Good blog, I do wonder for younger people like myself out of school, and not raised in a religious household, where you find a place to consistently build a relationship with consistent encounters to truly meet. I find this to be a big reason why the online dating is as prominent as it is, versus a particular philosophy of preferring it.
In it I mention that I used to go to a cafe every single day (in fact I had no coffee making setup at all at home), as a way to force myself to be more social. This is how I met my wife, ultiamtely.
I feel for you my friend, my son is struggling to form bonds and find places of crossover and connection, I feel and I may be wrong, what they’re trying to say is get out there, push yourself into uncomfortable situations If you can, reach out to others and communicate, even as I’m writing this I know it’s easier said than done, sometimes I suffer the same, but tonight I’m going to a gig on my own & then dancing later till the early hours with no expectation but to connect and have fun, secretly I hope for a special connection but who knows, the more I go out, the more the lottery wheel of life will spin!
thanks for sharing this, it’s beautifully written. I’ve realized this lesson the older I get and the more experiences that my husband and I have navigating family life. Love and happiness is created by us, it comes from us, we must be deliberate and intentional on creating it for ourselves.
I’ll echo Casey and David’s sentiments: you make love happen. For 26 years, my wife and I treated our love as if we didn’t need to work at it and, to no one’s surprise, it withered and dried up. And then, one dark and dreary night nine years ago, we both recognized that we needed to work at it before our marriage failed. On that night, we pledged to work our butts off to learn how to love each other better and, to our great surprise and delight, it worked. The last 9 years have been the best of our marriage and we’ll soon celebrate 35 years together knowing that working at love is the best thing you can do. Wow, that came off schmaltzy! But I liked this piece Simon.
I think this comes down to our culture conceiving of love as a noun instead a verb. If it is static feeling then it is much harder tomorrow find than if it is a dynamic act that one engages in.
The traditional Christian view of love is that it is verb—willing and doing the good for another. When approached in this way, one can encounter love everyday by manifesting it in the world.
You do not find love. You make love. The only search is for a focus of one's desire, and the numbers game is in having more positive interactions than negative ones.
"Some people wait on a crucial step, the madness of love, to arrive as something that happens to them, or even for them. They do not consider that it is a deliberate choice. Possibly this is poor art priming people. Or possibly it is our defensive nature — it is difficult to deliberately nurture an intense devotion, if reciprocity is so uncertain. So a layer of inertia grows."
For whatever reason, the timing of this article in my personal life is spot on. I've been thinking about that which happens to us and that which we cause to happen. Love, like wellness, is active. It requires doing, being, working hard, and achieving. But for women like me, the former 90s Disney-princess girls, love was something that just happened, as fairytale-like as a magic pumpkin carriage or a fairy god parent. We were trained to wait for love to come to us, trained to want to be swept off our feet by some Prince Charming. We weren't taught to go after love, to work for it.
Now, us elder-millennials are realizing we were sold a series of beautiful lies and are working ever harder to repair the damage caused by turning "love" into a noun rather than acknowleging it for the verb it is.
Good blog, I do wonder for younger people like myself out of school, and not raised in a religious household, where you find a place to consistently build a relationship with consistent encounters to truly meet. I find this to be a big reason why the online dating is as prominent as it is, versus a particular philosophy of preferring it.
You might like: https://map.simonsarris.com/p/familiarity-and-belonging
In it I mention that I used to go to a cafe every single day (in fact I had no coffee making setup at all at home), as a way to force myself to be more social. This is how I met my wife, ultiamtely.
I feel for you my friend, my son is struggling to form bonds and find places of crossover and connection, I feel and I may be wrong, what they’re trying to say is get out there, push yourself into uncomfortable situations If you can, reach out to others and communicate, even as I’m writing this I know it’s easier said than done, sometimes I suffer the same, but tonight I’m going to a gig on my own & then dancing later till the early hours with no expectation but to connect and have fun, secretly I hope for a special connection but who knows, the more I go out, the more the lottery wheel of life will spin!
Matt 54, twice divorced 🙏
thanks for sharing this, it’s beautifully written. I’ve realized this lesson the older I get and the more experiences that my husband and I have navigating family life. Love and happiness is created by us, it comes from us, we must be deliberate and intentional on creating it for ourselves.
I’ll echo Casey and David’s sentiments: you make love happen. For 26 years, my wife and I treated our love as if we didn’t need to work at it and, to no one’s surprise, it withered and dried up. And then, one dark and dreary night nine years ago, we both recognized that we needed to work at it before our marriage failed. On that night, we pledged to work our butts off to learn how to love each other better and, to our great surprise and delight, it worked. The last 9 years have been the best of our marriage and we’ll soon celebrate 35 years together knowing that working at love is the best thing you can do. Wow, that came off schmaltzy! But I liked this piece Simon.
I think this comes down to our culture conceiving of love as a noun instead a verb. If it is static feeling then it is much harder tomorrow find than if it is a dynamic act that one engages in.
The traditional Christian view of love is that it is verb—willing and doing the good for another. When approached in this way, one can encounter love everyday by manifesting it in the world.
You do not find love. You make love. The only search is for a focus of one's desire, and the numbers game is in having more positive interactions than negative ones.
Beautiful and true
"Some people wait on a crucial step, the madness of love, to arrive as something that happens to them, or even for them. They do not consider that it is a deliberate choice. Possibly this is poor art priming people. Or possibly it is our defensive nature — it is difficult to deliberately nurture an intense devotion, if reciprocity is so uncertain. So a layer of inertia grows."
For whatever reason, the timing of this article in my personal life is spot on. I've been thinking about that which happens to us and that which we cause to happen. Love, like wellness, is active. It requires doing, being, working hard, and achieving. But for women like me, the former 90s Disney-princess girls, love was something that just happened, as fairytale-like as a magic pumpkin carriage or a fairy god parent. We were trained to wait for love to come to us, trained to want to be swept off our feet by some Prince Charming. We weren't taught to go after love, to work for it.
Now, us elder-millennials are realizing we were sold a series of beautiful lies and are working ever harder to repair the damage caused by turning "love" into a noun rather than acknowleging it for the verb it is.