Thinking about Love and other regulated activities

I started thinking about this blog as I was enjoying my Valentine's Day Week celebrations. As a single woman who lives with cats and her parents at the same time, there is some expectation that I'm to be bitter or apathetic or, at the very least, desperately obsessed with someone unsuitable, unlikeable and inaccessible. (We are, of course, going to ignore my revolving door of movie star crushes. Because I said so. And they aren't really the point.) That I'm going to somehow miss out on a holiday that claims to celebrate the joyousness of love.

It finally struck me this year that I could take advantage of my status as a single person and make whatever plans I wanted whenever I wanted them to bask in the holiday. I painted my nails. I never do that. I watched a movie that I'd been wanting to see. I sat quietly with a cat on my lap and just listened to her breathe. All of the things that I would have enjoyed with someone - the right someone - at my side. Which got me to thinking about my friends.
Which lead directly to thinking about India and traveling.
Which lead to population issues and driving instructions.
Which lead to normalizing posters - expectations communicated through advertising - the power of the spoken word to define a life whether that life requires outside definition or not.
(and since this is a train of thought I ride a lot, I've got quite used to the stops.)
Which got me to thinking about how impossible it is to standardize human beings, and how often that is exactly what people try to do.

It is easy to think of standardized shoppers and workers and politicians and archetypes. It is a bit startling when the easy thoughts of generalized expectations lead on to something like Valentine's Day.

We celebrate the holiday of a man who was martyred, and so the tale goes (altho the facts are a bit imaginary) he was martyred for performing weddings for soldiers, directly against the order of the Emperor Claudius II who believed that unmarried men made better soldiers. Learning that the facts are unfactual is a bit of a downer, but we'll pretend I didn't learn that part and go on.

It is not the spending or the gift-giving that I think of when I consider the standardization of lovers. It is the constant repetition of the form: one man and one woman and nothing and no one shall be loved as much as these two love each other. Friendships are not important. Family is only sought, never received, never expected, never involved. Co-workers are co-cattle. And please don't consider changing the sex or number of the people in the basic relationship, because there is nothing stable in the world if you do that.

How many romantic movies are about a man and woman who are only barely involved in family life and function solely as the subject of a spot light in the life of a friend group? How often is the word 'bromance' used as something kind of meaningless or sketchy? And, yes, as a woman who shared a home with another woman for more than two years, it is old and immature to believe that every female friendship involves naked pillow fights. And it is a dealbreaker. Then again, I also like my friends quite a little bit and do not tolerate being around people who can say nothing good about the people they claim to like. It is my choice to love the people around me and my choice to be around people I love.

But what about this world that has such issues with individuals loving other individuals, to the point that while in my country there is a need to keep the Church and the State separate, there is no need to see that regulating marriage is allowing the State to regulate Love. Married people are given perks that single people are not - socially, legally and economically.

In a world that is obsessed with zombies and robots and vampires taking over - things which are not human, things which do not make human decisions, things which are inhumane at best - the conversation about what makes a human being different than a robot or a zombie or a cow is less and less easy to have. Affection is a thing we share with other mammals, not just primates. We do, however, feel something that we elevate to a position of Proof of God: we can love each other. In our little skull prisons, we imagine the suffering and the joy and the stories of other people and sometimes those imaginings involve a greater concern for the happiness of another person than for ourselves - people call that love, the thing that takes you out of your selfishness and brings you into the world of other humans.

I think of how much it matters to hear the laughter of my friends. How easy it is to be with them. Not to have to speak. To debate the merits of pickles. The gift of dappled sunshine and a light breeze.

It is no grand adventure. It is not covered in hearts and flowers and balloons and it doesn't cost me anything.

To me, this is love. Whatever you call it, it is part of our human experience. Another very real part of our human experience is the inability to be standardized: it doesn't work, it never has, at some point people will stop following orders or suggestions or subliminal messages and they will resent the intrusion.

Humans will continue to love as humans will. Unstandardized. Legal or not. It is a only a lazy and desperate act of commodification and mechanization that does not see this. And it will fail. It always does.

My prayers to those who are in the center of the fight.
My respect to those who support them.
My love to all.