If you haven’t figured out yet, Yoshi Matsumoto is not my “real” name. It’s a pen name. I write anonymously because I want as little blurring as possible between my online activities and my real life. My friends don’t know I write or podcast or tweet, only a handful of my family does. It’s better this way. If they knew who I was and I wrote about them, even changing their names, they’d be able to tell, and mutual friends would be able to tell. It would be embarrassing. They might get angry I wrote about them without their knowledge and I couldn’t write honestly.
They don’t know though. So I’m going to tell you about Ryan.
Ryan is in a loveless marriage. He’s in denial about this. He loves his wife and believes that her lack of affection is because “she hasn’t learned to love herself.” This helps him sleep at night. It’s not him, see, it’s her. She just hasn’t learned to love herself. This is an earthenware jar of feces (aka, a crock of shit). The reality is that she doesn’t love him because he’s infertile. Something happened when he was born and then his testicles didn’t descend enough or something. They stayed up in his body too long. Got too hot, overcooked. He didn’t tell her this when they got married and he didn’t because he didn’t know. He believed himself to be fully functioning. His parents had never told him of the problem. Before getting married, he’d never tried to have a kid.
As a general rule, people love themselves. I think the canard of “I’m learning to love myself” is cheap new age pop-psychology for narcissists and psychopaths. At any rate, in my estimation almost everybody who’s ever uttered the phrase has loved themselves entirely too much. People, most people, want the best for themselves. They want the best for themselves and they want the best for themselves in everything pretty much all the time. That’s as good a definition of love as I’ve ever heard, wanting the best for somebody, all the time. Ryan’s wife, call her Christine, wants the best for herself. And, in her own estimation, the best for herself is someone that can get her pregnant. She’s sort of in a pickle though because she already married this guy not knowing he was damaged goods and she’ll look like a total see you next tuesday to her very proper social circle for leaving someone because he’s shooting blanks. That would make her look shallow. And she is shallow. Most people are. In her heart she’s okay being shallow. She just doesn’t want to look it.
It’s a difficult situation for both parties, don’t get me wrong. Christine is in a tough spot here. People, most people, build their relationships on fondness of others, sure, but also on utility. We don’t like to admit that. We want to believe that love and friendship are pure and unadulterated by worldly concerns. That people like us for us, and not for what we can give them. In almost all cases, this is not true. Like most young women Christine got married, in part, because she wanted someone to put a baby inside her. You can get this done without getting married of course but usually women also hope the fella sticks around. Kids are a lot of work after all. They need help. Christine probably liked Ryan also, sure, but, if there wasn’t a baby in the future, and she knew that from the start, there probably wouldn’t have been a relationship, certainly not a marriage. This doesn’t make her weird or abnormal. Lots of people would bail on a potential partner if they couldn’t conceive or had some other sort of long term health problem. Christine is only unusual because 1) she happened to be one of the unlucky ones whom this sort of thing happens too and 2) she’s very bad at hiding how upset it makes her. Most people are capable of similar feelings. Most people just hide it better.
My friend Stephen was another who couldn’t hide it. In college he fell for a sweet girl named Melissa who had cystic fibrosis. Not hard to see why he liked her so much, she was adorable and about the nicest person that ever existed. They dated for about ten years but he never married her because he knew they probably had no future together. And she knew he felt that way. This made her said but she didn’t really have any better option. Plus she loved him. Truly. In the unconditional way. Melissa was a saint like that. She had a lung transplant and for a while they dared to hope they might make it. Marriage was on the table again. Then, suddenly, she had a turn for the worst. She spent a few years in and out of the hospital. Stephen broke up with her and started dating a cute young girl from the office who was completely healthy and has since proven very fertile. Melissa died. Stephen and the new girl got hitched.
So it goes.
Is Stephen an asshole? No more than Christine is. No more than you or I probably are either. It’s easy to think you’re a good person when you’ve never been tested. How many people go through life thinking they’re good loving people but then shunt their parents off to a nursing home and hardly speak to them again when they get too old? How many people discover that their hearts aren’t as full as they once thought when they have a child with a health condition that is very taxing to take care of? How many people fool themselves into believing their love is pure only to find that it’s actually forged on rather base instincts when their partner can’t walk on their own or can’t work or can’t make a baby?
A lot.
Unconditional love is hard. It’s hard and very often the first condition we put on it is that the other person love us unconditionally first. That doesn’t mean it’s not worth striving for of course. Indeed, I’ve always felt that even to deserve the name “love” it must be unconditional. Free. Based on nothing but beholding the goodness in another person and wanting it to shine. Anything less is just “like.” I think that’s what Jesus was talking about when he said the kingdom of God is within us. We are capable of unconditional love.
It’s just hard.
Maybe Ryan and Christine will get divorced soon. I suspect they probably will. Both of them will be somewhat puzzled because both of them believed they meant the words they’d said on their wedding day. “For richer, for poorer, in sickness, and in health…” Ryan thought Christine believed it and she thought she believed it too. She just hadn’t been tested yet. Most love when tested falls down. Been a lot of that lately. A lot of it over a lot less. The passed two years have shown us that a lot of love, when stressed, breaks. Families arguing about disease and politics and so on. It just isn’t there. I’ll never forget when my great grandmother died, how all her children squabbled over what meager inheritance she left behind. Some of them still don’t talk. I remember thinking, “You’re all almost dead anyway, what good would this money do you?” But, that’s people. Love can be thrown away for $40,000 dollars split four ways. Less. Lot less.
“What shall it profit a man if he gain the whole world but lose his soul?”
Jesus
I know of no better way to lose your soul than to stop loving. Come hell or high water, hold onto it. Hold on to the people you love, even when they stop being able to give you anything in return. Even when it doesn’t make sense. Even when they don’t love you back. The only alternative is living in a world where unconditional love doesn’t exist. That’s not going to be my world.
I choose to hang on.
Thank you for this. Very beautifully written.As usual gives me a good think.