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Over to http://www.mrhopefulromantic.com/

Victor Frankl

“Again and again I therefore admonish my students in Europe and America: Don’t aim at success — the more you aim at it and make it a target, the more you are going to miss it. For success, like happiness, cannot be pursued; it must ensue, and it only does so as the unintended side effect of one’s personal dedication to a cause greater than oneself or as the by-product of one’s surrender to a person other than oneself. Happiness must happen, and the same holds for success: you have to let it happen by not caring about it. I want you to listen to what your conscience commands you to do and go on to carry it out to the best of your knowledge. Then you will live to see that in the long-run — in the long-run, I say! — success will follow you precisely because you had forgotten to think about it.”

The same holds true for love.

On classes of men

There is a crisis of male leadership today. Men do not lead, at least not in terms of virtue. Fatherhood has vanished in society and culture, and virtuous, strong male role models are lacking in mainstream media.

Nonetheless, women are still attracted to strong men. No one wants to marry a weakling. Women want men who know what they want and aren’t afraid to go out and fight for it. They want men they can rely on, men who will be there for them.

We can distill women’s essential preferences into: A. strong, and B. solid.

Many men are strong but not solid — they know what they want, but can’t be relied upon because their fundamental worldview is selfish. The classic player falls neatly into this category.

On the other hand, many men are solid but not strong — they are reliable, but are too timid to reach for what they want. They will orbit a women for months, even years, but never have the confidence to boldly make a move. The classic friend-zoned guy falls neatly into this category: he likes the girl, but God help him if he’ll ever let her know.

Finally, there is a small subset of men who are both strong and solid. Few, if any men, are born this way. Usually the men who are both  strong and solid started out leaning more one way than the other — they were solid and learned to be strong, or (less likely) they were strong and learned to be solid.

A note on a critical necessity which it is easy to overlook

This isn’t math.

It’s easy to get caught up in reading, analyzing, thinking, re-reading, over-analyzing, over-thinking and completely miss the point of what all this is about.

This is love, ladies and gentlemen. Love.

Love isn’t embodied in mathematical calculations, in matrices of compatibility, in formulae of fancy. Love is.

Find the right person and it’ll work out. It won’t work out how you think it’ll work out, it won’t work out how you plan it’ll work out, but y’know what? It’ll work out better.

But there’s the key: find the right person. With the right person you can accomplish great things. As long as your heart is the right place, you really can’t go wrong with the right person (and because she’s the right person, her heart’s in the right place too).

All these guidelines, advisements, stratagems? Dust and wind. The right person makes them beside the point. Not because they’re not true. They are. But because they’re not necessary to think about. They happen. Both of you have grown sufficiently in virtue that the practice of virtue has become something that happens without having to think about it. Virtue has become refined, form, perfection.

A chess player doesn’t think about his moves. He looks at the board. His brain, activating a massively parallel associative network, races to compare similar board positions that he’s already seen, in practice and in games. He recognizes the board, like he recognizes the face of an old friend. This isn’t something he has to think about. In fact, thinking about exactly what he’s doing is probably going to mess him up.

A baseball player doesn’t think about his swing. The pitcher throws. The ball flies in. The batter swings — not based on careful reasoned analysis of the trajectory and physics that he’s seeing but based on rapidly acquired visual information that is once again processed through a massively parallel associative network that enables him to make a reactive decision in milliseconds. Thinking about exactly what he’s doing will almost certainly mess him up.

So too with love. Cultivate virtue. Imbibe it. Breathe it. Become it.

And when the time comes? Live it, live it with confidence and security, firm in a foundation of love, without fear, without analysis, with a smile and without a care in the world.

And how do you find the right person? Well, frankly, you don’t. You find each other, without agency vesting in either of you. It happens. It isn’t something within his or within her control. At the right time, in the right place, it’ll happen. Your task is to be the best person you can be so that at that right time, at that right place, you’ll be ready.

All those old happily married couples who give the world’s most unhelpful answer? They’re right. You just know. You’ll know it when you see it. There won’t be any need for math or matrices, no time for formulae or compatibility charts. It’ll be like recognizing an old friend, an old friend you never met before but have always known.

Merry Christmas.

The world’s most unhelpful answer

I’ve asked a lot of married couples how they determined that they were right for each other.

Invariably, they all give variants of the same answer: “We just knew.”

If I follow up by asking, “Well, how did you just know?” they dodge by saying that “You’ll know it when you see it” or “We can’t explain, you have to experience it.”

Now, it’s possible there’s selection bias — I’ve only asked couples who are still married and haven’t done a comparative study of couples that divorced or any sort of longitudinal analysis or in fact, anything resembling any scientific experimental process at all. Nonetheless, everyone’s answer is the same: “We just knew.”

This is immensely unhelpful to a single man trying to figure out who to marry. Will I too receive this ineffable insight at the appropriate moment, and then, smiling, dispense the same tried and true advice to anyone who will ask me about how I knew?

But perhaps there’s a kernel of truth here — if you’re not sure and have to analyze whether you should marry someone, you probably shouldn’t. Marriage, being the unpredictable adventure that it is, is not something to be entered into lightly, or haphazardly, let alone hesitantly. If you’re not sure, better get damn well sure or don’t get married. The world is littered with divorces borne from marriages that folks hoped would “just work themselves out,” as if merely getting married would mysteriously resolve everything without anyone having to exert any effort.

Of course, there’s folly on the flip side as well. People still fall madly in “love” (infatuation), see no flaws whatsoever in their partner, get married in this state, then wake up a few months later and go “Who are you and what did you do with the person I carefully imagined you to be?” As is often the case, virtue lies between two vices. You have to be sure, but it has to be a resolute surety, one tried and tested, not one borne out of romantic headiness.

A week ago I attended a talk on marriage, and the speaker, a happily married husband of seven years, said that he’d advise couples to wait until the luster wore off. As he phrased it, “Marry not when you can’t live without the person, but instead marry when you realize you can live without the person.” It may be unromantic, he continued, but it will help you see clearly. He proposed two years as the approximate amount of time for the initial love-blindness to wear off before proposing.

Marry when you can live without the person? What’s his point? I think he’s arguing that marriage is ultimately the union of two human beings, and two human beings are necessarily independent creatures. There’re going to be some integration adventures, so to speak, as two lives meld into one. If you can see clearly before you get married, you’re going in with eyes wide open. You know what you’re getting into. Not perfectly, of course, but enough so that your entire worldview and mental imagery won’t shatter into a million pieces at the first hint of imperfection in your spouse. Don’t think your future spouse is imperfect? Look in the mirror.

That still leaves us with that most unhelpful answer: “You’ll just know.” Love is both emotion (a powerful one at that) and decision (you have to choose to love). But perhaps there is something to it — a fundamental resonance, some sort of understanding between persons that transcends expression, some way of fitting together that is beyond the mere physical, a distinct fit with each other that isn’t vulnerable to reductionism.

I think ultimately this resonance, this “you’ll just know” is not a heady emotion — not one driven by infatuation — but rather a quiet one, a secure, calm, peaceful Yes, this is it. Here is she whom I have long sought. I see her as she is and as she is meant to be. I see her faults, her failings, her imperfections, and I love her as she is. I see her aspirations, her dreams, her desires, and I love her as she is meant to be. I accept the task before me, I choose to love, and through that love, to bring out the best in her, to help her soar as she is meant to soar, even as she, through her love, brings out the best in me, and helps me soar as I am meant to soar. Two persons with one heart, rising together in the road of virtue, driven forward by the inexorable patient press of a joyful, peaceful love.

Why bother getting married?

Why bother getting married?

What’s the point? Don’t more than half of all marriages end in divorce? Why struggle, if it’s more likely than than not that you’re going to fail?

What’s marriage for anyway?

Marriage is the union of two hearts, united in mutual self gift of each other. True love, the only love worth bothering about in the first place, is best characterized as a gift of oneself, giving out of oneself to another. It is sacrifice. It is self-denial. True love puts not my interests first but those of my beloved, properly subjecting everything else below that.

True love is distinguished from the experience of falling in love, an ephemeral rush of emotion and neurotransmitters that can quickly fade away into infatuation, whereupon a man and a woman wake up, as if from a dream, confused as to who this other person is beside them. Infatuation shapes the other in the my mind, according to my desires and preferences. True love sees the other as she is, according to her graces and faults.

You cannot love that which you do not know, and you cannot know that which you do not see as it actually is.

True love is also distinguished from the experience of lust, another rush of emotion and neurotransmitters that burns brightly before fading once its mark — its object — is conquered. Lust burns with a passionate desire for self-satisfaction, for satiation of a personal hunger irrespective of the desires or needs of the other. Indeed, lust does not care about the other save that the other provide the means to the end that lust seeks — its own pleasure and temporary satisfaction. True love also burns with passion for the beloved, but this passion is kindled by the other’s virtue. True love seeks the good of the other, even at the expense of itself.

You cannot love that which you do not desire good for, and you cannot desire good for that which you only seek to use. Use is the opposite of love.

Mutual use does not love make.

Marriage is the institution which enshrines in society the unique phenomenon of true love. It is here, within these bounds, that true love gains the security it needs to love in this self-giving way, shielded from heartbreak by bonds stronger than passing fancy or whim. Until death do us part. In sickness and in health. In good times. And in bad.

This is what marriage is. It is vanishing in our culture, rapidly becoming a cultural artifact, a curiosity from a by-gone era, of an age where men and women meant what they said and where their word was their bond. Where mutual self-sacrifice for the good of the other formed the cornerstone of society, not mutual pursuit of maximal self-satisfaction.

It was never perfect, this institution of marriage, because we are not perfect. But it is an institution built to forge virtue, it is a school of life. Marriage does not take perfect men and women and have them live together in halcyon happiness. It takes flawed men and women and, through suffering and sacrifice, trains them in virtue through the arduous task of sharing a life together. Perfection does not result, for that is not our lot in this life, but across years and decades, men and women grow in virtue and in wisdom, becoming better and better images of the men and women they were meant to be.

Sex enters into marriage as the primary expression of what marriage is. It is the ultimate bodily expression of love, imaging the notion of mutual self-gift in its very form. In sex, a man literally gives of himself to a woman and she receives him, in turn giving of herself to him, with him receiving her. Each holds the other’s heart, in all the beauty of its vulnerability. Their bodies are joined, into one body, through a physical closeness closer than close. The unique interplay of the sexes is illustrated in sex, as the complementarity of man and woman shines forth as the two become one. This love sometimes burns so strongly that a new love is born out of the love of two, and a new person begins his or her life out of love of the two.

Sex, in its truest form, is the physical expression of the mutual self-gift that is at the heart of marriage. It puts into concrete form what otherwise would be abstract. It takes what exists in the realm of emotions and puts it into the realm of the physical. Sex in its essence encapsulates the whole of the union at the heart of marriage in a visible, concrete form. It is an image, an icon, a living testimony to that which otherwise would be invisible — the mutual self-gift, the mutual gift of self, that the man makes to his wife and that the woman makes to her husband.

This is what sex is. This is what marriage is, in its purest, ideal form.

As for what modern society practices? That is a zombie, a corpse shambling along, going through the motions of living, but heartless. Rotting and ultimately dead. It parrots the motions without any of the meaning, mocking that which it imitates. You see this in the hook-up culture, where the proper order of actions is turned on its head. Instead of love growing into marriage and sex, lust falls into a hook-up and sex. The act itself becomes corrupt, not so much a good lay as a bad lie. The body goes through the motions of saying “I am yours entirely, as long as I shall live,” but the mind betrays this, saying instead “I am not yours, instead I take from you that which I want, as I want, with no concern for you or your good.”

And true love and authentic marriage? It is still possible, even today. It is difficult, yes. Perhaps even more difficult that it has ever been. But difficult tasks are often those most worth doing, and marriage is a high call which raises the man and the woman who attempt it, forging virtue in the furnace of true love.

What to do while trying to find her

Is random chance my last, best hope for finding the girl of my dreams?

It doesn’t matter.

I can’t control random chance. If I can’t control it, I shouldn’t worry about it.

Here’s why:

When looking at an engineering process, the first step is to separate  inputs into two classes: controllable and uncontrollable. Obviously, I cannot control when I meet a woman of my dreams. There is, sadly (or gladly?), no button that I can press that will immediately generate an encounter with her whom I have long sought. But, I can increase the probability of a meeting taking place by increasing my social spheres and frequency of social interactions. This isn’t as a direct a control, but it is something that is doable.

Yet it can be overdone. If I rearrange my social schedule and go to all sorts of places all the time, desperate to find a good woman, well… the desperation inherent in those actions will translate directly, through body language and the way I carry myself, and serve to frustrate my interests. I’ll come across as desperate because I’m going to every single social sphere I can find, and that desperation will send a strong “No” signal to any of the women whom I might be interested in. As it should.

So what’s to be done? Well, the other end of the spectrum: sit in my apartment and do nothing, hoping against hope that somehow a good woman will appear is also obviously non-practical. It’s exceedingly improbable that I’ll meet the woman of my dreams through actively doing nothing. I mean, I can conceive of completely fairytale ways that it might happen — my apartment catches fire because the downstairs neighbor failed at making microwave popcorn; the woman of my dreams also happens to work as a firefighter… but yeah, not gonna happen.

As usual, there’s a happy medium between two extremes. Increase spheres of social interaction, but not too much, nor too little, but rather just right. The Goldilocks Principle, if you will. If I go out to a certain number of social spheres, especially ones that authentically interest me — not out of a misguided sense of “trying to meet someone” but rather “I find this authentically interesting and will be happy I attended even if I do not meet anyone” — then I increase the probability of meeting the right person. And because so much of a relationship hinges upon being able to share an understanding of each other’s passions — that is, being able to explain what I think is really cool and why I think it’s really cool — then going to places I’m already interested in provides common ground and an all-important conversation starting point.

But, Mr. Hopeful Romantic, I already do all these things! And they’re not working! I go to all these social spheres that I’m genuinely interested in. I broaden my horizons and go to ones that might be interesting. I don’t over do it. But I haven’t met anyone.

I hear you, Reader. I’m there too. I am executing the successful strategy but not meeting with success. Does this mean the strategy is not successful? No. It is just something that is going to take time. Given my dating preference matrix — dating for the purposes of finding a woman I want to marry for life, to start a wholesome family with and to have a long, happy marriage based on mutual respect and a deep, authentic, true love — well, there are not many women who are looking for that guy, sad to say. The world has changed, my time machine has arrived and put me in 2011 and lo and behold the moral landscape of the cultural milieu is not what it once was. Sure, people used to do everything they do now, but the culture was not oriented toward holding up hook-ups and sex with no strings attached as the default preference set. Now it is. Deal with it.

Given that what I’m seeking is increasingly rare in our culture — a lifelong, happy marriage — it makes sense that it is going to take some time of executing the successful strategy to find it. Nonetheless, there is no other viable alternative. No other way presents itself to attain the goal that I seek. There is no shortcut to the successful outcome, no way to short circuit the long, trying time that may stretch into years.

But this time can and should be used to better myself. To focus on improving myself and making myself more into the man I’d like to be, which also incidentally will make me more attractive to the woman I’d like to find in the first place. I am sure she will not protest that I took the time to get into shape, to start eating right, to read for personal edification, to grow deeper in faith, to pay off college loans, to achieve financial stability. No. In fact, given her dating preference matrix, it may be that I wouldn’t have stood a chance with her on that happy day when we do meet unless I had done these things. God knows.

Patience is difficult. It does suck when executing a strategy brings no results. I can chart progress in most other spheres of life pretty easily — if I work out, I can see that I can bench press more and more weight every month, making a pretty upwards sloping graph that makes every engineer smile. Here the graph is a flat line, the function’s output is binary. Have I met her? No. Next month: No. Month after that: No. While this is true, it is a depressing output function to look at.

Instead I posit a better one: Have I become a better man this month? Answer that as yes every month and the probability of the other output function flipping to Yes increases. It isn’t a magic button, but it’s all we’ve got. There’s nothing else that I — human being, mortal creature — can do. Patience.

Hope, however, cannot die in my heart. I cannot become cynical, cannot look at the world with a bland morose pity, saying silently “I trusted in you and was disappointed, I will never trust again.” It sounds sappy as anything, but every day the sun rises. Every day is a new day, with new possibilities. Most of those days will not bring about the possibility I’m hoping for. That is alright. That possibility is a rare one, a rich jewel, a gemstone blazing bright as the sun. One day it will dawn. And then this patience, this diligent self-improvement, this hopeful romance will have been well worth it. And then the real adventure, the dance of two hearts, will begin. And that’ll make all this waiting and hoping look easy.

How do you find the girl of your dreams?

Lately, I’ve been reading a lot of blog posts on the subject of love, especially love in the modern world, in an attempt to understand my own difficulties in discovering love, love that fuels the fire that burns for decades within an old-fashioned for-life marriage of the till-death-do-us-part variety. Love to the depths of time, or perhaps love that never existed in the first place (at least on any grand scale, but at least it existed as a collective aspiration).

A theme emerges:

The modern dating scene is basically stacked against your typical clean-cut, honorable young gentlemen seeking to establish himself as a responsible provider, hopeful to be a good husband and father.

Girls just aren’t into that, and the culture is such that even for those girls who are into that — they do their damnest to hide that fact.

Instead witness a parade of princesses cavorting with an endless array of alpha males, who abuse, use, and dispose of these ladies with reckless abandon and nary a care in the world. This is the hook-up culture, where love has been banished and sex is simply a glorified form of mutual masturbation without any emotional connection (indeed, emotional connection is to be steadfastly avoided).

Turn then, if you will, to the alternatives to this modern scene, for those of us who wish to save that treasured gift of ourselves for our spouses upon our wedding night cannot fathom this culture and certainly cannot play by its rules. So we rebel.

But this rebellion is a lonely one, for we, the few good men who strive and struggle, stand virtually alone. We are not players, for our objective is not to play the Game at all — we don’t want to bed them, we want to wed them. And that is a completely different game altogether, and whatever lessons the predominant Game teaches us translate at best awkwardly, if at all.

I don’t want to have to neg a girl — gently insult her, that is — to gain her attention or to have her engage in approval-seeking behaviors. But if I do, I notice it works. But it does not go where I want to go — negging might help me bed her, but that’s not the goal, that’s the not the point — negging won’t help me wed her.

What then do I, and men such as me, have to do? How do we navigate this tangled cultural milieu and attain our goal of building lifelong, romantic, loving marriages that blossom into full-fledged families built upon love and trust?

I have read a lot of books on how to accomplish this once you’re married. I have a decent amount of confidence that, working with my spouse, we could together create a lifelong, romantic, loving marriage, a full-fledged family, and a home built upon love and trust. There are ample resources out there to serve as guides and advice. I am under no illusions that it would be easy, but I know it is a difficult task worth doing and worth doing well.

I have read a lot of books on how to grow and develop a relationship once you’re dating someone. How to grow in virtue together, how to discover the ever-complex infinite mystery of each other. Once again, I am confident of success and aware of the labor necessary.

But how does one find this person to date? How does one find a person of like-minded morality who desires that which I desire — to date with the purpose of discovering whether or not marriage-as-envisioned could potentially exist between us?

That is the question I struggle with, and that is the one where I can find few books to read, and none in terms of offering concrete practical advice of what it is I can do, apart from patiently (oh so patiently) wait and hope, all while keeping my eyes open.

I’m an engineer by training. I don’t like doing nothing. But my efforts in doing something, mostly via online dating, have proved not only fruitless but frustrating. There are few endeavors more soul-wrenching that trawling through thousands upon thousands of profiles, looking to find one that resonates. And then the deadly silence as messages sent go unanswered and ignored. And the disappointment as those that do receive answers peter out into little more an exchange of pleasantries, ending without spark, without a verve, without a fire. Ending with nothing, except that I can cross another name off the list. Just some billion to go.

The algorithmic complexity of the brute force solution, as it were, thus appears untenable. I cannot review every single dating profile on every single website out there. And even if I did, what guarantee do I have the woman I am seeking is even on a dating site?

And what is the point of a dating site? To fruitlessly send message after message and meet with widespread ignorance and a few half-hearted replies, coupled with a set of unsolicited messages from women you’d never want to date in the first place but for some reason seem intensely, passionately interested in you. But those to whom you aspire? Silence.

A dating site is basically an exercise in demolishing one’s ego and sense of self-worth (and given subscription costs on some sites, not just the sense of self-worth). If it worked, it might be worth it, but that’s a huge If, an If that cannot be verified or guaranteed.

So where to? How do we solve this problem? How does Mr. Hopeful Romantic meet the future Mrs. Hopeful Romantic? Random chance? Sure, it worked for the evolution of Life, but I don’t have a billion years.

Random chance, however, appears to be the only hope. That somewhere, in one of my social outings, I will run across a woman with whom I am charmed and who is charmed with me, and the two of us will hit it off and never look back. But what if this does not occur? How does one find such a woman if random chance isn’t cutting it?