2010 February | Olympia and the City

Hello Robbin here,

With Valentines Day right here, the topic of love is in the air. To a single young female, this day is about as exciting as a trip to the dentist office for a root canal. Yeah! a day to remind me that no one will be getting any jewelry at “Jareds” and the adorable Hallmark card that I will receive will mostly likely be sent by my niece.

So in order to avoid such pain, I turn to my political theory books because they have the least to do about love, only to find Niccolò Machiavelli’s quote, “Whether it be better to be loved than feared or feared than loved? It may be answered that one should wish to be both, but, because it is difficult to unite them in one person, is much safer to be feared than loved, when, of the two, either must be dispensed with.” Machiavelli has now given me a lot to think about, for instance, “is it really safer to be feared than loved”.

Perhaps, our Italian friend knew something that we just did not; perhaps he understood how vulnerable and scary it can be to love and to be loved. Perhaps, he was not just a political philosopher but a lover who had loved and lost. As a result of that love, he got his heart broken and knew all to well about the pain that love can bring. Or perhaps, like me, he found himself in a sine-cosine relationship. A sine-cosine relationship is one where the person likes you but by the time you figured it out and start liking them back, they have moved on. Oh! To be so daft, naïve and not understanding the rules of engagement! So in that case, for all of us who have not picked up on someone liking them until it was far to late; or to those who have suffered from a broken heart and found themselves mirroring Carrie’s image, from Sex in the City, when she wakes from her Mexicoma with a broken heart, we know all to well that, yes, indeed, it is safer to be feared than loved. But the question leads to many more questions then answers. For instance, is the “safe” life the one we want to be living?

Also, is it possible, as Machiavelli has pointed out, to be both feared and loved? Can one actually have both and still be in a healthy relationship?

There is no doubt that love has served as a great muse for many artists, writers, and poets. A world without love would be a world without art, literature, and life. Imagine a world without Shakespeare’s comedies (which always end in a happy marriage) and tragedies (most notably, Romeo and Juliet, one of the most famous tales of unrequited love). And a world filled with solely fear, would be ones worse nightmare, a chaotic and disorderly world devoid of light.

So, how does one healthily blend the two? Or are the two already blended together and as long as we do not have one extreme or another, we’ll all make it in the end. Keep in mind that love, according to Pat Benatar, is a battlefield, yet, the Beatles tell us that all we need is love, and yet again according to the famous 1970 film, Love Story, love means never having to say, “I’m sorry”. So which one is it? If love is so great, why does it hurt so much that it evokes songs referring it to a battlefield and has produced some of the most amazing “screw you” break up songs when the course of love does not run true. (Yes, we are referring to you, Rolling Stones, Alanis Morrisette, Kelly Clarkson, and Justin Timberlake.)

Also, where does one find love? In this world, where we spend more time craning our necks reading our emails, updating our status on Twitter, and checking our Facebook page on Blackberries and iPhones all while developing “tech thumb”, we are missing out on the world around us and the potential for love that is passing us by each day. So therefore, we resort to using online dating sites and other alternative methods (use your imagination to figure that one out) to find our “future” mate or at least the next date because we fear the pain that rejection that we may get by asking the person next to us for a cup a coffee. In this case, we are ruled by our fear and look for an alternative way to find love. These alternative ways, by the way, can lead to many different things, including different venereal diseases.

Perhaps, our primitive ancestors understood something about love that we did not know and we need to learn from them. They seem to balance the rule by a “fear” than it turns into “love” mode and it seemed to work for them. They after all used fear to find love by going from cave to cave, waving with their clubs, sniffing out their mate, then knocking them over the head with their club and dragging them back to their cave. Viola! The relationship begins…and what other option does the male have? (Yes, in this story, it is the woman with the club dragging her mate back to the cave, we are a family blog, there is no male on female violence here.) Back then, if you made it to 16 years old you were middle age and by 30 years old you were considered a “wise elder”. Let’s face it, if you didn’t have head lice living in your beard, had most of your teeth, and were a good hunter, you were a good catch. But needless to say, the club brings fear, one gives into the fear, and the fear later becomes love… It seems simple, right? But it isn’t necessarily the start of a healthy relationship.

Alas, perhaps, using the methods of our primitive ancestors are not the best example for us to use, though, there are times where it would be so much easier to just pull out the club, hit him over the head and drag back to the cave where he will have a “good” life instead of playing the “love” game. Thus, our quest to answer Machiavelli’s question of “whether it be better to be loved than feared or feared than loved?” continues. For me, even though I agree that it is safer to be feared than loved, I stay hopelessly optimistic about love and know that it is all around me, it is all I need and because of it, I know I will make it in this world after all. As for finding the “one”, I am comforted by Lysander’s line from Shakespeare’s play A Midsummers Night Dream that “The course of true love never did run smooth.”

This Valentine’s Day, while powers that be at Hallmark and the jewelry stores define what love is to us, we need to remember that yes, it is safer to be feared than love, but who wants to live an a safe “unloved” fear-dominated world? Maybe the pain that a broken heart brings opens us to more love and provides us with some valuable lessons including learning not to live in a world of fear. Love is something we take a chance on, we compromise, we give, and we take because we believe it is all we need. It is, as Paul McCarthy once wrote, “And, in the end, the love you take is equal to the love you make.”