Love, Frankl and Midlife

I continue reading through Viktor Frankl’s fascinating The Doctor and the Soul, and I find it both enlightening and frustrating. Enlightening because I can see things from a different angle, frustrating because just when I think I’m going to get to a real insight about myself, he moves on the next point. I find I wish I could talk to him face-to-face.

Last night I finished the chapter on love, and while most of it was on point, I have a few quibbles.

Frankl distinguishes between sexual desire (i.e., lust), erotic desire (i.e., infatuation) and love. Lust is purely physical, of course. Erotic desire involves the psychological as well as the physical. In other words, erotic desire is the desire to have/be with a person for their personality as well as their looks. Love, on the other hand, is the full, non-possessive appreciation of a whole person. Love can be experienced in a monogamous relationship, or it can be for a relative, etc. Up to this point I agree fully.

What I think Frankl didn’t spell out and should have is that for monogamous, coupling relationships, lust and infatuation are stages one must go through to reach love. I don’t think many, if any, leap ahead directly to love, bypassing lust and erotic desire, to establish monogamous relationships. Love minus sexual and erotic attraction is simply a deep friendship (which is a wonderful thing, by the way), but not the basis for a monogamous coupling.

To be sure, I agree with Frankl that if a relationship gets stuck at the possessive, erotic desire stage, it isn’t love. Furthermore, a relationship stuck at that stage is fragile. If the partners cannot move it to real love, it may not be able to hold up over time and the vicissitudes of life.

Frankl also reiterates that one does not have to experience love to make life meaningful. One can also make life meaningful through action and through one’s attitude toward unavoidable suffering. In fact there comes a point in some people’s lives when love is admittedly no longer possible, and they must make meaning otherwise. He maintains however that if one does not experience love and feels resentment toward life over this, he will hamper the meaning-making in his life. To be able to live without love and yet not be resentful about that is a path toward meaning-making.

And this is what I must learn to do. I freely admit I harbor resentment for not having been able to find/have/create love in my life. All my past relationships never got beyond the infatuation stage. I may have thought I was in love, but I wasn’t. Between coming out late and having warped ideals of love modeled for me while growing up, I was hampered in the pursuit of love. If I could undo my past I would certainly change how I did things.

But now I’m at a stage of life in which I believe opportunities for love are vanishingly scarce at best. Because (IMHO) sexual and erotic desire must precede love, I no longer can fall in love with someone. I do not desire men my age. They are not sexually attractive to me.  If, when I was much younger, I had truly loved someone, and had aged alongside him, that wouldn’t be an issue. We’d have our whole history together to draw upon. But without the initial stages of sexual desire and erotic desire to start off with, love of a monogamous, coupling nature is not going to happen for me. In my life, I’ve moved well beyond the time when this could have happened.

So my current task is to deal with the resentment. I must learn to live with my life (the unavoidable factors I was born into, such as a fundamentalist family, a small town milieu, etc., and the poor choices I made along the way, such as sticking with infatuation relationships when they should’ve been dropped) and move beyond the resentment. I must admit that the resentment runs deep, and is tangled up with my religious upbringing, my regressive childhood social milieu and a host of other factors. It may very well be that letting go of the resentment is a major component of my meaning-making tasks in life. To show to myself that having been born in the time and place I was does not need to make my life hopelessly angered and emotionally crippled.

This Way Now

Monday, I quietly hit the reset button. The descent my life had taken had only been getting worse. I decided I may not have all the answers I crave, but I knew I didn't want to live like that any longer. I want to be clear-headed and curious, not numb and befuddled.

I'm in midlife. Midlife is a second adolescence. All your settled verities come up for review, questioning, and often rejection. You have to relearn who you are (or remake who you are). I'd begun to think of midlife as a problem to be solved. Worse, I'd begun to think I was botching the solution big time. I was flunking midlife (or so I thought).

But like adolescence, midlife is not a problem to be solved. It is a phase of life to live through and learn from. And it cannot be rushed. It can be handled with more or less skill, but I suspect the aptitude for midlife is a learning curve of sorts. So, I'm not trying to pass a test or get through a task quickly in order to get some vague reward. If I had to guess right now, I'd say the passage is the reward. Sort of like Zen Buddhists will tell you that Nirvana is Samsara.

After I hit the pause and reset, I wanted to establish some basic ideas about my life, some values I hold to. I thought about not only what those values were, but also the best way to word them. I'd read that expressing values as commands are counterproductive, because there's always a part of oneself that resents commands. Even if one desperately wants to lose weight, for instance, it's better not to say, "You must diet every day." Also, I'd read that casting affirmative statements in the future tense is also counterproductive, in that it allows the mind to permanently postpone the affirmative action/condition stated. For instance, "I will lose weight and look good," is little more helpful than "You must diet every day."

To that end I arrived at Five Assertions. I assert these things about myself in order to make them manifest in my life right now. I could probably come up with more, but these five cover a pretty good range. Best of all, they avoid negative statements. There is no "I do not do XYZ" in the assertions, even if it is implied that I will refrain from certain harmful behaviors and attitudes.

This is the new direction I'm taking as I navigate my second adolescence.

Five Assertions

1. Music is my boyfriend.
2. My body is the house of my mind, so I keep it clean.
3. I have human freedom, and I practice human responsibility.
4. I read daily.
5. Everyone struggles with life, so I struggle to be patient with them.

New

Every morning, I wake up a new person. I have a new opportunity to do things differently. That’s the best thing about the passage of time. I don’t have to be stuck in the same mode of being if I do not want to.

I do not want to.

I won’t let myself be consumed by regret over the past, but I also do not want the past to be my template for today. I will not let only my mistakes define who I am.

I have the knowledge I need to do better. I will act on that knowledge.

It is time to be someone new.

I Don't Know How to Do This

A couple of days ago I wrote that life is a job, and implied that one of the most basic aspects of that job is to make life have meaning.

I know that the meaning of my life is entirely up to me, for me to create. I've come to see that this isn't some diktat from some being of a higher order making demands of me based on some responsibility contract I was forced to sign by being born, as if I'd coerced my parents into making me, rather than the other way around. No, there's no entity arbitrarily demanding I get to work at meaning-making. Rather this is simply a law of the universe, like the physics of gravity or the dharmic laws of cause and effect. It just is. The responsibility to make meaning out of one's life is like the responsibility to eat if one wants to live. It is simply a fact of the human condition. I'm beholden to no one, but I am vastly beholden to myself.

The problem is that I feel I lack the skill set to create meaning for my life. If someone has been indoctrinated— dare I say brainwashed?— for the first three-fifths of his life, the "formative years", to believing that the meaning for his life comes from an all-powerful entity given to mercurial moodswings and tyrannical rulership, it's hard to take control of life for oneself. In other words, I was taught throughout my childhood, youth and young adulthood, that God had plans, that God had given me my life's meaning, etc. So I not only received no training in meaning-making, I was discouraged from even questioning it. I just don't know how to do this.

I can of course think critically. I can weigh options. I can say, well, I like this, I loathe that, I don't give a shit about the other. But I cannot find the wherewithal within me to feel passionate about anything. The closest I come to passionate is anger over the way I was raised. And even that is mitigated by feeling sorry for my parents, who were so smart and so clueless at the same time. I have no burning desire to accomplish any particular thing; I have no "great work" waiting to be done.

So here I am. I'm freaked out about being old and alone, and completely unable to find a mate. I'm adrift in a life that has no inherent meaning, and feel ill-equipped to create that meaning. I have no real career, no real family and nothing to look forward to except getting older, uglier and more alone.

Bear with me; I'm still trying to figure this out.

Growing Old Alone

I need to do more to be ready for being really old. I haven't done enough to prepare.

When I was really young, I just assumed I would die around 30. I had no rationale for this; I just thought I'd drop dead or be killed. Instead, I came out.

After coming out 20 years ago, I always assumed I would grow old in the company of another man, or in the bosom of a queer group home/homestead. Now I've watched those dreams blow apart like a slow-motion explosion.

I have insufficient plans for growing old by myself. I need to change some things. Soon.

Life Is a Job

I had been dwelling on the difficulty of making life have meaning the other day, when I ran across one short, key sentence in Frankl's The Doctor and the Soul:

Life is a task.

Exactly. Amen. Almost the same words I had been thinking.

I lose patience with people who keep talking about how life is a gift, as if it came wrapped in pretty paper with a cute bow on top, and we open it to find the most awesome playstation/smartphone/lego set/malibu barbie/pony combination imaginable. You insult me when you say life is a gift. Being born a gay child to Christian fundamentalist parents is not a fucking gift. Ever.

Life is not a gift. It's a fucking job.

But it is a job that if you work hard at and keep at it, you can make it somehow meaningful. I believe that you don't have to have been born in fortuitous circumstances to make life have meaning. You don't have to have hit the jackpot of good looks, material comforts, or decent parents. You just have to take whatever you find around you, whatever your circumstances are, and metaphysically macgyver it into something meaningful. And that job is different for every person.