Crazy Little Things (First Verse)

"This thing called love, I just can't handle it. This thing called love, I must get ‘round to it I ain't ready. Crazy little thing called love." - Freddie Mercury and Queen
"64-year-old Netscape Billionaire Jim Clark Marries 28-year-old Swimsuit Model Kristy Heinze" – headline, New York Daily News March 23rd 2009

From time to time, I am lured into a dialogue about the nature of romantic love. I might be kind of a buzz kill on this topic, and I don't offer much to the discussion. It's not that I don't appreciate the Giant Texas Twister thirty-degree-roller-coaster-plunge that characterizes falling in love, but the tendency for our species to just cover our eyes and scream "This is the One! At last, my true love has come along!" on the way down seems to me to be completely insane.

Maybe it's a huge thrill, but it's like getting a tattoo when you're drunk - unless you are impossibly lucky, the odds of making an optimum choice just aren't on your side. People who are more "Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?" are bound to feel deflated when they talk to me. I'm not saying that I am immune to love's call when I hear my name, but I'm saying that I approach cautiously. I'm the person who has an escape strategy and an emergency kit just in case that beautiful day at Love Beach turns into a tsunami of devastating destruction. I've been around long enough to witness love eviscerate even the most competent of individuals and I respect that its allure is so powerful that neither intelligence nor good sense nor experience can save the victim if they start going under.

Having established an intellectual position of being almost the polar opposite of a hopeless romantic has, as you might imagine, made me kind of porcupiney on the subject. If there were a category for this on the Myers-Briggs Personality Test with the two extremes being "pragmatic and functional" and "emotional and starry-eyed" I would fall, I think, pretty solidly into the range of "talk of romantic love makes me want to put on a helmet and a hazmat suit."

To my mind, love's biggest flaw is that unlike any other major decision you make in life (with the possible exception of parenthood), you sign on with very little reliable information and almost no reasonable expectation of a positive outcome. Your brain disengages and your sudden (albeit, exciting) departure from reason makes you easy and vulnerable prey to all sorts of misery.

Falling in romantic love has implications for every part of your life. Even a brief romance can affect your emotional well-being, your finances, your family, your career. To the extent that you're willing to risk all for love - haul your possessions and life to the other side of the country, buy a $5000 engagement ring, move in together, have a baby, forego an existing relationship in favor of a new love - the consequences of making the wrong choice can really derail you. If things go badly, you may have the luxury of just dusting off your wounded feelings and asking yourself "what was I thinking?" Or, you may find yourself at the courthouse filing for a temporary restraining order after the glass in your car has been shot out and your bank account has been stripped clean.

What's so diabolical about the lure of romantic love is that it dwells at the very center of what it means to be human. It's a natural weakness, and it makes us susceptible not only to our own emotional and psychological limitations, but it exposes our soft underbellies to other humans, whose intentions may range anywhere from pure and honorable to criminal. While everyone likes to rhapsodize about the mystery of romantic love as if it was guided by the unseen hand of benevolent Destiny, romance is, in reality, less "mysterious" and more a state of such complete confusion that almost no one goes into it having done a reasonable cost-benefit analysis. It's much more pleasant to swoon when you hear "Moon River" playing in the background, my Huckleberry friend, than to apply the same sort of rational scrutiny to your beloved that you would use to make any other life decision like, say, subscribing to a cable package.

There are any number of reasons why we prefer to disengage our brains when it comes to love, not the least of which is that love is not an intellectual process...it's a highly orchestrated ballet that is part psychological and a whole lot biological. Intelligence is not a major player in this game, because if it were, everyone would just stay home where they belong and use all the energy spent on meeting, chasing, bedding, partnering, fighting and parting on more productive activities like catching up on all those old National Geographics that no one ever actually reads, or improving their word power.

Instead, romantic love is driven by unconscious forces cloaked in psychology and driven by instinct. The conscious brain is mostly helpless to rationalize a condition it cannot even understand - it knows it's falling, and it knows that falling implies a loss of control and possible injury, but the poor brain can't do much to inform the rest of the organism that it senses danger and advises retreat.

The psychological motivations for falling in love are almost entirely unique to the individual. Whatever luggage you bring along on your romantic excursion is the accumulation of your experience from gestation onward mixed into a cocktail with your personality. Childhood family life shapes you in infinite ways and teaches you first and foremost about love. What you take out of your nest - the good and the bad - predisposes you to both attract and be attractive to either lovers or predators who recognize your particular frequency.

Early imprinting can provide such a healthy frame of reference that we end up choosing mates with sterling characters and good mental health. But, many of us didn't have ideal parents who could model committed and nurturing love. Those of us who were raised in families further down the function/dysfunction scale tend to make romantic choices that are at least partially predicated on beliefs first formed in the family crucible.

Thus, a young woman who had a distant father is an easy mark for exploitation by an older male predator; or men who had abusive mothers seem to be oddly attracted to overbearing and critical women. Unless the brain has done a very thorough job of educating the unconscious, we aren't even aware that we're basing romantic love on dysfunction. It all looks like love and feels like love, but it won't work out in terms of lasting happiness with the object of all that passion, because the origin of those feelings lies in a wounded past and not in the context of the present relationship.

Then, add normal experience. We don't paddle the waters of love for many years without hitting some serious turbulence along the way whatever our status - married, single, young, older, divorced, gay or straight. Your experience will shape how you approach any new romance and most of us are bruised from loss, grief, betrayal, abandonment, manipulation, death, divorce or just disappointment. We may start out with hopeful hearts and a promise that this time we won't make the same mistakes or fall into the same destructive patterns, but you tend to bring yourself along with you wherever you go. And so does the other person. Inevitably, one or both of you will be navigating according to outdated maps. Eventually, conflicts will start to creep into the new relationship, making it seem eerily reminiscent of some other relationship that you thought you had escaped for good. It can be overcome, but doing so requires a lot of effort and commitment from both partners. Relationships don't always survive the challenge.

If I'm not putting enough emphasis on the hopelessness of romantic love, let me add on one more dimension. Most of us have been highly socialized so that we do not become troublesome to our clan and our villages. We understand that to participate in society, our full range of impulses, desires and emotions must be throttled back so far that some large part of ourselves is either never expressed to anyone else, or only expressed in the most intimate of relationships. The Jungians call this the "shadow-self" - the part of everyone's psyche that is deemed unacceptable or aberrant to the rest of the villagers and must be suppressed (you have only to do a minimum amount of internet surfing to get an idea of how many people are opening the attic and letting their shadows out to make new friends).

Rage, violence, deviance, cruelty, fear, loneliness, isolation, rejection, avarice, revenge, jealousy, malice, self-hatred, lust, deceit, racism, shame, treachery, guilt and addiction all call the "shadow" home. Pretty much any behavior we generally regard as sinful or that we make illegal through our system of justice hides out in the shadow. Containing it doesn't make it disappear, of course (see internet), it just keeps it out of the light of day.

Humans are very adept at pretending to the outside world that their own shadows are mild, harmless or non-existent. We like to project that we are nice creatures who do nice things. But romantic love has a way of making the individual want to share (or, perhaps "unleash" is a better term) all the aspects of who they are, including what lurks in those dark shadows.

When we first gaze into sparkling eyes across a candlelit table or admire the way a pair of faded jeans hangs from a trim set of hips, we aren't doing a Jungian analysis. When the first bouquet of roses arrives with a note that says "I have never known love like this before", you don't ponder whether the giver has a super-virulent shadow. You don't say, "Thanks for the flowers, but I'm just wondering if you have any unresolved rage or control issues you haven't mentioned, or if you spend a lot of time locked in your study with just your laptop and your credit card."

Gosh, no. That would be seriously unromantic. You wait until you're engaged and sharing a home before you put all that together.

And that's just psychology - that's just the mind-game aspect of romantic love of which we are only dimly aware, if at all. We haven't gotten to the prime mover - the Source - of all those intense, queasy, desperate, ecstatic, the-earth-moved feelings. At its core, what masquerades as what we call romantic love is not poetic in the least. Unlike a love poem which tells us that the heart wants what the heart wants, the truth is that the heart wants what the mammal wants.

That's the bottom line. I'm a mammal. You're a mammal. We are mammals all (unless, of course, you are reading this and you are NOT a mammal, then you can just skip past this next part).

Now, in case a more cynical view of romance just sounds too dreary in a world that already has few comforts, don't go away yet. I am not trying to debunk romantic love or suggest that searching and finding is just a risky psycho-biological experiment with statistically poor results. It is that, for sure. But we are complex social creatures, and as an aggregate, many things will be true at once. We are both predictable research data and wild poetic impulse. I'm just saying that if we're going to fall in love anyway, we might be able to avoid some of the more dangerous hazards if we have some idea of what's transpiring behind all of the Manilow-esque love songs and Match.com - type mating sites.

Evolutionary biologists tell us that there is almost no part of our humanity that can be extracted from the process of sexual selection. Our bodies, our drives, even our personality traits are all hard-wired to attract, mate and promote our unique genetics into the mainstream. Beyond the mechanics of mere survival, the desire to attract a partner is the primary task for our species. (So much so that it's been speculated that the reason terrorism appeals to young men is the promise of dozens of virgins in the afterlife. Their culture prevents typically poor, low-status males from acquiring a wife, or wives, and men who have few opportunities to marry on earth willingly commit suicide to enjoy its pleasures after death.)

Cling to your Emily Dickinson or Johnny Mercer, but remember that you are a primate. We are more closely related genetically to a bonobo or a chimpanzee than either of those animals is related to an orangutan. In our mating dance, we're still listening to the echoes of the forest and grasslands from where we came.

And it's a fascinating story...better than any fictional romance because it's our true story and explains such intriguing mysteries as: why the Civil War Pension Program of 1906 allowed aged veterans to marry girls so incredibly young that widows were still collecting Civil War pensions from their deceased husbands until 1999; and why a 64-year-old billionaire marries a 28-year-old swimsuit model instead of a kindly, post-menopausal social worker with life experience and shared interests (besides just swimsuits).

But it's a long story, so let's meet back here in a couple of weeks to continue. In the mean time, watch out for crazy little things and wear your helmet.

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Ingrid lives on San Juan Island.

While Ingrid is spiritually promiscuous, she credits her guru, Jimmy Buffet, for her mantra..."If we couldn't laugh, we would all go insane." Besides a passion for Tiki Studies, Ingrid is borderline biblio-obsessive. She is an old-school Libran - i.e., she won't be leading the Revolution, but she'll work to make it an attractive affair and hire the musicians and caterers."

Her column appears every other Thursday in San Juan Islander. To contact Ingrid, send emails to ingrid@sanjuanislander.com

editor@sanjuanislander.com

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