The
basic facts you have to understand about the situation are these:
(1) Other people think of you in terms of the roles that they
assume you are playing or want you
to play in their adventures. (2) You think of other people in
terms of the roles that you assume they are playing
or want them to play in your adventures. (3) Both
parties are almost always wrong to some degree, and sometimes
to an enormous degree — and the things that they want are
generally not the things that you want, either.
Let
me give you an example.
My
sophomore year in college, I found a girl I was very attracted
to, and she seemed to be attracted to me. There were absolutely
no problems in our relationship as far as I could see. We were
very comfortable together, had wonderful conversations, and thoroughly
enjoyed each other's company. For the first time in my life, I
was virtually certain that I had found the woman that I was going
to marry. So after a month or two of dating regularly, I asked
her to go steady.
Her
"No" absolutely startled me. There was no explanation,
just a complete lack of interest.
I
couldn't see any point in pursuing the relationship, so I turned
my attention in other directions immediately. But the puzzlement
stayed with me until the last half of my senior year. That semester,
I was in the habit of studying in a vacant classroom several days
a week between two of my classes. I was unaware that anyone else
knew about my temporary habit, but one day this girl that I hadn't
had a conversation with for two and a half years came into the
room in a very purposeful way and began a conversation.
The
gist of it was very simple on the surface. She said that she wanted
to get engaged to another guy in our class. She said that she
would accept a ring, if he offered it. She seemed to be asking
me to help her in some way that I couldn't fathom because I just
barely knew the person she was talking about. I figured she had
made a mistake, so I explained to her that I had never so much
as had a conversation with him. She simply ignored that information
and went on to tell me that his big attraction for her was that
he was going to medical school and that the problem was that he
didn't seem to be at all interested in marrying her. Indeed, she
went on to make it abundantly clear that the focus of her interest
in him was the fact that he intended to go to medical school.
That was what she was looking for in marriage (she
did eventually marry a doctor).
The
only way for our last conversation to make sense is to assume
that she wanted me to know exactly what she was after, just in
case I had professional ambitions. She was unattached and about
to graduate. We had been very much attracted to each other at
one time. At that point, she must have been investigating even
remote possibilities for her marriage adventure. But after our
conversation, there were no circumstances short of being marooned
on a desert island with her that I would have resumed our relationship.
What I later came to think of as the organizing adventure
of her life was nothing like mine.
|
The
organizing adventure of your life is the adventure
that consistently takes priority when you have hard choices
to make.
It
establishes the point of view and the roles in terms of
which you first tend to think about other
people unless you are consciously pursuing another adventure
at the time.
|
In
terms of our different adventures, what was going on is fairly
clear.
In
her mind, the marriage adventure was strictly an adjunct to her
social prestige adventure or her economic adventure. I can't be
exactly sure, of course, whether the economic or social advantages
of being married to a doctor were uppermost in her thinking. She
might not even have been sure herself. Neither can I be sure how
her love adventure fit into her scheme of things, but our last
conversation certainly suggested to me that love was not a major
consideration in her life. Or she just assumed that love would
happen automatically with marriage — which isn't the way
it is.
What
was going on with me was entirely different. I had decided at
a very early age that the main thing I wanted out of life was
a love adventure. I wanted to find myself one woman to live with
intimately and to make the center of my life. That was my
organizing adventure. It started at about the age of ten.
I couldn't put it in this way at that age, but I had the idea
and I consciously thought through what it implied: That I had
to find a way to earn a decent living and that I had to find the
right woman.
So,
at the age of twelve, I started dating, in spite of some serious
obstacles. Around the age of thirteen I took up magic and juggling
because I thought I just might figure out how to make a living
that way early in life. By the time I was sixteen, I could see
that wasn't going to pan out, so I decided to try writing for
a living. My thinking was that I had four years of college to
get through before I would have a degree (for degree
read job credentials), but I just might be able
to become self-supporting with my writing before that and be able
to support a wife and family with my writing. That didn't work
out either, but I found the right woman for me at just about the
same time that I got my degree, and we got married just about
as soon as I found a job.
If
you think about what I've said, you will understand a number of
important things about me.
That
last observation is a key point: All of those adventures (and
a good many others) are potentially separate adventures. You can
weave all of your adventures into a pattern that is a cohesive,
satisfying work of art, or you can go haphazardly through life,
living each adventure as you come to it without putting any real
work into making a pattern that truly suits your needs. Or anything
in between. But in the end,
|
The
quality of your life is strongly dependent on how well you
make the basic adventures in your life mesh into a single
pattern that expresses what you want to be.
And
that takes work. It takes a lifetime of work.
Anywhere
along the line, if you take your eye off the ball, it will
probably curve and hit you in a tender spot.
|
And
there is one more point: I made a major mistake in my love adventure
from the very beginning and essentially kept on making it until
my senior year in college. I assumed that all the other people
I knew were aiming to get pretty much the same things out of life
that I was after and would go about it in pretty much the same
way.
That
assumption was absolutely wrong, and that failure led to a lot
of frustration. It's just a fact that people choose different
organizing adventures for their lives and define their adventures
in different terms.
| If
you're trying to fit someone into one of your adventures —
and especially into the organizing adventure of your
life — you're just wasting your time unless you
make sure that that person is thinking about you in pretty
much the same terms of the same kind of adventure
and that the other person is very willing to work with you
in weaving his or her other adventures into some reasonably
convergent joint pattern. |
When
things aren't done this way, all of the people involved are headed
for a lot of personal stress, frustration, difficulties, and maybe
outright misery — unless things just fall into place by pure
chance, which does seem to happen on rare occasions.
From
my personal experience, I can highly recommend the love adventure
as the organizing adventure of life.
|
When
the love adventure is the organizing adventure of your life
and you have found someone to live it with, from that point
on, your main goals in life are to make your spouse feel
like the most loved person in the world and to make the
total experience of living as good as possible for this
one special person.
You
measure your success in life by how close you come to achieving
these goals. Everything else is secondary.
|
Living
this way can greatly simplify your life. At least, it has been
like that for me. The way I have lived my love adventure has meant
that my sex adventure and my marriage adventure have also involved
only two people. I am absolutely certain that this arrangement
has kept my life as uncluttered with problems and complications
as it could be (I really, really hate problems and complications,
especially when I know that if I had been just a little bit smarter,
I could have avoided them).
Theoretically,
I have nothing against extramarital sex. Indeed, avoiding it has
been downright bothersome at times. But there's just no way around
the fact that extramarital sex is the greatest source of complications
in life, even if you do not make the love adventure your organizing
adventure. (If you don't immediately see the enormous benefits
of aiming for the kind of simplicity that comes from strictly
combining your love, marriage, and sex adventures into one package,
I suggest that you consider the problems you hear about from time
to time that extramarital sex can cause, even for the rich and
famous.)
It's
just a practical fact of life that the fewer people involved in
your organizing adventure, the more control you have over the
quality of your life and the greater your chances of keeping the
quality high.
And
making the other adventures in your life that inevitably involve
a lot more than two people less important to you also makes the
inevitable frustrations in dealing with so many other people less
significant to you. It also seems to make dealing with these other
people less difficult.
For
me, this "defusing" effect on my more complicated adventures
has always been a significant bonus from consciously making the
love adventure the organizing adventure of my life.
I
hope you're beginning to get the picture.fontp
So
let's take a few more examples of how things can go wrong for
people.
One
case I remember in particular involved a couple I knew in
college. A bunch of guys I usually ate my meals with in the dining
room (family style, boys only) were discussing their plans for
after graduation. When the seniors had had their turn, one of
the juniors was asked whether he planned to marry the girl he
was pinned to. "No," he said. "I'm just pinned
to her for the sex. I plan to dump her before I graduate and marry
one of the socialite types at Indiana, where I plan to go to dental
school."
Now,
I did not inquire into the matter, but I am fairly certain that
his pin-mate's conception of the adventure he was involved in
with her was not the adventure that she thought it was. This was
in 1956, and I am reasonably certain that she thought that she
was doing more than playing a role in a sex adventure. In her
mind, she was headed towards marriage and raising children with
him. She may even have been in love or thought that she was.
Of
course, I have no firm information about what was going on in
her mind. Indeed, she may have been entirely focused on the social
prestige adventure. In short, for all I know, she may have been
interested in marrying a dentist in exactly the way that the girl
I was so mistaken about was interested in marrying a doctor. But
whatever the case, there is no way that they were involved in
the same kind of adventure.
But
there is an additional important point here: Sometimes, people
are intentionally deceptive about the adventure they are pursuing
and how you actually fit into it. That's a possibility that you
just have to learn to sense in order to protect yourself from
damage and disaster. And it is very difficult to learn to sense
such things because most of us are naturally trusting and because
most of us want to believe that anyone who seems to fit so nicely
into our adventure just has to be thinking about us in the same
terms.
And
that is frequently just not always the way it is.
Another
case: I had an acquaintance who was married for the first
time about a decade after I graduated from college. I was puzzled
by his long delay. He was very attractive and artistically talented
with decent mental equipment, prime social skills, and a good
deal of personal charm. He liked women and knew some very attractive
ones, but did not have anything resembling a serious relationship
with any of them. He had dropped out of college after a couple
of years, but I was still puzzled by his choice of a career. He
took work in a bank in a time and place where bank work was a
very low-pay occupation. With everything he had going for him,
he could have done a lot better economically. But he had worked
his way up in the trust department of a locally important bank,
and was very careful of his reputation. (His sex life, for example,
was strictly limited to two weeks a year when he vacationed in
a distant state.)
The
whole pattern finally made sense to me when he announced, after
an extremely short courtship, that he was marrying a very wealthy
young woman he had met in the course of his work in the trust
department.
I
could be mistaken, but my best guess is that he had intended from
an early age to marry an heiress and that the life pattern he
had put together was, at its core, a conscious combination of
marriage, economic interest, and social prestige adventures. I
never really found out how his love adventure fit into the pattern.
He died too soon after his marriage for me to tell.
Another
case: One marriage I know about involved an academic. The
organizing adventure of his life was the pursuit of academic success,
and he did very well. His wife enjoyed his success, but having
and raising children was also a very important adventure for her,
and her husband's work simply didn't leave him time to be the
kind of father that she expected him to be. His conception of
the role of a father was pretty much limited to doing his share
of the work in conception and bringing in the money to support
his wife and children.
The
woman was disappointed with her husband's lack of personal involvement
in raising the children. She felt that they needed a strong relationship
to their father and needed for him to spend time with them. But
she was an extremely capable woman and made the adjustments that
she had to make (if not always with extreme grace). But the point
is that, in the end, they managed to love and respect each other
and to carry out their combined adventures very well, all things
considered.
For
practical, personal purposes, all organizing adventures fall into
two major categories: (1) Those carried out with a purely egocentric
focus and (2) those that are tempered by a real concern for the
welfare of other people.
It is extremely important for you to learn to make this distinction
in the real world and to sort out the degree of self-interest
in the people you deal with.
The
four cases you can link to below may help you learn what you need
to know.
In
reading these four cases, you probably noticed that firmer conclusions
about the organizing adventures of their lives can be drawn for
the fictional figures.
Not only is this what you would expect: This outcome should also
tell you that:
| It
is easier to learn the adventure concepts in this material
by thinking about fictional characters than by starting off
with personal observations or biographies of real life figures. |
It
is also a good learning strategy to write out your analyses, whether
it's for an actual assignment or not.
There
are a number of frustrating factors built into the human condition
that very much complicate the problem of sorting out your adventures
in life:
(1)
Even when two people are trying to be open and honest with each
other in matching up their adventures to make a life together,
it's just a fact that:
| People
often don't know what their priorities are until
events force them to make choices. |
It
is the choices people make when the chips are down tell them exactly
what their priorities are and what their organizing adventure
in life really is. People often believe that they would make one
choice under certain circumstances, but actually make a completely
different choice when those circumstances arrive. This may even
be the normal case.
(2)
It is also just a fact of life that:
| People
grow and change over time, and the way they conceive of themselves
and of their adventures will change as this growth occurs. |
When two people are in the process of matching up their lives,
it may be best to try to match up individual growth
potentials, as well as adventures. It is especially helpful to
make sure, as well as they can, that they are "bent"
in the same direction — as in the saying, "As the twig
is bent, so grows the tree."
(3)
It sometimes happens that events unfold in such a way that an
individual is forced by circumstances into a survival mode, and
just staying alive becomes the organizing adventure of life for
a certain time. These are rare events, the kind of episodes that
inspire books and movies. But they do occur.
(4)
It also happens on rare occasions that pure chance will offer
someone an opportunity to pursue an adventure that the individual
had never thought of as a real possibility before. Such an event
may change the course of life for the person or people involved,
or it may leave things relatively unchanged.
And
now one last case: My own, revisited.
I
knew from about the age of ten what the organizing adventure of
my life was going to be. It was going to be a love adventure,
even though at that early age and for some time afterwards, I
could not have described it that way.
What
I knew at the beginning was that I wanted a girl to sleep with
and to live with. I wanted to get to know a girl intimately, and
I wanted a permanent arrangement. I had a problem to solve, and
when I got it solved, I wanted it to stay solved.
I
actually spent about a decade consciously looking for the right
person. I had no idea what kind of woman I wanted to spend my
life with, and I had to do a lot of looking. I dated a lot of
women, and I have come to believe that items 1 and 2 in the box
just above were what made the process so difficult. Not that I
even came close to understanding the problem in those terms at
that point in my life. I was just going on feelings and intuition.
I
did, however, finally find a woman that I felt completely comfortable
with, and it feels as if I have been living in some kind of magical,
enchanted mode ever since. Psychological time absolutely disappeared
almost as soon as we decided to get married. We've been married
for forty-eight years now, and psychologically, we're still on
our honeymoon.
As
I mentioned earlier, I highly recommend the love adventure as
the organizing adventure of life. And I can even tell you a lot
about how to do it right.
|
The
key to having a spectacular love adventure is for both parties
to understand and consistently go against the grain of their
egocentric drives, perceptions, and behavior towards each
other.
Both
parties have to work at the problem continuously. It is
strictly a no-time-off proposition.
|
We
are all born with an egocentric perspective built into our little
psyches. It tells us that we are the center of our
own universe. Everything exists to satisfy our needs, and if that
doesn't happen immediately, we wail until somebody fixes the problem
or distracts us with a goodie.
As
we grow older, we learn that this isn't really the way things
are, of course. The universe doesn't really exist just to meet
our wants and needs. We find that the attitude we adopted in the
crib doesn't work anymore. We first learn to cope with our new
situation, not by abandoning our egocentric perspective, but by
masking it from the other people in our lives and finding subtle
ways to get them to meet our wants and needs, anyway.
If
we are unfortunate enough (as many of us are) to be able to make
this strategy work until we reach maturity, we aren't really fit
to participate in a loving relationship with anyone. The reason
is simple: We have nothing to bring to the relationship. All we
want to do is get something out of it, and love doesn't work that
way.
What
you have to do to create a loving relationship is undeniably difficult.
But it is also very simple and straightforward:
| What
is required is for both people to consistently, systematically,
consciously look for ways to sacrifice their egocentric impulses
to benefit each other — and make the sacrifices pretty
much without letting them feel like sacrifices. |
For
example: If you hear a crash in the kitchen, you know that
you spouse has just made a mistake. It may be a minor disaster,
but it is very annoying for the person who did it. So, what do
you do? You get there immediately and clean up the mess. You absolutely
do not bitch about what happened. You do not
shake your head in a condescending way, as if you could never
have done such a thing yourself. You do not frown
and mutter. Nothing of the sort comes from you in thought, word,
deed, or gesture.
For
example: If your spouse has health problems and you can provide
any sort of relief, you provide it. There is no such thing as
being too busy or too tired to do it. It is never too late at
night. The book you are reading is never too interesting for you
to put it aside. There is nothing you have to do instead. You
just do what your spouse needs for you to do. You make your spouse
absolutely know that nothing is more important to you than doing
everything you can to alleviate his or her health problems.
For
example: Is there something you know that your spouse particularly
enjoys? If so, you see to it that your spouse gets it, if there
is any practical way for you to do it. And if it's a personal
service that you can provide (my wife is passionate about getting
her back and hair stroked a certain way), you do it regularly
on request and without request.
For
example: You see a chore that has to be done. You know that
if you don't do it, your spouse has to do it. Of course, you probably
have the chores divided up between you, but you make an effort
to do more than your share, and you sometimes just do a chore
that your spouse was expecting to do.
Of
course, the above examples are not exhaustive, but they should
make clear the kind of intelligent sensitivity and commitment
that are required.
| And
it is important to emphasize that both parties
have to be absolutely committed to sacrificing their egocentricities.
|
If only one party makes the commitment and only one party makes
the sacrifices, the whole situation is completely different: It
is called exploitation, a kind of foot-to-doormat
relationship. And that is definitely not a love adventure.
| And
the one most important thing that you do not
do is hurt your spouse physically, verbally, or psychologically.
Or in any other way, if there is any other way. |
The
big details here are:
When
you do the kinds of things in the examples, you are sacrificing
your own egocentric drives. That's the first
key, because one
of the big rules in life is that
| You
only get what you sacrifice for, you seldom get all
of it, and you get to keep what you do get only as long
as you keep sacrificing for it. |
The
second key is that you can't regard these sacrifices
as sacrifices: You have to think of them as gifts. |
Do you remember a time when you were very, very young perhaps
when, for no good logical reason at all, you just wanted to give
something to someone you felt a strong attraction for?
I
hope you can dredge up the memory because that's the attitude
you need to make a permanent part of your mental
makeup now. The sacrifices have to actually be gifts in your mind
and value system, willing gifts, gifts that it would
cause you pain (or at least discomfort) not to make.
|
These
"sacrifices" are quite literally the most valuable
gifts that you will ever give anyone. No other kind
of gift really matters in this relationship.
Making
these gifts is actually a form of communication. You
are trying to "speak" to the deepest level of
your spouse's mental makeup, and making gifts in the form
of sacrificing your own egocentric drives or reflexes is
the only way to communicate the message that
you have to give your spouse on the level that you need
to reach.
If
you are unwilling or unable to make this pattern of behavior
a permanent part of your life and mental makeup, you can
forget about having a meaningful, first-class love adventure.
It's
that important.
|
What
I have outlined here is essentially a strategy for two people
to use in evoking a response from each other. It is a response
that is built into all of us, although it can certainly be repressed.
I call it the love response.
|
For
me, love is the relationship that
two people create between them by consciously living together
in a mutual love response mode. When two people do evoke
this response from each other, the bonding that takes place
seems to me to be the strongest human bond that there is.
Once
you have this experience, you will not be able to think
of anything else as love, either.
|
There
is one major point left to be made about sacrifices:
| Consistently
making sacrifices to make any adventure work is the way that
you invest that adventure with meaning in your life. |
If
you choose an organizing adventure for your life and make the
sacrifices to invest it with meaning; and if that adventure turns
out in the end to be essentially trivial in your own scheme of
values, then all you have accomplished is to trivialize your own
life.
Some
of the conclusions that you should draw from all of this are fairly
obvious:
|
(1)
Be very careful about the choice you make of an organizing
adventure for your life.
(2)
Be very careful and very clear with yourself
about the level of meaning that you invest any
adventure with.
And
(3) if your adventure involves other people, be as thoughtful
and as careful as you can in choosing them.
|
In
particular, if you want to make the love adventure as the organizing
adventure of your life and choose a partner who is on another
track entirely or not willing to make the sacrifices required,
it can be devastating for you when things don't turn out the way
that you need for them to turn out.
|
Caveats
I
hope it is not news to you that you are not going to be
perfect in putting the cap on your egocentricities, and
neither will your spouse. In fact, neither of you will even
do your absolute best here, and both of you have to accept
that.
But
both of you still need to work as hard as you can at the
project.
You
have to use your commonsense in interpreting the recipe
I have just given you. Things are not as absolutely absolute
as the language I have used along the way technically means.
Living is always a matter of good sense and balance.
You
will also have to consciously and regularly manage your
mind: For example, you may have to remind yourself that
what you are doing is "just the policy" now. Or
that your spouse has so much "credit" in his or
her "account" with you that in practical terms
it's just inexhaustible (as indeed it will be not too far
into the program, if both of you are doing it right).
In
short, you have to do whatever works.
Most
importantly, there is nothing so simple (and this recipe
is very simple) that it is foolproof. I am reasonably certain
that there are people in the world who will manage to believe
that they have done exactly as I have prescribed here and
will still create a personal disaster. It is just a fact
of life (of my life, anyway) that there are people around
whose fate it is to screw up almost everything they do.
I
hope you are not one of them.
|
My
personal experience strongly suggests that if you do manage to
make sacrificing your egocentricities a way of life in your love
adventure and create a mutual love response in each other, you
will have the most extraordinarily satisfying relationship that
it is possible for two people to get out of life. Of course, my
experience is based on making the love adventure the organizing
adventure of my life, and that may be a necessary element
in the way things have gone for me. I have to admit, too, that
I don't know any other people about whom I can definitely say
that they have consciously made their love adventure the organizing
adventure of their lives in anything like the way that my wife
and I have, so I don't have anything like a solid statistical
sample to offer you.
Essentially,
all I can give you is my own personal experience and a very high
level of conscious analysis of that experience.
But
the whole thing has worked so well for me and my wife that it
is difficult for me to see how anyone could fail to give the system
a try.
|
I
have used the term "spouse" in explaining things
here because my love adventure has been strictly a marital
affair. But I don't really know that being married is an
absolute requirement for a first-class love adventure.
I
suspect that parents and children (after the children reach
a certain age) can consciously bond together in a love response
mode, too, and that this experience may be the most important
contribution that parents can make in raising their children
. But I have no personal experience in these terms. My parents
both died before I consciously understood what love was.
I
doubt that couples have to be of opposite sexes to live
together and bond together in a love response mode, but
I have had no experience in this mode, either.
And
it may be that even larger groups could consciously practice
the discipline suggested here to bond together in the same
manner. I can't help but wonder if such a thing is possible
and, if so, what it would be like. But I have never been
part of such an experiment.
I
have also assumed in this write-up that you are not currently
involved in serious marital problems. If you are, then you
need to focus on finding strategies to make some repairs,
if you think that repairing the damage is still a possibility.
One
Web site that might help you is Smart
Marriages®. The Directory
there may also be useful to you.
|
There
are a couple of matters I need to mention in closing.
I
could tell you my life story as a love adventure, and you would
see me in one particular way. But I have had one other major adventure
that I could also use to tell you the story of my life from a
completely different point of view, and you would see me as an
entirely different person.
The
story of my life as a love adventure is not available at this
point (I am working on it). But I have written up the story of
a large part of my life in terms of my other adventure, and it
is available as an ebook from Lulu.
In terms of adventures as they have been discussed here, the story
does illustrate a few of the general ideas you have met here,
and you might enjoy it from that point of view.
That
other adventure is linked to my love adventure in several ways,
but one linkage is probably more important than the others: The
story tells how I came to undertake the project of working out
a new worldview and how I actually went about the work. Because
of the insights that came with my new worldview, my wife and I
have always been able to make a very decent living and still have
plenty of time to make our love adventure work and to enjoy the
results together.
| I
am not at all sure that our love adventure would have been
so successful without the economic benefits from my worldview
project to smooth the way for us in life. Those benefits may
have been a necessary element in the whole mix for us, along
with having the good sense to keep our lives in a certain
balance. |
The
ebook at Lulu
is essentially a fairly short story about how I came to develop
a new worldview, but this new worldview itself is the major subject
of this Web site, and you can find out a lot about that new worldview
by clicking on the SapiensWay™ link
below.
There
is also a third adventure and a third story that would make me
seem entirely different from the first two versions. It is the
story of the work I have done in my life to earn a living. It
is a much less interesting story than the other two, but it does
bring us to one last point:
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We
are in the habit of classifying people by the way they earn
a living, as if that had to be the organizing
adventure of their lives. For many people this may be the
way it is, but it is probably not true even for the majority
of us.
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My
other two adventures (my love adventure and the adventure of working
out the meaning of life to my own satisfaction) were a lot more
important to me than anything I have done to earn money. Taken
together, they would present what I would think of as a fair and
fairly complete picture of my life. The way I have earned a living
hardly enters that picture, except for contribution of the economic
benefits -- which I am sure was no small contribution in practical
terms to the success of my other adventures.