That was 16 year-olds in 1997. It wouldn’t surprise me if it’s 13 year-olds in 2011.

No. The 13 year-olds might say she’d make a great baby-mama.

Many men, and I am one of them, resist growing up. We learn to do manly things, but we don’t learn to look inside and see what is churning around there. We repress it and press on. After all we have work to do, right? Many men, and I was one, are children impersonating an adult.

I learned that all of us start out in life with a sack, which we carry with us always. In that sack we place experiences and issues that we don’t want to deal with. Some are fortunate enough that, as they go through life, the sack never becomes too heavy, but many reach a point where the sack becomes too much to carry. It is then that, if we are lucky, we sit down and begin to take those issues and experiences out for examination with an eye to lightening our load. If we are successful, the load becomes bearable again and we even grow stronger from the self knowledge that the process has produced.

I wouldn’t want anyone to walk the path that I have, though if you think it might make you and/or your marriage stronger, it couldn’t hurt.

Liked your comment too, Wandriaan. Lots of wisdom there. You have obviously sat down and examined many of your experiences and issues. Maybe not in a counseling atmosphere, but in some way that worked for you.

In order to be truly happy we must take risks. That’s not foolish optimism, but dedication to our own best selves.

Now if only it were easy.

True security involves very strong sanctions, both in law and, above all, socially (and that’s where religion really proves its mettle). But then, as you have noted many times before in similarly themed posts, people sometimes, perhaps often, get locked into a “radical security” that is like a prison.

On the other hand, we can trust individuals to know best what constitutes radical security at any given time, and peel away legal and social (religious) sanctions. Then we get what we have now, and the cost is that absolute certainty is less attainable than under the sanction system. And loneliness and the devastation of separation and divorce are their own kind of prisons.

Things really have changed, as I can attest being demographically in the cohort of the kids or grandkids of many people who post here. Growing up, in high school, we used to joke entirely casually when we saw a pretty girl, to this effect:

“Damn, she would make a GREAT first wife.”

That was 16 year-olds in 1997. It wouldn’t surprise me if it’s 13 year-olds in 2011. However much we still hear the echoes of past sanctity surrounding the institution of marriage, the substance of the sanctity is gone, both internally in the form of belief, and externally in the form of sanctions.

Nothing is more important to our lives than having that absolute, unquestionable love. When you have it, the feeling of the general goodness of life is pervasive; it pierces through and saturates every sour moment and off-key circumstance like the soft drone of a xylophone. It’s simply indescribable. To have had that and seen it evaporate not only leaves you exposed and vulnerable, but it explodes the ability to trust and that general sense of the positive thrust of life. Cynicism menaces; doubt intrudes; a vague feeling of disorientation sits at the back of one’s mind and leaps out and attacks without notice.

For my money, the best statement of what all of this feels like and its significance is the little essay of Michel de Montaigne’s, “Of Friendship,” where he focuses on his sense of loss after losing his dearest friend, Etienne de la Boetie, to an early death. In a situation not exactly the same but similar, I read it and broke down in tears. Montaigne is the brother of anyone who knows such loss.

I’ve found out too young what it feels like to lose this “radical security,” and I can add with the confidence of personal experience that there is nothing that can desiccate the sweetness and light of life quite like it. (I’m on a Matthew Arnold kick today for some reason).

I have no answers, merely commiseration.

Homer Simpson on the episode of his lost prom date with Marge where she picks him on the side of the road:

“I have a problem. When this car stops, I’m going to hug you, and kiss you, and never stop.”

Simply Red:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qoyz62lbgOs&feature=related

“If you find somebody to love in this world, you better hang on tooth and nail.” –Don Henley in “New York Minute.”