One the most common reactions when love falls apart is the feeling of betrayal or unworthiness. Both reactions usually come with a big dose of devastation, as if one's world has been turned upside down. There are reasons built into our prehuman condition that force those feelings of unworthiness and/or betrayal. It is a story we've made up that makes no sense in a sentient world. In a sentient existence, t's all about self-validation.
Listening to love songs over the span of life of a lyricist is fascinating. You can almost see the ongoing devastation take effect, as attempt after attempt to love gets crushed. It's no different for anyone else. It's just that lyricists put it down in words. You can see that they finally settle for less - like everyone else.
Love should be an unmitigated celebration. One shouldn't feel devastated, invalidated in one's existence by its waning. Disappointment, sure, but not devastation. I go back and forth on whether love will become a lifelong experience or not, once we become human. Honestly? I can make an argument either way.
This is the strongest argument I have developed for love lasting a lifetime. If the impediments to lasting love are as facile as they seem, then the idea of sharing one's life fully with one other is a powerful incentive. It's important. Instead, everyone learns to settles for less, one way or another, after enough encounters with its failure. If you are honest with yourself, you cannot say otherwise.
This is where self-validation comes into the picture. Why is it that we feel invalidated when someone doesn't love us back or changes their mind or screws with us? That's on them. It is the lack of self-validation that causes the real disturbance.
I've explained in detail why men don't feel valid in their existence. Because of that, they pick apart the validity of the woman every chance they get. That is the genesis of misogyny that places it on the shoulders of every man. It goes back at least three millennia.
Settling never sat well with me, so what else was there to do? I never lost my feeling of validity, but I knew there was certainly a problem that I was not facing. The problem that every man encounters was blocked from introspection.
Finally, though, it became clear that there was a problem and it was much bigger than just me. Somewhere along the line I realized it was the whole of the male gender that had this problem. Not that the male gender is a problem, but that they have a problem that causes them to go haywire. There is no reason for it to remain.
The problem really is terribly obvious, but the animal throws such tantrums in its attempts to avoid the reality: male animals are lousy at coitus and there is not a single reason that a male sentient being needs to remain lousy at coitus. When men's biggest (and unnecessary) failure is on the verge of being revealed, they throw a fit. Thus, we have put it on the back burner, over and over again - for three thousand years rather than face the facts. We are no longer an animal. Our sentient awareness makes awareness of the failure unavoidable and our sentient capabilities makes it simple to overcome - once we face it. The loving Rite of Passage into their humanity is all that the male gender needs to learn. Note: the whole of the male gender, not just this or that male.
Why is it so hard for anyone else to see the instability built into the system of our prehuman state? A little initial effort on the part of the man that will end up being no effort at all within a generation or two can change the world. Because he is a thinking human being, not just an animal, a man can learn to love. Not trained into it by rote but immersed in it - like a human being. It's all up to the male gender to realize what Nature has provided, instead of running from it like a scared child.
Think of it this way, maybe. Those original men, thousands of years ago, were pretty new at thinking and they weren't very good at it. Now, throw in the mind-boggling experience of orgasm that one wants to repeat often combined with the bothersome reality that the woman is getting almost nothing out of the experience, along with the reality that it is difficult for the man to comprehend what goes wrong (though easy to repair, once he finally realizes what goes wrong), driven by the animal (not human) impediment of muscles instincts and you end up with the confusion, bewilderment, and hobbling of a sentient existence that has haunted us all along.
How would one expect a barely cogent human male three thousand years ago or more to deal with that? Those early ancestors couldn't think their way out of a wet paper bag, much less the physical aspect of the mind-boggling experience of orgasm and failure to make it mutual. They made up gods and so much else to deal with it. We are not them, except by rote, training, and paradigms of nonsense.
All that is necessary is to think one's way through the experience rather than just focus on the ultimate experience for oneself. It is an entirely new effort to overcome the reactionary, instinctual response of the animal. It never even crossed humanity's mind that a man (not an animal) can last as long as he desires because he is not just an animal. He can think his way through that which impedes an animal in order to make it the most incredible loving experience. He is not really human until he does so. It is all explained in Details.
Do you see how even other alternatives to loving coitus don't validate, on their own, the feeling of failure? The failure that bothers men isn't really the failure to pleasure woman. It is the failure of the male gender to make the most natural form of sex human and loving. That leaves a tremendous hole in our humanity. We've known all along that we should be able to do better but the confounding stories and lies we have told ourselves all along have abrogated the possibility.
It undermines a man's humanity to realize he cannot. He is at a loss. His humanity is invalidated, it seems. The best any man can do is make up excuses and carry on. Of course, he wants to invalidate everyone else. Other men might not be invalid at the act of loving. That makes him suspicious. Women will, sooner or later, learn that he is invalid. That makes him downright paranoid. Let me clear that up in an instant. Somewhere around 99% of men do not know what they are doing when it comes to loving coitus.
The best a man can do, today, other than stumble upon some way in which to last a few minutes is to humble himself. It is an unnecessary humility. Humanity is not built for humility as a way of life. It is up to the man only to undo his forced humility. The worst a man can do is, well, look around.
It's, of course, way more complicated than that. The man is attracted to women (duh.). So, he does everything he can to attract a woman. Then, once he has her, he tries to figure out what is wrong with her. Why would she accept someone that is so lousy at sex? This should clear a lot up for a lot of women.
One alternative that is common is the relationship that, as the years wear on, goes without the loving experience and the sex becomes experienced less and less often. What do you think that does to the relationship and the state of mind of the couple?
Do you see? We have had to accept alternatives to loving coitus in order to make the experience mutual. It is a gaping hole in our wholeness. In order to calm those that feel a need to justify their particular alternatives, I repeat that the alternatives are not the problem. It is the absence of loving coitus that causes all the problems. Not the presence of alternatives.
It's a double or triple whammy. First, the story we tell ourselves is that we are invalid until we fall in love. We tell ourselves love of another will make everything alright.
Secondly, one begins to rely on the other for their very identity, their validation of existence.
The understanding of the two genders are so tangential that they never intersect. The man spends some portion of his time shunting away the thoughts of failure that the gender has never been willing to face and the woman can't even see it.
I guess another good point is that this all makes one begin to wonder if any intimate relationship ever fails for some other valid reason? I couldn't say. I don't think a valid reason has ever been suggested. You may think that some other condition can be traced as the source of some of the marital problems. I say that we cannot tell until the lack of loving coitus is eliminated. Finances are the usual scapegoat today. That is so specious as to make me laugh. I talk elsewhere about the insane obsessions regarding money.
In general, any and all of the problems of humanity (the ones that humanity causes) are invalid until loving coitus becomes an alternative. Then, we will see.
Love and self-love is part of human life. It is not part of prehuman life. A person should grow into their lives loving themselves and never find it invalidated ever. If they find someone to love, that is spectacular and probably the common case. It may even last a lifetime - for a human.
It is a huge step as men are finally beginning to realize it is virtually none of them that perform loving coitus. The next step, of course, is that they learn that they can. They are human. They think. They can overcomes the witless instincts of an animal. It's not even difficult once a man gets past the fear of failure, exposure, and shame that the animal instilled that continued the stupour of the animal for three millennia. So very ironic.
This post belong as the opening passage of Human, but I've buried it in Bits & Pieces for reasons I will not get into.
The one that really drives me nuts is that I know I portray it all very black and white and I pick apart the guys' responsibility for the mess with more emphasis than I should. Of course, women are messed up also (especially this self-validation thing), but just keep in mind that, if it weren't for men shunning their responsibility so long ago, there would be no such problems. That has been the reason for my ire. The questioning it caused among women is as bad as the more blatant misogyny of men that caused it. Though I am a man, it offends me severely. Every bit of it.
Maybe think of it as the witless state of the animal being exacerbated by the failure of men combined with the knowledge that it damn well makes no sense for men to fail at loving coitus. Somewhere deep inside each man, we've known it for quite awhile.
Th real key, the real beauty of it all is that it will grow to replace the instincts of the animal. Within a generation or two, as the one generation that has learned becomes elders and imprints their success on the next generation, it will become natural for a human. We will finally be human rather than acting out the part. We are lousy actors.