Today/tonight/in the morn I was thinking at work about relationships, love, women, and what a great time august has been for me in the present and in the past.  Okay, mostly I was thinking about all those things and how they pertain to women in my life.  You know what I realized?  I am surrounded with the best women I have ever known to exist, myth or faerie tales.  Okay maybe a bit of an exaggeration, but not by much.  Honestly the women that I have as best friends are the most amazing women and people I know.  All of them have their uniqueness in being completely awesome and so incredibly influential in my life.

            These women, whom I dare shall name, maybe forgetting one *eekk* are what really continues my world in a happy cycle.  In no particular order, Kate, Sarah, Shaina, Erin, Danielle, my sisters, my mother and my grandmother are so much part of my life that I do not know what I would be or where I would be without them.  In a sense the male figures in my life have come and gone, granted they were a strong influence, but they do not hold a candle to any one of these women.  Unshakably loyal, understanding and putting up with my nuances of disappearing for months on end and then reappearing, putting up with the tirades, the arrogance, the innocence, and the dating, they stay behind me and are there whenever and for whatever.  Honestly I am humbled right now just spelling this out.

            But with these great positive influences in my life, any of which I would most likely marry in a second, I continue to date their opposites.  And I am left to wonder, what attracts me?  Particularly what attracts me now?  Of course the women mentioned above have their negatives and sometimes even their demons, but I would consider them (especially my friends) to be wholeheartedly good people (which I find is rather rare).  I have always prided myself on the good people I have surrounded myself with and called my friends.  So why is it that I surround myself with these good people, namely mostly women, and yet pursue their opposite in the dating world, especially of late?  All my closest friends know that I have the rule of attraction and that one partner of any kind of relationship is always, at one point, attracted to the other, and I am in no way going to deny that at one point I was not attracted to any of the women mentioned above (minus the family).  In a very much real sense, a greater bond of fellowship has been formed over the initial attraction to a deep rooted friendship… platonic I do not think so, but deep rooted : )  But these friends I have never dated, not one of them.  Out of my dating history I can name one, truly good woman and she just happened to serenade me : )

            So I am left with a larger question really, what holds us to other people?  Rather, what attracts us to confide and hope in others that they will give us a happy long lasting relationship?  I have had the most beautiful relationships with these women, but nothing sexual (not even a kiss from one of them).  Why when I, or others, add sexuality into an equation does the necessity of confiding in another become hazardous and potentially explosive?  Of course normal relationships can endure these test, but not as often or to the caliber of a sexual relationship.  It seems to me that this might be a more modern problem than one that the human race has always dealt with. 

The beginning of humankind marked the necessity to procreate to continue to strive, thus having sex was not only pleasurable but a function of life.  In the modern day we are left with ‘safe sex’ which means free sex with little chance of consequence if done correctly.  With the advancement and growth of the human race, has love also advanced into a more abstract stage or state of being? I do not doubt there always being love, but it seems that love has somehow grown and evolved into something highly abstract with the continuing eras of mankind.  Definitions of love, throughout time change greatly and from civilization.  Lust has always been eros, and pleasure has always been pleasing, I do not doubt that.  I doubt our reflection upon love with the advancement of technology and mating selection. 

In the old world, one’s love would be bound by the area or surroundings one lived in.  If you lived in a city, maybe you would know a few hundred people or a thousand if you were in the upper ruling class and you had those selection of people in order to fall in love with.  Today we have TV, which advertises ‘true love’ through millions of bodies which we are told to envy and love, personalities which seem flawless and overly appealing in shows, books, magazines.  I heard somewhere that if someone lives in a city now, within 8 blocks there is one person that one would be compatible with to live out ones life.  And think how many other selections we have in our daily lives that deal with love, not just the human brand… ie chocolate, ice cream, and various other mediums. 

I ask if our selection has become too vast and now we have grown numb to our own feelings, or rather a slave to them?  With so much selection we can put a prototype ‘mate’ in our heads of what we want and search the web until we find him/her.  Also built in our minds is prototypes of love, lust, self-image all born from the media and our daily interactions.  Have we made ourselves dead to the true feelings of attraction?  Or have we abstracted them into something which we can no longer feel? 

It is my belief that we are slowly becoming more numb to the ideal of love.  We are brought up on faerie tales of Princes and Princesses running away together and finding true love only to be hurt again and again in our naïve little world.  When chances brush by us we then wince away, in fear of hurt until we do not even feel the chance, or the brush we just let go of our hopes and dreams and take whatever next ‘decent looking’ thing walks in the room.  Then we convince ourselves as the situation gets worse that love is not so great and we need to get out of our ‘second choice’ relationship.  We convince ourselves slowly that it is okay to be the type of person that ‘not feeling’ is the same as ‘not taking a chance’ at love or heartbreak.  Is this a loss of innocence or a taming of something wild from our childhood when we believed in something greater than ourselves and our own bubble?

So what the hell am I left with?  More questions than when I started!  What do I know?  I know that I feel less now.  I know that for the first time, in a long time, I feel excited, and I mean really excited, to be embarking on a journey of chance with a woman.  I know that this hand might make me bust, but you know what?  I know that I feel like a kid again, a innocent young kid bounding with his shoelaces untied and his mother yelling at him.  I know what I have slowly let myself become, and I do not like it.  I know again what beauty lies within listening to Opera in a language you do not understand, knowing that the words are HOPE.  And hope is all I LOVE right now, and I would not have it any other way.