(no subject)

I ran across this via aroraborealis and am reposting it here because I think I'm going to chew on this one for a little while before I can put together a coherent comment. It's apparently an excerpt from a longer article by Daphne Gottlieb called "My Cheating Heart," in the March/April '06 issue of Utne.

Love - at least the pair-bonded, prescribed love - does not conquer all. It does not conquer desire.

Let's say you're a normal, upstanding, ethical man (or woman) who has decided to share your life with someone beloved to you. This goes well for a number of years. You have a lot of sex and love each other very much and have a seriously deep, strong bond. Behind door number two, the tiger: a true love. Another one. (Let's assume for the moment that the culture and Hollywood are wrong - we have more than one true love after all.)

The shittiest thing you can do is lie to someone you love, yet there are certain times you can choose either to do so or to lie to yourself. Not honoring this fascination, this car crash of desire, is also a lie. So what do you do? Pursue it? Deny it? It doesn't matter: The consequences began when you opened the door and saw the tiger, called it by its name: love. Pursue it or don't, you're already stuck between two truths, two opportunities to lie.

The question is not, as we've always been asked, the lady - beautiful, virtuous, and almost everything we want - or the tiger - passionate, wild, and almost everything we want. The question is, what do we do with our feelings for the lady and the tiger? The lady is fair, is home, is delight. The tiger is not bloodthirsty, as we always believed, but, say, romantic. Impetuous. Sharing almost nothing in common with the lady. They even have a different number of feet. But the lady would not see it this way. You already know that.( Read more... )