From the original article on July 6, 2007. Author: Chateau Heartiste.
No one goes on vacation thinking of the long ride home.
What is unique about love is that it alone among all the human desires defines by its absence the utterly meaningless life. With love, the poor person can feel rich as if the struggles of his survival were minor inconveniences. With love, the old person forgets his age. With love, the young person sheds his angst. A man can amass a kingdom’s fortune and an emperor’s power but without love his worldly successes stand like hollow totems to unhappiness. What good is anything if it doesn’t ultimately reach a conclusion in love? The wealthy businessman who spends all his hours in his office and wastes his years whistling past the grave being too busy for love is a loser no less than the unloved degenerate street bum. Sushi tastes better than a 20 dollar bill.
The mischievous thing about love is that as vital as it is to a fulfilling stint in consciousness, it mocks its own importance with reminders that it rests precariously on a foundation of some very banal preconditions. People fall out of love and it is rarely for lofty reasons. A man loves a woman until she gains 50 pounds. A woman loves a man until he loses his job and goes unemployed for months on end. And when that pretty face turns ashen and carved with the years will it really be love anymore? Those crass attraction buttons still have to be pressed for love to appear and then to sustain itself. Self-delusion about the dirty business behind love is not only required, it’s inevitable. Why ruin the fun by obsessing over the dull ride home?
A lot of seducers mistakenly think that love is a garnish to the main course of pursuing and winning the hearts of women. They compartmentalize — it’s a bonus to feel love, but damned if they’ll let that get in the way of the good times. The worst thing to happen to a guy who gets ass regularly is not rejection (after all, rejection is the badge of honor worn by womanizers) but falling in one-sided love. Or, similarly, falling in love only to have his woman dump him. Getting dumped is part of the game, and can be expertly handled, especially if there are fallback options. But the alpha who succumbs to the folly of love opens himself up so completely that state control is no longer his prerogative. He risks everything, including his most cherished asset… his trust.
This is the wrong way of approaching relationships. It’s fine to be calculating about the pick up, and the dating, and even the relationship management, but attempting to corral as thermonuclear an emotion as love is only going to light the fuse on the bomb. I’ve seen many players sabotage their relationships with really great girls who had captured their hearts because they feared losing control under the chaos of being in love. They put all this effort into bedding her and making her fall for them that they lost sight of the main objective. A man can be all alpha but if he doesn’t cash it in for the ultimate prize he’s revealed the beta at his core.
I once lost a girl I loved. The rush of pain was so intense even a fight club pummeling couldn’t have distracted me from it. But I didn’t stoically shrug it off. I threw glasses at the wall. I broke things. I smashed up my apartment.
If you aren’t smashing stuff after losing a lover you don’t know the pleasure of relinquishing everything for love.
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