On life, love, sex, and the (vain) pursuit of happiness

Am I living a good life? How do we measure how well a person is living? What measuring stick holds truest? When I’m on my death bed, will I be able to say that I lived well without suspecting secret disagreement from loved ones around me? Will my brothers and sisters agree? Will I imagine a smirk on my cousin’s face? Will I believe my friends’ pats on my shoulder? Will my partner break down and cry?

Fools may agree that a better measure of quality of life is not monetary or professional but that it’s about happiness. I may have a trillion dollars in my account and still be a miserable Scrooge. On the other hand, I could be a penniless struggling actor and be the envy of the world for the life I am living: the friends I have, the love I share, and the unfussy unadulterated happiness I experience every day in my life. Still I don’t think I am alone in wanting financial and professional success. It’s when I start sacrificing my happiness to get to that success that the alarm sounds. That’s when I would start having less life, if that makes any sense. I would lose sight of what’s important and slowly empty my life of joy and love. Life is about living with joy and love.

But what is this thing we call love?

Love can very well be the most sung subject in the world. The word ‘love’ may be the most frequently used word in the history of film, music, and religious discourse. If you don’t ‘have’ it you are likely to feel insecure, deprived, ostracized, and unhappy. If you do have it, you’re supposed to not feel insecure, deprived, jealous, and unhappy. But mostly we are not sure if we have it, and we feel insecure, deprived, jealous, and unhappy.

Is love over-rated? Have we been placing a little too much emphasis on it?

My earliest recollections of love are like fuzzy dinosaurs. They feel big but little is left of them besides the sweet feelings, which are still with me today, hanging around, like memories, like the corners of my mind. So sweet and tasty are those feelings that -I realize now- they are still the yardsticks against which I compare my feelings today. More than that, I think that they are affecting the way I deal with people I’m attracted to. I’m sort of still there on some level. What I feel must measure up to them or else it’s not strong or real enough.

My love life started at my pre-teens. At that time, I always imagined myself in love. Whether this love had an actual object was beside the point. The feeling was there anyway. I was moving from one person to another in my head, editing and perfecting the image and along the way using different personas to suit my mercuric moods and dispositions. Sometimes the person was real, but often it was a figment of my imagination. At times it would be a crush over a star or total infatuation with a song or a book and its singer or author. But most of the time it was an imaginary person. I’m not sure if I was actively cultivating those feelings or whether they were there by default and I was just basking in them.

As a teenager I went through several crushes, one after another, only abandoning one for the stronger force of another. Another way to end the crush was by some sort of consummation, which did not happen frequently I might add. Later, in my early twenties I moved to another realm, adding a physical element but losing something along the way. Love, now in the form of relationships, was not based on crushes but on needs and emotions. I found myself dragged into and through relationships for more reasons than I can assume. Love became a quest for satisfaction. I think I developed a need to be with someone. The need was about personal satisfaction as much as it was about a social need to be like everyone else. I think a lot of people are in relationships because they need a partner -be it for social reasons or sexual fulfillment. So many people are in love with love as opposed to in love with a partner. I understood much later that I had to discern my feelings. I learned to take a step back and look at them. At one point I decided I was never going to fall or be dragged into relationships, that I was going to only accept what I thought were real emotions. I wanted to be satisfied and I looked for satisfying relationships. That was a whole other issue.

With time and experience I rearranged the way I understood satisfaction. I found that small measures of satisfaction were a sure way to go forward in life. They are the toes in the water, the taste buds on the tip of the tongue, our defense against full-blown catastrophes. I divided my satisfaction target into smaller progressive units. I started to enjoy my life more. My relationships became more stable.

Needless to say, before I figured out this system, I went through a crazy period where I was looking for more and more satisfaction: higher intensity, more feeling, superior emotions. I was running faster and jumping higher and, in the process, falling harder. I didn’t notice that I was actually getting less and less. I do not regret this period. I think that the path of excess is OK too because it eventually leads us to our balance. Some people are luckier or smarter at using experience than others and will learn quicker. The danger is that a few may end up stuck in the excess, drowning in the ineffective quest of reaching new heights and not realizing that their highest point was at the very beginning.

So then, what is love?

My dictionary defines love as an 'intense feeling of deep affection' or a 'deep romantic or sexual attachment' to someone. Buddhists define love as the wish for others to be happy. They regard it as a step further from compassion which is the wish for others not to suffer.

What else? Love is the answer. You gotta have love. Love is pain. Love is jealousy and betrayal. Love makes the world go around. Love is a cliché. Love is all there is. Why can’t you get it through that thick head of yours that all you need is love? Love is a need. Love is need. We are needy for love.

Love is damaged by need. Take the need out of the love and you have a better relationship. Of course, we cannot easily do that. What we can do is recognize. That’s the surest way to liberation. When we recognize that we need, we start needing less. When we need less, we love more. Then, jealousy decreases, friendships become better, families become closer and more open to each other. Love becomes more about giving than expectations. It wouldn’t be so often transformed into hate because according to this definition, love is not the opposite of hate but the absence of it. No longer will love be about the search for happiness through others. Rather we will realize that love and happiness are one and the same. The illusion that happiness is a feeling equal in intensity to suffering but opposite to it in direction is actually what ruins our happiness. We search and search for it but it’s not anywhere over there. It’s right here. Drop the search and you will experience it.

Everyone wants to be happy. Everyone. Canadians, Americans, Brazilians, Palestinians, Israelis, Lebanese, Syrians, Black people, White people, Asians, Latinos, poor people, rich people, young people, old people, Muslims, Presbyterians, and Hindus all share this very same basic desire. Madonna, Haifa, Bush, Sarkozy, Carla Bruni, Ahmadinejad, and Bin laden are all moving out of the same exact place in their hearts. Why is it so hard to believe that we are all the same in wanting to be happy? It is not in wanting happiness but in the pursuit of it that we go our separate ways. The search for happiness is causing us unhappiness.

The basic mistake that we often make is excluding others from this search. We forget that terrorists are looking for the same things that we are. We assume that they don’t have mothers and lovers and that they hate their own children. We become so swallowed up in our search that when we collide with someone else who’s on the same search, we think they are only there to deny us our trophy. My precious! If only we can see that we all want the same thing and that what we want is inside each and every one of us. The supply is infinite.

I remember a song that I used to hate in the 80’s. It went: “What is love?
Baby, don’t hurt me.” In that lame song, I see meaning for life. Go figure.