Date Whoever the Hell You Want To.
Happy Schmalentine's Day!
(Almost.)The worst holiday of the year is coming up on Friday. I hated it when I was single and feeling badly about it (most of my life), and I'm proud to stay I still hate it even though I am married now.I feel like a lot of holidays aren't much more than opportunities for the marketing, advertising and media industries to convince us that we need to buy more stuff and give certain gifts to certain people on a certain day. (Mother's Day, Father's Days and Christmas are other examples.)Anyway, as long as I'm ranting about Valentine's Day, I might as well bitch about the plethora of articles spawned by a viral blog from May 2012 called "Date a Boy Who Travels." Date a Girl Who Takes Hot Yoga? Really?First of all, don't date a "boy" or a "girl", please. That's illegal.Date a man or a woman. Whichever you want.I would tell you to date someone who's nice to you, but if you're into dating people who aren't nice to you, you're not going to listen to me. You've got to live through enough meanness to figure out that you're worth more and don't have to put up with that bullshit.Date someone who you could love and who could love you. Otherwise, why are you dating?Date someone who you could maybe consider spending the rest of your life with... if that's your ultimate desire.Lifetime partnership is not for everybody.Some of us think it's for us, but maybe we're wrong. Anything could happen. Separation, divorce, death. It's not pleasant to think about, but it's a fact---a fact that makes life and love all the more precious.Some may think we're not cut out for long-term or "lifelong" love, but the day after tomorrow we will meet our forever partner and all that we had once believed will fly out the cage.If you're not "in a relationship", date yourself. Take yourself to dinner and a movie. Travel solo. Indulge in romantic gifts for yourself once in a while.We're all in relationship with everything and everyone else. That's the nature of life and the reality of the universe we live in.Finally, read this wild quote from J. Krishnamurti:
Can't you fall in love and not have a possessive relationship? I love someone and she loves me and we get married — that is all perfectly straightforward and simple, in that there is no conflict at all.(When I say we get married I might just as well say we decide to live together — don't let's get caught up in words.) Can't one have that without the other, without the tail as it were, necessarily following?Can't two people be in love and both be so intelligent and so sensitive that there is freedom and absence of a centre that makes for conflict?Conflict is not in the feeling of being in love. The feeling of being in love is utterly without conflict. There is no loss of energy in being in love. The loss of energy is in the tail, in everything that follows — jealousy, possessiveness, suspicion, doubt, the fear of losing that love, the constant demand for reassurance and security.Surely it must be possible to function in a sexual relationship with someone you love without the nightmare which usually follows. Of course it is.