Dating Out of Your League

Love is a Bloodsport

There is a heated social assumption nestled deep in the modern collective unconscious, and it blisters our minds and mythologies with the illusion of entitlement. Idealized romantic love is a central beam in this delusional structure, with all its social agendas and moral hypocrisies. At the core of all human relationships is the straining heat of chemical passion; greed, lust, longing and savage desire. Love is the stuff of sex and sex is a product of nature Herself. So often the modern new age movement prefers to see Mommy Nature as a beneficent being, all chubby and delightful, just waiting to grant us a life full of love and peace at the end of our toils. But honest observers of the drama will have to concede that Tennyson was far more accurate in his description of Her as “Nature red in tooth in claw.” Love is ritual, love is fetish. And love is not kind. Nor is it fair.

Still, the primary goal of the modern age seems to be to twist every natural drive and force, to subdue nature in a futile attempt to define and edify Man’s place in a very chaotic universe. In that attempt, love has become a stagnant pool. We struggle to catch and conquer the objects of our affection. Men are the pursuers and that natural role endows them with a wide spectrum of expressions and deceptions all meant to aid them in their quest to seduce the loveliest of lovelies. Whatever his method or means, the imperative is that he convince a female to accept his advances for sexual consummation in the advancement of his genetic agenda.

In most of the animal kingdom, females do not pursue. It’s a lady’s choice out there and they choose the brightest and best they can find. It’s a system founded on the aristocratic principal of beauty, charm and prowess. Nobody is granted love on the basis of kindness or gentleness or for having read the latest book on “manifesting.” We remain creatures of nature and the hard, cold fact is that all people are not created equal in the bedroom. Just as in other species, not everyone can mate with the most beautiful or the very best.

However, being human and steeped as we are in that stagnant pool of illusion, there are two ways we go about misinterpreting and misapplying the natural, erotic forces of our attractions to the beautiful. In one way, we attempt to secure an object of desire that is very far out of our “league” by disregarding all the natural laws of pursuit and capture. We level the playing field with social enticements. In other words, we look at our accomplishments (wealth, position, education ect) and decide that they can be brought into the mating arena as equivalents of physical beauty. And indeed, such enticements often do succeed in seduction, at least temporarily.

The second, far grander maladjustment comes in when people decide that not only can they mate with the object of their desire, but own that person as well. Our natural drive to mate is a blinding, ravenous force, urging us to claim someone; to hunt and possess them… For a season. For the purpose of genetic expansion. But our culture has distorted this biological drive, and now we’re obsessed with possessing people. Forever. But beauty rebels against containment. Pleasure and passion in their truest forms are meant to fade and elude us always. People struggle to hold and own that lovelier, younger person as confirmation of their own worth, forgetting that the conquest itself was the coup de grace. Our obsession to justify our own existence in the ownership of beauty, in the enslavement of another, degrades the primal lust and natural passion that empowered us to their pursuit in the first place. We prefer to forget our own temporal condition, and in doing that we lose our humanity and our dignity. The quest to attain and acquire is our lot. But if we expand ourselves enough to acknowledge nature’s sublime cruelty we can also come to know the sweet, fleeting splendor of bliss as well.