament to his great character, not necessarily hers.  Gretchen sounded awful to Jessica. She tried not to judge..

She was at a crossroads… would she wait for James to be ready? Would she pay greater attention to Jono or Jack? Would she show James what he could have if he chose to love her? She didn’t want to wait because she held firmly to the belief that the man that chose to be with her would be instantly sure that she was the woman he wanted to spend the rest of his life with.

If there was one lesson she’d always clung to from her youth it was that the right thing at the wrong time is still the wrong thing. This was true for James and Gretchen’s relationship and it was true for her situation now.

Jessica could have sat and pontificated on the things James was missing out on by dwelling on the past. She could have sat and tried to win James over. She could have even flirted with a different fate and seen where Jono or Jack could take her but she decided against all of those options because she’d been there, done that, been hurt and grown stronger.

Self worth was the greatest gift she could give herself. She’d let the other girls compete because for her, love was not a contest, it was a blessing, and if James didn’t want her, she didn’t want him either – not because he was bad, blind or a poor judge of character, but simply, because he wasn’t the one…and she would never accept anyone less for herself.

 

Happily ever after…when never is more in sight.

I have been incessantly listening to Adele’s album this week; putting me in a happy/sad/love-longing/depressed/elated/fantastical mood. It pulls on every heart string and stirs every emotion – much like a break-up. I’ve been continuously listening to stories of them too (but that has been less of a choice).

The one track on replay has been ‘hiding my heart,’ about the inevitable heartbreak that comes from a transient relationship.

One friend I have knows all about this. This week I felt, saw and attempted to help her heartbreak as she dignifiedly watches on as an old flame, passionately prepares for his wedding to a new love (less than a year on from their break up). The girl he’s with also experienced devotee devastation when her former five year relationship crumbled. One woman’s treasure, was another woman’s treasure and woman number one was trashed instead. Love had to be cruel to be kind to her and though we know not to play with fire, sometimes we need to be burnt to move on.

It won’t make much sense to her for a while but there would never be enough love, or enough joy to fill her in a relationship where the love she had was unrequited.

I’m no expert on why one girl gets chosen over the other and what makes a man commit but I do know that if he hasn’t committed to you, then he’s simply not the one. I am all for shades of grey… but for healing’s sake, this is one truth that will always be black and white to me. If love exists it finds a way to conquer.

What gives me hope and assurance in this is a friend who has newly found love. Love even visited her in her dreams before she met him. True story.

I love this tale so much because this woman confirms that the right man is worth waiting for. Good things come to those who wait. The cliché is true.

She however is anything but cliché. She is vibrant, intelligent, beautiful (in and out), hard-working and very successful. I can’t fault her on anything. She is everything most women would hope to be (me included).

Women used to be told to downplay their intelligence so as to avoid intimidating the opposite sex. Her intelligence attracted a mental and emotional equal and the prospect of finding something like that thrills and delights me.

This young beauty was single for a while but was a champion for love. I’d hear her talk about meeting a man that brought her joy most days that I saw her. Perhaps her positivity powered this new romance. God knows she deserved that happiness. Everybody does and most people will get to experience it, but not without a period of loneliness first.

I think the secret to this is that in order to appreciate the love you have, you have to experience what it means to live without them so when they walk on set as an extra in your life, you quickly realize that you’d prefer them as a regular cast member with the scenes of romance on replay.

The real stuff is good too. The fights and the way you overcome them. The dark moments and the days their light rescues you from that misery. The moment when simply seeing them where you are is enough to satiate your hungry soul. Hearing their voice will do that too. Then their’s that day it unlocks happiness that was previously foreign to you. It’s this love that I’m waiting for.

It’s also this love that I hope soon comes to my friend. Heartbreak has forced her to hide her heart, but I hope that when the grieving is over and the healing begins, she is able to reopen her heart to find love that friend #2 in this story has got to know.

While love songs do nothing for my patience, they do plenty for my passion. and remind me that that fire is worth waiting out in the cold for. There’s a positive in everything.