Love and Freedom

There is no happiness without freedom. I know this absolutely. In order to be happy and fulfilled, people need the room to find themselves, pursue their dreams, and be exactly what they want to be.

There is no happiness without love. It is in our natures as social beings to care for others and to want to be cared for in return. Infants deprived of human contact die in their cribs. Prisoners in isolation units lose their sanity. And it is the dream of many to find someone to share their lives with.

Love and freedom often come into conflict. It can be domineering parents wanting their children to fulfill the dreams the parents could not. It could be the controlling spouse who manipulates to get what he or she wants. Or it could be someone like me with his laundry list of requirements that a woman has to meet.

The love between friends is without this conflict. Our friends accept us for who we are. They don't tell us what to do. And friendships can continue indefinitely until one asks the other for money and doesn't repay it. But that is another topic.

The love between family members is tense. That is because family members believe they own you in some way and have some say in the way you live your life. But I learned to get along with my brother by not giving him constant advice. Advice is merely a clever way to run someone else's life disguised as being helpful.

Then, there is the love between lovers. This is the most tense of all. Acrimony and matrimony seem to go hand in hand. I know the reason why this is the way it is. When two people love each other, they also believe that they own each other. They take certain liberties with that assumption. They can be controlling. They can be demanding. And this begins to break down the love.

I have come to accept a radical notion. There is no love without freedom. Time and time again, I have run across people in relationships that have broken down over freedom issues. I will go so far as to say all relationships end for this reason. One party wishes to do something the other party does not agree with and vice versa. It could be something mild like spending money a certain way, or it could be something serious like adultery.

The reason our friendships last is because of freedom. The reason relationships do not last is the lack of freedom. This is the reason why a cohabitating couple can be together for ten years with no problem, but they get a divorce a year after they tie the knot. The relationship changes as freedom is taken away.

A couple of solutions have been offered to try and overcome this conundrum:

COMPROMISE
Both sides give up freedom for the sake of the other. You hope it is 50/50. It never is, and the tension begins.

COMPATIBILITY
Both sides want the same things, so there is no need to compromise freedom. This is simply bullshit. It is damn near impossible to find two people that are so alike that they never disagree on anything. The marriage of Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward has been long lasting in a world where marriages have the shelf life of bananas. But they disagree all the time. Then you have seemingly perfect couples like Bruce Willis and Demi Moore who go splitsville but still enjoy being around each other.

I don't think compromise or compatibility are the answers. Neither one serves as a solution.

I believe that freedom is the answer. Of course, both parties have to agree that freedom is the answer. Beyond that, I don't see why any two people couldn't get along in a relationship. In fact, this is how all relationships start. Both enjoy the other and can do so for as short as one night or for years and even decades.

I am not advocating open relationships or open marriage or any of that bullshit. The fact that Hugh Hefner with his three girlfriends has ended up settling on Holly Madison shows that there is a monogamous streak in all of us. I can already predict the other two will fade into oblivion for Hef.

We can judge Hef, but we all do the same thing. It is called dating, and we do it until we settle on the one we like the best. Even polygamists have their favorite ones. They end up carrying the rest out of obligation. The rest of us do the same thing. It is called the ex-wife or the ex-husband.

So, how does this freedom thing work?

Basically, you let the other person be who they are, do what they do, etc. My relationships never last longer than six months, and that is because it is usually at that point where I start having to decide where things are going to go from there. So, I tally up what I consider to be my reasonable demands, see if they measure up, tell them to shape up if they don't measure up, then dump them when they refuse to do my bidding. In the one relationship where I got dumped, I was the one who refused to go along with her demands. Plus, I had issued a few of my own.

Generally, I have no problems with my relationships until this point. In fact, I can guess that the breakdown of any relationship began with a demand. When freedom is replaced with control, love dies. It will happen everytime.

I am generally tolerant of demanding women. You might find this ironic given my libertarian and individualist streaks. But this is what makes me so tolerant. It is always a choice for me to do what they tell me, so I always end up loving it. I just adore bitchy women. They never control me though they try. I obey out of choice and go the extra mile for them to show I do it out of choice. But even if I refuse, that has never been a dealbreaker.

The dealbreaker always comes when I ask them to change. The animosity comes when I try to give them advice. In short, no woman likes to be told what to do. They may get used to it and become doormats in the process. But they end up miserable. The life drains from their souls. This is not love.

My most recent ex told me that I had "killed it" for us. I thought she was totally wrong. I realize now that she was totally right. I had killed it. I made a demand, and that loss of freedom destroyed the love she had for me. I ripped it from her heart and pounded it flat into the concrete.

In a relationship, I am a benign dictator. But a dictator is a dictator. We can justify anything for the greater good, and most dictators do. In a relationship, we can justify anything for the sake of the relationship. But a relationship is an abstraction. There are only the people involved, and they are all that matters. My relationships end precisely when I start working on the relationship.

I'm never going to tell another woman what to do ever again. I will love them as they are without demand. They are free to do what they want and live as they please. As long as it doesn't hurt me, I don't care. And if it does hurt me, I will end it. But I can honestly say that this only applied to one of my previous relationships. Out of all the women I have been involved with, only one ended up doing real damage to me. I've made all the rest pay for it.

That is where I stand on that issue. If I ever find myself in another relationship, it will be totally different. I can guarantee that. My freedom is intact and will always remain so. I'm just ending my career as the benign dictator.

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