Stronger

I've finally figured out what it is that I need in a mate.

I need someone stronger.

If there is one quality that I have been most disappointed in among adults in my all-too-short adulthood it is how weak so many people are. How little courage they have. How weak their consciences. How much more concerned they are with how people perceive them than with an honest assessment of how they really are.

I count myself, squarely, in every single one of those categories. I am weak and have given into weaknesses more than I can and often would like to remember. We all have.

What I'm looking for and what I find all too rare is someone and people, generally, who can be more honest about that fact. The fact that all of us are weak, give into weakness, and have given into weakness far too many times to count. I work with kids enough, at this point, to know that people who argue that they do not or have not given into any myriad of weaknesses are lying, to me and to themselves. If we all would remember being kids and young people we can remember giving into to all kinds of weaknesses. All of us. I don't care how pious or sanctimonious we may be.

And it is learning from those experiences, not avoiding them altogether, which helps us learn the lessons and makes us stronger.

Acknowledging this does not mean that we should glorify or rationalize our sinning and our weaknesses or pretend like they are less hurtful or more healthy than they really are. And being aware of the consequences of our sinning and weaknesses and fucking up does not mean that we should at all get all self-righteous and sanctimonious about our foolishness. It just means that we should learn the lessons. And the most important lesson is giving ourselves the freedom to fuck up, to learn our lessons and, as much as possible, avoid screwing up when we get clear about its consequences, and forgiving ourselves and one another when we do.

It sounds simple enough, doesn't it? And yet that is perhaps the most important and most common mistake, sin, weakness, what-have-you that we all engage in. That we neither give ourselves nor one another enough freedom to screw up and that we fruitlessly and counterproductively believe that if we withhold forgiveness that we have somehow found some kind of control over the behavior of those whom we cannot ever control no matter what we might ever want to believe otherwise.

Liberal societies are stronger because they've figured all of this out, better, than more traditional and repressive societies. Liberal values are stronger values because they carry this wisdom and understanding about humanity inside of them, and the knowledge that such understanding cannot be either given without responsibility and internalization for such values nor can they be imbued within people against their will.

Liberal values have come to terms with the now and forever immutability of free will, for better and for worse, and the need for free will to animate conscience and for conscience to animate our thinking, expressing, and behaving.

The strongest liberal values embrace that freedom wholeheartedly without living in fear of being burned, because they have accepted that being burned is a part of life and a part of living and living those values. Weaker people with more illiberal values will always rationalize cynicism about this strength and exploit it for vulnerability, they will always take advantage of its more thoughtful, less reactive, and less aggressive values.

And that is what makes liberal people and liberal values so strong. That they can take the hit. And know that it is better than striking out when doing so only exacerbates the problem.

Liberal people sometimes, often, do give into the weakness of aggression when it is counterproductive. I'm watching a whole culture do it, right now. But when they do, they do what they do best.

They learn their lessons. And that is what makes liberal peoples and liberal values so strong.

Liberal values are sustaining because they are both the wisest lessons learned, and the capacity for learning the deepest, most profound, most serious lessons along the way. Liberal values are stronger because they are animated by wisdom more than by muscle or force. They don't eschew force altogether, because judgment, in the moment and over a lifetime, is more inviolable in a liberal democracy and among liberal peoples than any other value. Consciences more than rules are the heart of a liberal culture. Rules and laws are a means of organizing those consciences for practical purposes of giving authority to a way of thinking about an issue. But what is far more inviolable than such authority in liberal cultures is the freedom of conscience and to question, doubt, and challenge such authority, especially when it centers itself around force rather than wisdom, might rather than right, and violates higher matters of conscience.

When a political leader or party or ideology or a people centers themselves around might rather than right, as is the case in America, at least, today, and much of the liberal democratic world, sadly, it is sign of the bankruptcy of that thinking of the ideas that animate those people or ideologies. It is a sign that they have begun to think of themselves as right rather than as participants in a debate and discussion about right. It is, by definition, self-righteous.

It is also the basis for the most serious sin of power: pride. The most serious sin likely in the history of humanity, in terms of its overwhelmingly tragic consequences, is pride and self-righteousness amongst those who would aspire to power or affiliate themselves with those who might. Why do Stalin, Hitler, Mao, Mussolini, Castro, Hussein, Kim Jong Il, Robert Mugabe, and their ilk all maintain their right and means of power despite the clear evil they perpetrate? At a personal level, what animates this kind of stubborn pursuit of evil ends? Do they believe themselves evil? Do they believe they must do battle with good people?

No. I don't think so. I'm fairly clear at this point that, in all likelihood, they have all very much thought of themselves a good people doing what undoubtedly they believe to be some of what they likely believed to be great good in their lifetimes. They believe themselves to be right and, often, the final arbiters of right. Not likely in their deepest, truest hearts. They likely had truer consciences creeping deep below their insanely self-righteous surfaces. But their weakness, their pride, their self-righteous pursuit and maintanence of power was likely very much sustained by a belief that what they were or are doing serves a much better purpose than their detractors give them credit for.

They are wrong, of course. They are evil sons-a-bitches, every single one of them. But they believe themselves to be better.

Don't we all believe ourselves to be better than we really are when we are not doing good or being better than we know we need to be? Of course we do. Every single one of us. It's only once we've learned the lesson that we know what dicks we can be and have been.

To be stronger is not to never be weak. Such an existence does not exist, has never existed, never will exist. We are all weak. We, meaning people, will always be weak. There will never be a dawn when weakness will somehow disappear from our individual or commonly led lives.

To be stronger is to accept our weakness, and ourselves for our weakness. That's not just moralizing or pie-in-the-sky bullshit. That's a practical lesson of life that you can take to the bank. And if you don't believe it, try living another life, and get a taste of what weakness rationalized as sanctimony or bullying or infallibility or any of its many guises looks like. If you have any sense at all - and any desire to live a decent and happy life - you will learn the lesson, hopefully sooner rather than later. Though I have to admit that I have had some fuck-ups in my life that have taken an enormously long period of time for me to own up for.

And that is life. Some people choose so many self-fulfilling prophecies of failure to learn this lesson - this lesson of forgiveness and giving ourselves and one another the freedom and the space to fuck up and learn the lesson. And, admittedly, if your lesson is to stop being a murderous, terrorist motherfucker, you will definitely have to be contained, and killed if necessary, if you can't get the lesson straight. I believe, sincerely and with all my heart, in the power of redemption from our mistakes and sins and fuck-ups in life. And I am not naive in the least to believe that everyone who claims to have taken responsibility for their mistakes have in fact done so. I've given enough empty apologies in my life to know that "I'm sorry," doesn't always mean that I am really sorry or that I will not fuck up again. Nor do I live in a world of cyncism that either assumes that people will burn me with an apology nor that the history of humanity is a story of falling more than picking ourselves up. Picking ourselves up is the rule rather than the exception. And the single most important quality that undermines our and others' capacity to pick themselves up when they have screwed up is their inability to forgive themselves, genuinely, and our inability to forgive them when they cannot or even when they can, that leads people, myself included, to fuck up far longer than I knew I should. Having a mistake held over my head has led me to fuck up more times than once, and has never led me to take responsibility more quickly. Ever.

What I need in a mate is not someone who is looking forward to a life of baseness and ludeness with a lying, no-good two-timer (though I have to admit that the baseness and lewdness has a certain appeal:).

Cheating, by the way, just so happens to be one sin I've never committed, largely because someone I loved very much told me just how much it would hurt if I ever did. I believed her then and now.

What I need in a mate is someone who is stronger than all of this and able and willing to embrace and love people, the world, and me, even for all of its baser and lewder and less noble qualities. I need someone who loves people, genuinely and unconditionally, not just when they behave the way she wants them to behave.

I need someone with the courage to love people. And herself. And me.

I had someone like that for awhile. I hope that's who she still is. I don't get to talk with her much, these days, which is a sign to me of someone rationalizing more weakness than I want in my own life. I don't want the woman I love to give up all of her friendships or old relationships to make me feel secure. That is not and never has been real security. That is weakness and insecurity afraid of its own shadow.

I want someone who is strong enough to love the world with her heart wide open, even when it means heartbreak and pain and tragedy in a world that loves its weaknesses, too often, more than it loves itself and people who rationalize and hide their weaknesses more than they embrace or love themselves or one another.

I want someone who loves herself and me and everyone, more, for who they are, and not just who they wish them to be. I fall short on that one a lot. I sure as hell wish the world was a lot better than it really is. But it's not. And I love all these silly little bastards, anyway. I love them the more I deal with them, is the truth. I just get more infuriated with them, sometimes.

I want someone who loves me and who I can count on in a social situation or who has wisdom to offer or something for me to learn from or can and wants to constructively challenge me, to learn something I don't know, to see how I'm wrong when I don't see it, to be a better man. And I want someone who can love me for who I am, in the meantime.

Once you've had that even just once in your life, there really is no substitute.

I want that sort of love, for real. I want a sustained and sustainable version where that love is taken seriously and not taken for granted and with someone who knows that it is more important than anything else that life has to offer.

And I want to spend many, many loving, romantic, fun, down-to-earth, exciting and not-so-exciting, thoughtful, relaxing, politically incorrect, vulgar, offensive, stupid days, nights, and everything in between and otherwise be head-over-heels in love and everything that comes with it - for better and for worse, for richer and for poorer, in sickness and in health, till death do us part.

Really, I just want to have a nice life. And love someone as much as they and I deserve.

And I want to be loved by someone who loves me as much as I love her, and people, in general. I want to be loved by someone whom it hurts like hell to lose because that's just how remarkably special that person is.

I want to be loved by someone who I can look to as strong and as much a rock in my life as I am in hers. I want her to be someone who knows that that strength doesn't come from muscle or money or power or any of these trifling things. That it comes from heart and mind, love and conscience, and being as decent and humble a human being that she or I or anyone we might know or come in contact with knows how to be.

I want someone who is stronger. For real. Not all that posing bullshit. I want someone who makes me stronger in her presence and who I am deeply proud to call my friend and partner and, one day, wife and whom my kids call mom. I want someone who is the kind of mom that my kids are proud of both because of what a good mom and woman she is and, as with me, despite her flaws, not pretending that she nor I nor anyone doesn't have them. I want my kids to kick the living shit out of my legacy, is the truth. And the legacy of their mom. And all of our legacies. I don't want them to be like me. I want them to be better than me. And I want a woman in my life who understands that and who wants to raise kids who learn from her and my failures and mistakes and who teach her and me how to be better people, not reinforce all of our flaws.

I better get work done before I have to head for home, here, in a moment.

I just wanted to think, for a moment, about having someone stronger in my life, and to help me be stronger still.

Love,
Ben